[alharith]

It's always the big liberal cities, with majority democratic councils, and a legacy of democratic mayors and govenors with the worse police departments: Chicago, Atlanta, D.C., NYC, Baltimore, LA, etc. But somehow the "redneck trumpers in flyover states" get blamed for everything. It's really hilarious at this point. In my city of Charlotte, with the Keith Scott shooting, it was: 9 democratic council members to 1 republican, democratic mayor, democratic governor, black police chief, and a black police officer that did the shooting, but somehow it was institutional racism.

There is a policing problem in this country. Period. Color of your skin be damned. If people started from there, things might have been a little different at this point.

I am sure this will get flagged, but it really needs to be said at this point. Hopefully some of you see the truth. I sure see it, and I am a middle eastern immigrant.

[danharaj]

Let me try to clear something up for you. The people protesting on the streets right now don't give a shit what color the boot on their neck is. Systemic racism doesn't just mean the system is full of racist individuals. It means that processes that make up the system lead to racist outcomes. And, yes, Black individuals can participate in racist power structures that hurt Black populations, and of course racism doesn't have a particular political party.

Stop treating politics as a game of football and look at how power is distributed and who benefits from that distribution. Material analysis, not color coded appearances.

[tonyarkles]

In Canada, we have at least 4 major political parties, and a few others that usually get a seat or two in parliament. The NDP is the third party (one time they had enough seats to form the official opposition). Anyway, only the Liberals and the Conservatives have ever been in power; every 10 years it seems to swing back and forth.

Jagmeet Singh, current leader of the NDP, tweeted the other day something along the lines of "Systemic racism comes from the power structures in place. If you want to find the source of systemic racism in Canada, you have to look at the parties who have been in power for the last 150 years: the Liberals and the Conservatives."

[bobthechef]

I have a serious issue with the idea of "systemic racism" or "racist outcomes". I have yet to receive a coherent and convincing explanation of what it is.

I can understand what "institutional racism" means when we speak of things like legal slavery and Jim Crow. Racism is right there, in black and white, in the law. It is legally instituted and thus institutional.

However, when we speak of "systemic racism" and claim that disparity in outcomes is racist, then we're starting to go off the deep end. Statistical disparity is no proof of racism. You must be able to explain the disparity and not simply claim that disparity is identical with racism or assume that there must be a racist, sinister cause behind it. By definition, racism is something only individuals can do and so racist laws are the product of racist people.

The best examples I can come up with are case where policies and programs exploit incidental facts to conceal true motives. For example, if you know the location of black neighborhoods, and you know that they tend to be poor, and your aim is to reduce the black population of Americans (i.e., a racist motive), you might plant more abortion clinics within walking distance of black neighborhoods[0] under the bogus claim that you're trying to alleviate poverty. Given the statistics, non-Hispanic black women had the highest abortion rates. About 80% of Planned Parenthood's surgical abortion facilities are within walking distance of black or Latino neighborhoods. Black women are three times more likely to have an abortion than white women. Now couple that with Margaret Sanger's overt racism and eugenics/population control fanaticism and you could begin to suspect racist motives even if the majority of employees, supporters, and those involved are not necessarily racist (though I expect a certain unacknowledged patronizing attitude toward blacks and the poor among many supporters).

Or consider the extremely high rates of black children born out of wedlock (comparable to rates among poor whites, IIRC). We know that the absence of the father from the home is a strong statistical indicator for future delinquency and the perpetuation of poverty. So are the perverse welfare incentives that work against marriage and stable families racist? You would have to show that the intent was racist, but in the absence of such proof, it is more reasonable to assume that well-meaning Great Society-type policies were poorly considered in much the same way well-meaning NGOs aid programs actually hurt those they seek to help by, e.g., wrecking local economies by flooding the market with free goods even during times where there is no crisis (examples are Haitain agriculture, Nigerian textiles, cobblers in Africa).

The murkiness of the idea is extremely dangerous because it begins to resemble a conspiracy theory. Sinister forces are vaguely assigned to myriad realities which means that various injustices, including accusations of racism, become permissible in the name of "justice". Furthermore, such things can distract from the real problems facing a particular group, minority or otherwise, and thus stifle solutions and consequently prevent such groups from truly flourishing.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6208a1.htm

[pnako]

Right now you have the two political parties and virtually all the S&P 500 corporations, all the universities, and most of the media (including social media) actively supporting BLM and being against "systemic racism".

I know that things aren't that simple, but where is that "systematic racism" actually coming from, then? It can't be from the law, since the civil rights era has removed any legal discrimination.

And it can't be just coming from Fox News, 4chan and the odd corporation that doesn't tweet BLM stuff either.

[TulliusCicero]

The big cities are the ones most known for being terrible because they're big: reputational risk is always higher for bigger organizations than small ones, because it's easier to be aware of the problems in one big org than twenty small ones that add up to the same size.

This is because we extrapolate any incident within the big org to apply to the whole organization, whereas we obviously don't extrapolate out incidents in small orgs to apply to different small orgs.

So if you have 1 big police department with 5 fatal shootings, and 20 small police departments with 5 fatal shootings in total, all in different departments, people will think, "wow, that big police department is trash, but 15 out of the 20 small police departments are good! Small police departments are so much better!"

[non-entity]

This is just political flamebait. If you think this is some phenomena purely constrained to cities you're being lazy at best or wilfully ignorant and driven by ideology, which is probably more accurate.

[alharith]

Throwing generalized insults is easy. Projection is a hell of a drug. I don't think it's constrained to cities. I hold to no ideology. I said the _worse_ of them are usually big blue cities.

[marcinzm]

Cities just happen to have a majority of the population and a lot of minorities. It's also harder to hide things in cities. Small red towns are generally much worse and things rarely come to light.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/police-are-killing-fewe...

edit: Regarding cities having a much larger percentage of minorities: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...

It took me all of 2 minutes to look these things up, the fact that you didn't just shows that you care more about a particular ideology than facts.

[effable]

I have a few questions:

> "In my city of Charlotte, with the Keith Scott shooting, it was: 9 democratic council members to 1 republican, democratic mayor, democratic governor, black police chief, and a black police officer that did the shooting, but somehow it was institutional racism."

Why does the political affiliation or the colour of the people involved mean that it cannot be institutional racism. Isn't the idea that the racism is baked into the policies, the modus operandi of the police and judicial system?

> "There is a policing problem in this country. Period. Color of your skin be damned. If people started from there, things might have been a little different at this point."

Let's assume that this was the case. How will this improve things compared to now?

[Kednicma]

Part of the problem is that cops are usually not living inside their precincts, and they are trained to think of themselves as bringing law and order to a lawless metropolis. This is, of course, silly nonsense, but they believe and practice it nonetheless. In this way, it's possible for rural counties surrounding a city to contribute cops, violence, and hate to the city itself.

[knowaveragejoe]

In many ways, the worst kind of people to be police become police.

[soared]

Your argument is black people get killed by police less often than white people, so there is no problem?

[someguydave]

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Of the 11,514 murder offenders in 2018 where the race of the offender is known by now, 6,318 of the offenders were black: 54.9%. Blacks make up 13.4% of the us population.

I don’t get how growing up in a city with a poor economic policy causes one to become a murderer.