4 ms·

Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture

3 points by anarbadalov 6y ago

narogab 6y ago
The writer's assumptions are undercut severely by such data as was posted earlier today on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363627
downerending 6y ago
Cultures are made of people, and all people are racist everywhere and at all times throughout history. Nor could this possibly change.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  True. May I also add that cultures are indeed fluid, and change over time on account of being made of people. Allow me to give an anecdotal example. Men used to marry and sleep with very, very young girls this and was seen as culturally acceptable, normal, correct and even healthy. Fast forward a couple of centuries and we've agreed as a whole, regardless of race and culture, that this is a practice we should do away with. Wholesale. As you can see, culture and people, do in fact change. With this potential for change in mind, we need to tackle the elephant in the room. The reasons for which a practice, regarded by most as a beneath the standards of our global, egalitarian morals, should persist and continue to exist. Something must drive racism, some benefit that outweighs the cost, from a psychological standpoint. What is it?
  - downerending 6y ago
    It's the fact that racism is ultimately stereotyping, which you could think of as rapidly gathering information under uncertainty. It's not very different than training an ML model. There's no way to capture all of the complexity of the world, but capturing some of it has immense survival value, and would have been the norm throughout the evolutionary history of animals (at least). We can be sad about the necessity of this, just as we are sad that most animals (and most of us) will die horribly. But it's an immutable fact of reality. If it were somehow possible to raise or breed a person that lacked any capability for racism or other forms of bigotry, they would go into the world like a sheep among a society of wolves. They'd die quite quickly. Better for us to simply acknowledge the truth, and try to rationally limit the fallout. Pretending it's not so simply makes things worse.
narogab 6y ago
"INTERRACIAL VIOLENT CRIME INCIDENTS 2018" for black on white, black on hispanic, white on black, white on hispanic, hispanic on white, hispanic on black crimes: https://storage.googleapis.com/conservativereview/2019/10/50e84488-interracialviolentcrime.jpg https://storage.googleapis.com/conservativereview/2019/10/50...
narogab 6y ago
https://whiteprivilegeisntreal.org/black-vs-white-crime-statistics/ https://whiteprivilegeisntreal.org/black-vs-white-crime-stat... summarizes its conclusions as follows (see article for details): "Black vs White Crime Statistics Conclusion - It’s an uncomfortable truth but blacks commit crimes at nearly three times the rate that whites do. - Blacks commit 36% of the violent crime in the US even though they are only 13% of the population. - Blacks in England commit crimes at nearly three times the rate of their population rate. - The parity in black crime rates in the US and black crime rates in the UK prove that there is no systemic or institutional racial bias in the US, and that the judicial system is not unfairly targeting blacks. - There is no systemic racism in US Judicial System. - There is no racial bias that unfairly targets innocent blacks in the US Criminal system. - The cycle of black crime begins with the breakdown of family values that has 72% of black pregnancies creating low-income single parent households. - Black children growing up in single-parent low-income situations are likely to repeat this cycle unless they raise children in a married two-parent household with more stability. - White privilege isn’t creating a system that unfairly arrests and prosecutes blacks, the black parents making bad life choices are creating situations that increase the likelihood of bad outcomes happening are the ones responsible. - White privilege isn’t real and isn’t responsible for blacks committing more crimes, black adults making poor life choices are the ones responsible.

3 points by anarbadalov 6y ago

The writer's assumptions are undercut severely by such data as was posted earlier today on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363627

downerending 6y ago

Cultures are made of people, and all people are racist everywhere and at all times throughout history. Nor could this possibly change.

vagrantJin 6y ago
True. May I also add that cultures are indeed fluid, and change over time on account of being made of people. Allow me to give an anecdotal example. Men used to marry and sleep with very, very young girls this and was seen as culturally acceptable, normal, correct and even healthy. Fast forward a couple of centuries and we've agreed as a whole, regardless of race and culture, that this is a practice we should do away with. Wholesale. As you can see, culture and people, do in fact change. With this potential for change in mind, we need to tackle the elephant in the room. The reasons for which a practice, regarded by most as a beneath the standards of our global, egalitarian morals, should persist and continue to exist. Something must drive racism, some benefit that outweighs the cost, from a psychological standpoint. What is it?
- downerending 6y ago
  It's the fact that racism is ultimately stereotyping, which you could think of as rapidly gathering information under uncertainty. It's not very different than training an ML model. There's no way to capture all of the complexity of the world, but capturing some of it has immense survival value, and would have been the norm throughout the evolutionary history of animals (at least). We can be sad about the necessity of this, just as we are sad that most animals (and most of us) will die horribly. But it's an immutable fact of reality. If it were somehow possible to raise or breed a person that lacked any capability for racism or other forms of bigotry, they would go into the world like a sheep among a society of wolves. They'd die quite quickly. Better for us to simply acknowledge the truth, and try to rationally limit the fallout. Pretending it's not so simply makes things worse.

narogab 6y ago

"INTERRACIAL VIOLENT CRIME INCIDENTS 2018" for black on white, black on hispanic, white on black, white on hispanic, hispanic on white, hispanic on black crimes: https://storage.googleapis.com/conservativereview/2019/10/50e84488-interracialviolentcrime.jpg https://storage.googleapis.com/conservativereview/2019/10/50...

narogab 6y ago

https://whiteprivilegeisntreal.org/black-vs-white-crime-statistics/ https://whiteprivilegeisntreal.org/black-vs-white-crime-stat... summarizes its conclusions as follows (see article for details): "Black vs White Crime Statistics Conclusion - It’s an uncomfortable truth but blacks commit crimes at nearly three times the rate that whites do. - Blacks commit 36% of the violent crime in the US even though they are only 13% of the population. - Blacks in England commit crimes at nearly three times the rate of their population rate. - The parity in black crime rates in the US and black crime rates in the UK prove that there is no systemic or institutional racial bias in the US, and that the judicial system is not unfairly targeting blacks. - There is no systemic racism in US Judicial System. - There is no racial bias that unfairly targets innocent blacks in the US Criminal system. - The cycle of black crime begins with the breakdown of family values that has 72% of black pregnancies creating low-income single parent households. - Black children growing up in single-parent low-income situations are likely to repeat this cycle unless they raise children in a married two-parent household with more stability. - White privilege isn’t creating a system that unfairly arrests and prosecutes blacks, the black parents making bad life choices are creating situations that increase the likelihood of bad outcomes happening are the ones responsible. - White privilege isn’t real and isn’t responsible for blacks committing more crimes, black adults making poor life choices are the ones responsible.