Baton Rouge shooting

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Do you really think most of those cases would have ended in a police involved shooting had the victim of been not-black? You're welcome to insist so, but good luck convincing others to believe it. Do you really think a white kid playing with a pellet gun in public gets shot within seconds of police arriving on scene? I'm not sure what kind of evidence you'd like because we're debating perceptions. You can dismiss and invalidate others experiences but that won't alter their experiences. You don't need to explicitly say 'they're all liars' when your attitude quite clearly demonstrates that's how you feel.

At the end of the day, until police work to alter the way they're perceived, they'll be perceived the way they are. Maybe that's not an issue to you, but it is for police. How they choose to deal with this perception is entirely on them. For starters, if they'd like to prove shootings are justified, having an outside agency investigate them instead of having the cop's buddies in the department investigate would be worthwhile; not accepting every single 'I was in fear for my life and had to fire' at face value without repercussions for the poor judgment displayed would do quite a bit. Maybe they don't face murder charges in those cases, but firing them and ensuring they don't continue to work in law enforcement would be reasonable. Focusing on community policing and working with the communities they work in would help.

Yeah, I just got tired of responding to him. He clearly found his conclusion, facts be damned. I have posted links to scholarly research papers and news articles many times in direct response to him. Yet he claims I haven't or pretends he refuted it. You'd think he'd get tired of writing the same thing over and over again but apparently not.

There is very little "de jure" racism remaining in the US. This is what the OP means by "institutional racism," I believe. We got rid of the vast majority of "de jure" racism during the 1960s.

But there is a heck of a lot of "de facto" racism still remaining. We should acknowledge this.

You still haven't provided real evidence, and you claim that what I'm saying is absurd without showing how. You just say, "Good luck convincing others." Ok? So how is that a convincing argument exactly?

I don't care about anyone's "experience". Plenty of people "experience" all sorts of crazy ridiculous things, and this can be a group phenomenon. Your argument is nothing but an appeal to popularity (without even proving it is the popular opinion or "experience" among blacks).

You keep saying cops do this and cops do that, but I don't see how you support this because you give no examples of it happening. Even if cops do sometimes get away with things like that, it's not legal; and if there was enough evidence of what they'd done then I'm sure they would be charged with the appropriate crime.

If this was a really common thing I would expect BLM to be sharing story after story with more examples of such things, but that is not the case. Instead they hinge on the same recent shootings, which like I pointed out are terrible examples given that we don't know enough about what happened yet.

PEOPLE'S EXPERIENCE is an essential adjunct to research, and to philosophy, in my opinion.

What is your problem with anecdote, anyway?

In order to diagnose something, you need much more than theory; you need ANECDOTE. Case studies.

In order to arrive at something resembling the TRUTH of anything, you need anecdote. Logic alone just doesn't cut it. Logic alone is restrictive in scope.

I pulled them up. You gave me one about income inequality. I don't disagree with that one, I've mentioned poverty from the very beginning.

You gave me one from fivethirtyeight about blacks being killed at a much higher rate than in other countries. That is completely explained by the extremely high black-on-black homicide rate.

You gave me a scholarly journal article about the link between homicide and income inequality. It makes sense to me. I see no indication of institutional racism.

And one more about the same thing. Once again, it said nothing about institutional racism.

So unless you're talking about some other examples I don't remember, nothing you gave me was evidence of your claim.

In some cases it makes sense. In this one it is just a bandwagon appeal. The argument is that, because many people believe they experienced it, therefore it must be true. Plenty of people believe they experienced seeing a sasquatch. Yet I don't believe that it really happened. But according to you I should, because their experience matters.

Sasquatch is nonsense, obviously.

Did I say one should rely TOTALLY on anecdote? Obviously, that would be foolish.

But we must never dismiss it out of hand. We must make use of it.

Wow, you read all that in 15 minutes. Or did you just look at the headlines?

I've learned to not take folks seriously when they insist they know what other people experience better than those people themselves know.



I think Lukeda420 might have nailed it. You can lead a horse to water...

I read the conclusions of the studies and articles, and none of the conclusions even made claims about the existence of systemic racism. So I decided reading the rest was a waste of time because they do not support your claims of systemic racism; in fact, they support my claims about the black crime rate, poverty etc. being much more important issues than police racism.

Nobody here has even demonstrated that systemic racism is something that currently happens at all in America, let alone that it is the experience of most black people. Do you really think I should just take a few people's word for it that it's true? No, that's obviously stupid. Provide some evidence for this claim. If you can't or won't, there is no reason to accept it.

You call it stubbornness; I call it reasonable doubt.

You're hung up on semantics, frankly.

Whether the racism is "systemic," "institutional," or whatever doesn't matter.

The fact is: is that it exists. And it exists amongst ALL of us.

And it does have detrimental effects.

Like I said, De Jure racism is probably virtually extinct in the US, and has been virtually extinct for 40 years or so.

But the De Facto kind is alive and well.

Here are some quotes from a study that supposedly supports your claim:

From the abstract:

And from the conclusion:


This clearly supports my claim that things like poverty and crime rates need to be considered seriously and objectively, rather than calling them "diversions from real systemic issues" like Black Lives Matter does on their official website.

Of course, I believe crime rates and poverty must be considered objectively.

This notion is not contradictory to the fact that racism exists.

There are many causes for the problems we have today. Some of them can be attributed to the ethnic groups which feel discriminated against: their apathy, hostility, whatever.

Some can be attributed to the society within which they live.

It's a complex dynamic. And all must be addressed....by the group being discriminated against, as well as the people doing the discriminating.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 21 Jul 2016, 10:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

But anyway, I'm clearly wasting my time here. Apparently nobody here wants to acknowledge that sensibilities, ideas and behaviours in the black community play any role in these problems.

I know the response will just be to say, "Not all! Not all!" I never said all of them deny the other factors. But I have not seen anything coming from Black Lives Matter that proves most or even many of them do. Sorry, but I don't accept things solely because someone on the internet told it to me.

Anyway, this has gotten really boring. If someone actually makes a good point I will respond, but if it's the same old s**t I've already addressed, I'm not wasting my time.