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It’s not really that simple though. You can always go back less than 40 years and point out that street gangs were a response to police harassment. That communi
by bergenty 4y ago
It’s not really that simple though. You can always go back less than 40 years and point out that street gangs were a response to police harassment. That communities were selectively devastated with targeted infusions of dangerous and addictive drugs. That there is a continuous pattern of profiling based on superficial attributes. A bad summer can ruin a person’s life, I don’t understand how we don’t expect generation abuse to do the same. Clearly the “sub Saharan level” life expectancy is not a racial attribute but contained within precise geographical boundaries in a prosperous country. You could say it’s purely cultural and if you wanted to be more edgy a “racial or genetic” failing, but really it’s the system that has deliberately and purposefully failed them and any current circumstance cannot be considered mutually exclusive of the very recent past, let alone the past few centuries.
For counter examples, look how long the richest and most dominant countries for the vast majority of human history— China and India — took to recover from a much less brutal form of dominance.
- pxmpxm 4y agoThe explanation I had in mind was more directed to the narrative over reality when it comes to shotspotter, rather than the mechanics of structural poverty incentives that invariably drive people toward illicit income that's fraught with violence. We've had 50+ years of various great society type programs that are designed with negative net-of-transfers earned income gradient, and those were squarely aimed at racial strata, but it's a huge stretch to claim that a thing that listens for gunshots in a place where tens of people get shot weekly is some sort of bigot master plot. Also tangentially speaking, anyone seeing a race dimension in "subsaharan africa life expectancy" is merely looking in a mirror.
- bergenty 4y agoWhen there has been a continuous stream of “bigot master plots” it understandably becomes hard to distinguish conspiracy from conscientious intent. If you look at the current situation without any of the prior historical context it does bring up the question of how does law enforcement deal with this situation because their historical actions have led to a catch 22 situation where action or inaction is vilified. Maybe a coordinated and public attempt at cleaning up the police force that goes hand in hand with a nationwide, simultaneous move to clean up the hood?
- pxmpxm 4y agoCertainly a prudent, rational idea. However my sneaking suspicion is that the recent attention to the former of the two has was designed for a completely different objective; a betting man would posit we'll be having this discussion again in 2024: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=blacks%20lives%20matter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...