That can’t possibly be a valid scientific opinion on the basis of public health data — until recently the virus was killing more people per day than the police kill in an entire year.
It’s a political opinion and this was a political letter.
From now on, when public health experts give advice, we must all wonder if it is based on science, or if it is just political messaging which has no more claim to truth than any other political messaging. That’s dangerous ground to be on if you want science to be taken seriously by the public.
With that in mind, it is important to put an understanding of public health data in context with systemic racism, and why the data looks like it how it does.
What are we going to do!?
Gather in large groups while screaming in close proximity to each other!
It's perfectly valid to see those issues as important but still not worth the risk of spreading COVID-19, but by boiling this down to a contest of how many people each Bad Thing killed in X amount of time, you miss a lot of the nuances in both issues and really preclude any reasonable, rational, productive discussion about the nature of the tradeoffs that are being made.
If you want to ignore all those things and walk away convinced that it's a political stunt, nobody can stop you.
The problem the public health sector has worked itself into is that it dismissed any attempts to analyze “trade offs” when we were talking about economic trade offs. So now they have to pretend like we’re not talking about trade offs at all. Hence the completely non-sensical premise that protests are okay because police brutality is a public health problem.
I'm also not super convinced that "the public health sector" was never receptive to questions about economic tradeoffs. We have a dysfunctional federal government and the same in many local jurisdictions, but where I live the local public health institutions have been working hand in glove with state and local governments to open as quickly as possible while staying abreast of the disease's spread.
My problem with their letter is that they made a judgment about these trade-offs and attempted to portray it as a scientific one, when it really wasn't. Based on the data alone, there is no way to reach their conclusion.
Is that all BS, then? No, I don't think so.
I wouldn't call it a "scientific conclusion", but the point that black people have poor health outcomes relative to other demographics has a lot of merit and honestly who else should be making it but medical professionals and scientists?
That's my point. If it's not scientific, then scientists should not have presented it as such.
I can reason about moving a heavy object from my car to my house using the general knowledge that dropped objects fall downward and often break when they hit the ground; I don't need to whip out the graph paper and prove it.
And at risk of being too on topic and reading the article, the issue is that the gloom-and-doom arguments that a lockdown is necessary and correct have been well and truly rejected by the activist wings of politics, and implicitly by a large portion of the commenting-class of journalists. And business. And possibly the public at large. They clearly don't agree.
It doesn’t seem an irresponsible or unprecedented extension of that principle to say that if your country is rocked by civil unrest, dealing with that is more important than preventing the spread of disease.
it is safe for me if you take morphine; it is not safe for me if you spread an airborne pathogen. see the difference?
Protesting the lockdown is not a just cause.
Saying "Well now anything doctors say is political!" does not show good intent or faith, but someone looking for a gotcha statement so they can say "See, they were political actors all along!"
You can't decide what other people think is unjust. You would be negating the entire point of protests.
I think the quarantine of the healthy was unjust. You're going to tell me I can't protest against it?
Nobody said you cant protest to your heart's content, you can protest over anything. It's just calling out one of those protests is a mite's buzz of a complaint to a lion's roar of shame for the treatment of black people by America.
Science is a minor concern within a sphere of human influence.
When mathematicians of all people, reject prizes for making undeniable progress in their field [0], you can only imagine what happens in all the other fields that are inextricably tied to politics (economics anyone?)
Here's a depressing quote from Perelman's wiki: "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman#:~:text=On%20....
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
I'll note that in 1964, people were calling civil rights protests "unwise and untimely". [1] Somehow it's never the right moment for justice. Anybody suggesting an indefinite delay should be aware that their arguments are indistinguishable from those of people for whom "later" actually means "never". If people really want to end these protests now, instead of arguing for delay they should quickly enact deep structural changes.
[1]https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
Personal racism exists and will probably never go away. It would be nice if it did.
I do think people get profiled and hassled because other people who look like that have done XXX and cops see a possible pattern. This isn't fair to innocent people at all but I suspect this has been what is happening rather than anything "structural".
I learned this firsthand like 20 years ago when I grew long hair and a beard John Lennon style for maybe 8 months. I was very quickly pulled over, hassled and searched (very rudely I might add) on made up charges by a rural cop. This did open my eyes to maybe a small part of what black America goes through in dealing with cops. I cut my hair back to military style, shaved, and it was back to letting me off with a warning and have a nice day.
I feel like this kind of thing is a good part of antagonism but I don't see it as "structural". More many cops (including minority cops as far as that goes) not liking certain types of people. They need to serve the community imo and it would be better for everyone.
Police abuse is sort of a separate issue relating to training and accountability. While it is very definitely fueled by racism and classism, I feel like it is an issue that affects all races, albeit blacks more because of long standing economic and cultural issues. The 'warrior cop' mentality affects us all, and is something that has been slowly improving in many large cities.
"Personal racism" is tough. Racism is a broad term for many things. If my neighbor plays their stereo too loud and they're white, I might call them 'white trash' in private conversation, and depending on their race I might adopt a different epithet. That isn't to say I would deny them opportunity or hate them because of their race, just that their race is a convenient attachment point for my general dislike of them. Now I'm not saying that is good or excusable, but I think it is a different thing than denying someone rights or opportunities because of their color, or making assumptions about them based on their background.
When people of color don't feel safe to walk the streets of their own neighborhood because a Karen can report them as suspicious and the authorities take that seriously and escalate the situation, there very definitely is systemic, structural racism at play. If this were just happening to blacks who appeared 'urban' you might have a point, but it affects even well dressed black people and there are countless stories backing that up. Hell, ten years ago an aquaintence was profiled because her dark Italian skin made her appear Mexican to some stupid AZ cops.
I am a long haired white guy who has also been bald, so I get what you're saying. For years I could guarantee I would have the last open seat on a plane next to me, I'm assuming because of the way I look. That doesn't negate the experiences of people of color, it just adds another facet to the way people can prejudge you. If anything, it should illustrate how bad things could be if you weren't white.
I think "structural racism" is one of the biggest branding failures of the whole movement.
To begin with, it uses the word "racism" to refer to something unintentional, when it normally implies intentionality. That needlessly makes people defensive. So then they want to deny that it's happening rather than admit there is a problem, which is the first step to solving it. Before even step one you've already lost.
Then the definition comes out as something like, structures that produce a racial disparity. But before controlling for confounders that's just everything. There are a slew of factors that correlate with race -- income, culture, in some cases biology (e.g. for Vitamin D). If lower income people get worse outcomes then all else equal, black people will get worse outcomes as a result of lower incomes. Which implies a poverty problem in those cases rather than a racism problem, which means you need anti-poverty solutions.
If you try to insist on a racism frame there, all you're doing is making enemies out of lower income white people who might've been your allies against the actual root cause which affects them too. And you make it all too easy for opponents to reveal the confounders and show that the "racism" isn't there, even though the problem is still there, because the problem wasn't "racism" (as it's commonly understood) to begin with.
It's easier to actually solve the problems if you stop having to constantly fight with people over calling it that.
A pretty clear example is what happened with the phrase "Black Lives Matter". It doesn't involve the R word. And yet, it sends a lot of white people into a rage. Literally, as here, where the menacing white man is shouting: “Black Lives Matter? Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10223827665665524&se...
And it's not just that guy. For many, there is no acceptable way to point our racial injustice. The only acceptable level of protest is one so quiet that it is entirely unseen, unheard. MLK addressed this in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" if you want to read more.
It's more that white people become defensive when you accuse them of racism. Which, when racism means intentionally hating black people, you can understand -- they know whether or not they hate black people and then you're accusing them of something they know isn't true.
Having to explain that it means something else in this context is just handicapping yourself from the start for no reason. Call it structural injustice or something.
> A pretty clear example is what happened with the phrase "Black Lives Matter". It doesn't involve the R word. And yet, it sends a lot of white people into a rage.
In this case the phrase is the name of a group. Now the group is holding mass protests after everyone has been told to stay home because of a virus pandemic. There is a non-frivolous argument that doing that right now could end up killing a lot of people. That has the potential to piss people off completely regardless of what is being protested.
You can certainly find examples of people saying nasty things against the lockdown protesters and trivializing their concerns -- and that even had a reason to be happening specifically now and not a year ago or a year from now. (King's "later is never" doesn't really apply to a temporary public health issue which can't be used as an indefinite excuse.)
But the phrase itself was kind of an own-goal to begin with. The best way to hear the trouble is to compare it to "Blue Lives Matter" -- the tone deaf response that raises the question, compared to what? The original has the same problem, you just don't hear it when it's your team.
The phrase taken literally states something so uncontroversial that it carries the implication it has to be relative to something else in order to mean anything. So people hear "Black Lives Matter More Than ___" and are invited to fill in the blank with something important to them and then get upset.
It was also just waiting for opponents to claim the middle and respond with All Lives Matter, which makes you sound like jerks because they're being inclusive and you're implicitly saying you only care about black people.
Good messaging is hard.
> For many, there is no acceptable way to point our racial injustice.
It seems to me that calling it "racial injustice" rather than "injustice" is not adding anything useful. If there is an injustice not related to race, should we ignore it? Does the racial injustice have some uniqueness to it that requires it to be addressed separately and using some unusual methods not suitable to ordinary injustice?
When you look at something like police brutality, it disproportionately affects black people. But what does a solution have to do with race? If we address police brutality in general, does that not solve the problem? Does that not make it easier to build a larger coalition?
More than twice as many white people are shot by police as black people. This is proportionally not as many. But what does that mean? You bring that proportion of white people in, the ones suffering the same as you, and now your coalition is three times as large. But you have to set your sights on the injustice and not just the "racial" injustice.
Yes, it seems that way to a lot of white people, especially ones who haven't studied the topic. But there are deep historical roots here, and white bias is a major cause of the problem. Continuing to erase that means the problems will continue to remain unsolved.
If you'd like to learn more, I'd suggest Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist. For the historical roots, Kendi's history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning is fascinating, too. To understand the white pattern of reaction and erasure here, DiAngelo's, White Fragility is a good resource (as is her 2011 paper by the same name).
If you think you can solve these problems via focus on just a generic injustice, feel free to take a swing at it. But I don't think white armchair critique of anti-racist activists is helpful. And I haven't for some years: https://www.facebook.com/williamp/posts/10105565800812373
Your poverty example strikes me as disingenuous because poverty for black people is considerably worse than poverty for white people, even when you control for the big confounders, precisely because of racism. Which means that anti-poverty measures can be a great thing but they will not by themselves be sufficient to level the playing field.
It's funny how it's always --other-- people who are getting defensive, who will refuse to listen, who are lost before the arguments have even been expressed. You're fighting on behalf of a demographic that doesn't exist: people who aren't racist but are unwilling to listen for 2 minutes to an explanation of systemic racism. I bet you just dislike the concept of systemic racism yourself and you're using hypothetical alienation of ignorant poor white people as a cover.
It is very difficult to devise reasonable plans of action when the core terms in the dispute are ill-defined. There also seems to be a current of thought that any attempt to clarify or analyze the situation is an attempt to diminish the grievances. This anti-intellectualism coupled with the chaos and violence of a mob is frightening.
Here's a movie, Thirteenth, which VERY CLEARLY defines and examines structural racism in the criminal justice system in the US, and how it evolved directly from the systems of slavery and its sequel, Jim Crow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8
This analysis and conversation has been building for literally decades. It's like showing up for the fifth week of an algebraic geometry class and calling it 'anti-intellectual' because you can't be bothered to pick up Euclid...
And thanks for proving my point that some people view any attempt to analyze the situation as an attempt to diminish the grievances.
Your willingness to jump yet again to the conclusion that I was attempting to dismiss legitimate grievances is frustrating and again an example of the behavior I was trying to call out.
When I pointed out that "systemic racism" means different things to different people and that lack of agreement on that point made it difficult to have a meaningful discussion, you told me to "Go educate myself" and proceeded to lecture me about my ignorance regarding the criminal justice system.
How did you determine I was ignorant about anything? I happen to agree that our criminal justice system has some deep problems, so you just attacked a potential ally.
It seems to me that you jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that I had challenged some assertion about "system racism'. But by doing so you illustrated my point that it was difficult to have a discussion when terms are so ill-defined and that it was even more difficult to do so when people assumed that any attempt to clarify and understand the meaning behind the words was some attempt to minimize or diminish the grievances.
Your reaction was exactly the behavior that I was pointing out as making it difficult to discuss these issues.
You are upset that I am "splitting hairs over phrasing" and that is an example of what I would call "anti-intellectualism". The meaning of words is supremely important if we are to find common ground and be able to work rationally towards addressing the legitimate grievances being expressed in the protests.
Yep that was exactly my point and why I related the story. I learned that people really are profiled and harassed based on their looks or certain assumptions about them. It really does happen.
But not in any structured way, but rather in random human behavior that we might never be able to correct, right?
Unlike the average San Francisco resident I've actually spent a lot of time around blacks and black communities so this isn't theoretical one dimensional abstract signaling of the type that is unfortunately too common lately.
The issue is deep and not nearly as simple as one sided "structural racism social injustice". A lot of it comes down to culture and how people feel about proper behavior. Along with contempt for cultures that don't have the same values. And willingness to engage in violent behavior.
But I don't deny black Americans have a rough time with the police and I do think we should do something about that. Maybe that is what is meant by "structural" in which case I agree, no argument.
I'm not sure what to do about people not liking each others culture though. I expect the bigots are the ones missing out, but I don't know if we can legal that problem away.
A cop and his boss acting badly may be systemic. It isn't structural.
I personally believe profiling is not the same as racism, both have clear definitions. Both also sweep up innocent people and lump them in with miscreants who "look like that" so it's not something to go to the mat over. I basically agree.
What I don't agree with is your over the top rhetoric.
"We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight. The USA has had more than 240 years to fix that."
This disregards John Brown, the civil war, the civil rights act, affirmative action and a multitude of programs policies and attempts to bring justice and some measure of equality of opportunity to the minority. It also ignores the widespread support of the current protests and paints America with an overly broad brush of racism. In short, it does exactly what racists are accused of doing. I realize you likely read this kind of thing in a book. That doesn't make it any better nor more fair or accurate.
When you say "structural" and attempt to equate profiling with slavery or segregation, both of which were structural in an attempt to imply we are exactly the same place legally and in terms of opportunity, and how the system treats minorities when we manifestly are not, it's offensive, inaccurate and it raise hackles.
I really didn't want to get deep into this, and I'm not debating, but I think this point needs to be raised because there is entirely too much hot and shallow speech about lately and it detracts from the core point.
Structural racism is often called systematic or institutional racism[0]. It doesn't have to be deliberate, but instead is something that perpetuates reduced status of a racial minority by the way laws or institutions are structured.
A commonly used example is the difference in laws and sentencing between crack and powered cocaine. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a mandatory minimum sentence on 5 years for 5 grams of crack cocaine, but the same Act made the 5 year minimum sentence apply to 500g of powered cocaine[1].
This doesn't appear to have been deliberately racist, and instead it was mostly in response to media hype about crack. But it had the result of meaning blacks were much more likely to be sentenced to prison for minor drug offences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
[1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-po...
As an example, you might read Loewen's "Sundown Towns". He covers the Nadir, the post-reconstruction period that includes events like the Tulsa Massacre. He demonstrates pretty convincingly that white-led ethnic cleansing was widespread across the US. Through a variety of historical records, including extensive use of census data, he demonstrates that in town after town, all across the country, white people violently drove out any black people and then used violence to keep them out. And then they quietly erased that history, despite keeping otherwise extensive historical records.
Was any of this covered in my high school or college education? No. That's even though it demonstrably took place in towns all around where I grew up. That a lot of suburban growth was driven by racism. That wealth distribution was driven by racism. That made it easy for me to think that racism was this thing that happened long ago or far away. When instead I grew up soaking in its structural effects.
You said this experience opened your eyes, yet you say structural racism doesn't exist. That was literally structural racism. Do you not agree? This is called white privilege; a black person can't change their skin color, but you can cut your hair.
> I'm not sure how much "structural" racism actually exists in the US at this point. There are no doubt pockets and they should be rooted out.
Well if you're "not sure", they why are you posting your own narrative without becoming sure? It's like if I said, "I'm not sure how cars work, but here's a theory that sounds good to me: it involves lasers and hamster wheels, and so I will now believe it."
This is the one of the biggest issues in America, would you consider attempting to GET sure about it?
Perhaps you should ask for clarity. Here, I'll go:
Structural [institutional] racism never left the US. That's what millions of people are protesting right now. It's not some vague notion.
Here are a few off the top of my head:
- Drug laws that target blacks (crack sentences are 10x longer than cocaine)
- Wealth accumulation that holds back black families (not getting loans means not getting houses means not passing wealth down to children; the GI bill that rejected nearly all black applicants and was primarily responsible for middle-class Boomer wealth accumulation)
- Education (poorer zip codes get less funding and end up less educated and poorer, a vicious cycle)
- Job applications (black sounding names get rejected more frequently)
- The vast sentencing disparity between whites and blacks committing the same crimes (blacks are guilty till innocent, and shot for being black in the wrong place or misdemeanours (jogging, selling loose cigarettes), whites are "good kids" who don't deserve to have their lives ruined by a felony rape)
All are structural, institutional racism that are alive and well today.
Do you think I am way off base, or do you reject what I'm describing as factually incorrect or politically motivated? Or anything other than examples of structural racism. I personally don't know anyone who believes structural racism doesn't exist so I'm in a totally different world here...
The idea that 400 years of structural racism can be proven seems highly doubtful to me. Do you really have 400 years worth of evidence of literal outright racism? How can we hope to inspire change with rhetoric like this? This is the equivalent of simply screaming louder to get a point across. Highly ineffective unless annoying them into submission is your goal.
We had slavery in America from 1619 until 1865. Jim Crow and segregation for 100 years after that. The Civil Rights Act, and related laws, eliminated much of the legal basis for institutional racism. But as we all know, that didn't eliminate racism. Safe to say, there's plenty of racism left in this country. Especially in institutions like the police. That's 401 years.
ETA: That's focusing purely on the black population. If you count what was directed against the native populations, you can go back even further.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/8654130...
The police regularly distort their reporting. There is no centralized collecting of police violence statistics, in large part because they have organized against the collection of those statistics. The 1,000+ number will be far less subject to manipulation.
Here's some additional reporting. The 2014 Tampa Bay Times project to track police violence found 827 people shot in a year. In Florida alone. They spent a huge amount of effort on the reporting because the statistics were sometimes not collected and usually not trustworthy where they were.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/f...
While it's fair to say that bias was a factor in Rice's shooting, and I'd agree, pointing to open carry protests as evidence of this may not be the most effective line of argument. Especially since armed Black demonstrators carried out their own demonstrations not long afterward: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-law...
Police were responding to:
> "There's a guy in here with a pistol," the man tells a police dispatcher during the call. "It's probably fake, but he's like, pointing it at everybody."
The problem with systematic racism is the "percieved threat" part. When I have that racisit bias, I obviously will percieve a black person more as a threat than a white one. I may not even be aware of it, and facing ones own biases is a hard thing even more so for such serious things as racism and police brutality. When this bias is combined with the kind of training US police is getting, it a given to end up where the US ended up.
The only nice thing is, it also shows where to sart to remedy theissues. Once the police and the poluation accepted to see the issues.
In this quotation: "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission". "As risky" seems like a very specific choice of words because they could have said "we do not condemn these gatherings because of the risk" but did not.
Similar to how a judge might say "I condemn you to death" is designating the sentence of death to a subject, "condemning a gathering as risky" is designating the attribute of risk to a gathering. They do not condemn the gathering as risky, so they consciously decide to not designate or apply the attribute of risk to the gathering.
Of course, it could have simply been a mistake to word the sentence in this way, but "as risky" does not seem like the obvious choice of words, "because of the risk" does.
And yes, they do later go on to say to prepare for an increased number of infections and do recognize that protestors can and likely will spread the disease, but that just goes to show that the statement is contradicting itself. They are specifically being inconsistent in the earlier mentioned sentence.
This post is pretty double speaky because these doctors can't quite come out and say stay home because the virus is still here and dangerous. So they say things which are self contradictory and therefore ultimately meaningless but allow themselves to signal their support for the cause.
It's what happens when your institutions become explicitly partisan.
Additionally, what are you even going to do? Use the violence of the state to tell people not to protest against the use of violence conducted by the state?
2.) Lower income minorities are the ones who are often afraid to call the police, due to the widespread racial bias in policing across the US. Do not speak for them if they themselves have very low confidence in the police: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...
3.) It's not racist to criticize the Chinese government. It is, however, racist to misattribute the actions of the CPC to the actions of "the Chinese", which happens far too often.
4.) I don't even understand this point. You can't easily pick and choose what people are deciding to protest about: there is nobody at the top saying "we should protest about BLM and not the Chinese government." And especially don't conflate property destruction with what these protests stand for.
It isn't a matter of equating the perceived importance of the gatherings. It is a matter of the government not being content neutral in its actions. If the government is going to restrict public (and private!) gatherings for public health reasons, the restrictions can't be selective based on the speech content of the gatherings.
> Additionally, what are you even going to do? Use the violence of the state to tell people not to protest against the use of violence conducted by the state?
Factually unfounded? It is pretty clear that opportunists and provacateurs have used the legitimate protests as a shield for their illegal activities.
Protection of property and safety of citizens is "gross misuse of public resources"? Do you think the people living above the stores being vandalized and lit on fire would agree with you?
> Absolutely no one was giving a free pass to looters.
I call shenanigans on this one. The mainstream press has downplayed the looting and violence very consistently conflating criticism of the illegal activities as criticism of the legitimate protests efforts. And there is a vocal minority of voices actually legitimizing the violent activities as an appropriate and necessary extension of the peaceful protests.
They just seem to think protesting America's rampant institutionalized police brutality is more worthy than protesting the lockdowns themselves, and I can't say I disagree, but even if I did I wouldn't be able to say they're being inconsistent, because they aren't. They just haven't stuck their heads in the sand of relativism.