“And was this specific event driven by race? Who knows, but it's easy for me to believe the answer is no. But in the bigger picture, the situation--that black people are on the receiving end of more of these situations than white people, is absolutely a function of race in America. That's what needs to be owned up to so that we can begin to make serious efforts to address it.”
So help me understand this. Are you saying that white people and Black people are in the situations an equal amount of times but Black people are treated differently? Or are you saying that Black people are in these types of situations were this kind of force, excessive or otherwise, happens?
Or, Are you saying that given the equal number of “opportunities” that Black people behave differently in those situations because of their past experiences?
1) There is no question that black people are disproportionately more involved in the criminal justice system in this country than white people. This is irrefutable.
2) It is also irrefutable that black people are treated disproportionately worse than white people by the criminal justice system, from traffic stops, to arrests, to charging, to sentencing. In other words, given the same conduct, black people average worse outcomes.
3) Why?
One reason is poverty. Poverty and crime rates go together like peanut butter and jelly. This is unsurprising: desperate people do desperate things. That doesn't mean all crime is because of poverty, and it doesn't excuse crime where poverty is also present, and it certainly doesn't mean that poor people are necessarily criminals--most poor people aren't criminals. But undoubtedly, the world round, poverty rates and crime rates go hand in hand.
Anyone who acknowledges anything about U.S. history can see that the state intentionally drove black people into poverty. First through slavery, then through Jim Crow and a host of other nefarious, overt acts taken to deprive black people of rights equal to those of white people. Again, this is irrefutable. Literally centuries of state-sponsored action had a very real impact on the black community, and turning that state sponsoring off didn't--because it couldn't--suddenly fix what centuries of official policy created. Nor is there a credible argument that at some point after the Supreme Court decisions of the 50s and 60s and the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act ingrained racism was just turned off and went away.
But it isn't just poverty. In large part its ingrained bias that goes with centuries of intentional oppression that shape our views. This isn't overt racism, it's unconscious bias--but it's important because it reinforces the biases that are there. An example is national media--including the generally somewhat left-leaning media--label black people as looters, and white people as gathering supplies after Hurricane Katrina--black and white people literally doing the same thing. That kind of thing is well documented, and it reinforces the idea that black people are more likely criminal, more likely dangerous, more likely predatory. That kind of bias is a big part of the outcomes issue.
So black people--even those who aren't in poverty--are more likely to be stopped by the police, more likely to have the neighbors call in complaints about them, more likely to receive negative attention while shopping, more likely to be marginalized in the work place, etc., etc., etc. The evidence of this is overwhelming. And that is systemic racism. It's different than member-of-the-Klan racism, but it's very real, and needs real attention for us to reduce or even (should we be so lucky) eliminate it.
And do black kids and white kids get different educations (on the whole) as to how to interact with the police? Absolutely. My black friends have conversations with their kids (and had conversations with their parents) that I would never dream of with my kids. Sure, I tell my kids to be respectful, but I don't worry about any police interaction as a life or death scenario. So yes, it's safe to say that black people (again, this is all on the whole--looking at populations in the millions, not any particular incident) have different interactions with the police.
As an example, my best police friend told me recently that on reflection it's very likely that many of the traffic stops he's made over the years were the result of the people he was tailing being nervous that he was tailing them--and thus less proficient at driving. Like many cops, he didn't pull people over to write tickets, he pulled people over because people driving badly at night often have bad things going on in their lives, and he was trying to catch the bad guys. Now, we're all (or at least most people I know) nervous when we have police officers behind us, but a group of people who learn to fear police interactions as potentially deadly, as opposed to merely uncomfortable, would be a lot more nervous--and thus make more mistakes. That's a vicious cycle, and one born of literally centuries of racism, not my friend, nor the person he's tailing, making a conscious race-based decision.
