That was certainly my experience. What I learned about racism up through high school was basically, "This stuff happened, but long ago and far away, unconnected to what's going on around you."

And it's no coincidence that I learned this in a suburban school with a student body that was 1% black. In a state that was 14% black. And that had a long history of racial exclusion and white flight.

I'm shocked now at how one-sided my initial education was on this. Shocked, but not surprised.

I often think the people who talk loudly and overly-much about the US’s endemic racism have never travelled abroad much to witness what the rest of the world is really like (looking at you, Japan). It’s a product of an education curriculum that is hyper-focused on the misdeeds of the US. While the misdeeds need attention the view completely lacks an honest accounting of how amazing the state of this 325m culturally heterogenous society is compared to.. throw a dart at the world map.

Just to put your mind at ease, I've lived on 4 continents, so I'm reasonably aware of how things can work elsewhere. And I also agree that America, imperfect as it is, is amazing.

That is no reason at all to erase the deep endemic racism or the harm it causes daily to people. "You would be even more fucked in Japan" does not make anything better.

Serious question (because I don't know the answer, or how to find out): are there many other places in the (first) world where people of a minority race are singled out for harassment by law enforcement, to the point where police are routinely murdering people of that race with little to no consequences?

If not, then I think a focus on the US's particular brand of racism is warranted.

I do agree with you that it is fairly remarkable that the US is as stable as it is given the large mix of cultural views and values... but that doesn't let us off the hook for the problems we do have.

>are there many other places in the (first) world where people of a minority race are singled out for harassment by law enforcement, to the point where police are routinely murdering people of that race with little to no consequences?

I would recommend looking into the treatment of the Indigenous in Canada [0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths

But your claims aren’t back by data either. Your first paragraph is made up.

https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/

(I link Sam Harris because of his bigger point about people echoing talking points completely divorced from the data, as you have done. You can check his data sources.)

Wow, that was a lot of meandering I had to read through before Harris actually got to the point I think you're referencing. But I don't see him present any evidence. He starts by hand-waving away people who believe the opposite of what he believes, and then just basically says "only about 1000 people in total are killed by cops in the US every year, so this is a non-problem". Which... no, sorry, that's not how it works. And the thing he links to literally has a section heading titled "Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans".

... and then he goes on for many paragraphs about several police shootings of black men, and how awful and unjustified they are, so... he seems to agree after all that this is a problem? Finally, he tries to muddy the waters by essentially claiming black people seem to "deserve it" more, because apparently black people are involved in more crime than white people? Which, again, doesn't seem to be very well supported by data.

So... I don't really get why you're using this link to try to refute what I said, because it does not do that, at least not in a logically consistent, evidence-based manner.

> But your claims aren’t back by data either.

I believe they are. Let's look at some actual data that we can easily read, rather than attempting to extract something useful from a meandering 15,000 word podcast transcript that rambles on forever.

This[0] shows that out of all US police shooting deaths from 2107 through now, 27% were of black people, and 49% were of white people. But black people only make up only 13% of the US population, while white people make up 60%, so that sounds pretty disproportionate against black people to me.

But this data is only for shooting deaths; likely someone like George Floyd, for example, wouldn't be counted in that data as he wasn't shot.

So let's take a look at this study[1] from last year (reported on here[2]) that suggests blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.

I could go on, but I'll let you educate yourself further if you're so inclined; "police killings statistics by race" is the search I used.

> people echoing talking points completely divorced from the data, as you have done.

I don't believe that's what I've done; Harris' own views seem completely divorced even from what little data he presents, if one can be expected to actually find data in that nightmare of a transcript.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-06/race-and-...

> Finally, he tries to muddy the waters by essentially claiming black people seem to "deserve it" more, because apparently black people are involved in more crime than white people? Which, again, doesn't seem to be very well supported by data.

I don't think you're being fair to what he said. He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interaction with police on a per capita basis would increase.

You seem to be implying that cops are, subconsciously or not, more interested in using deadly force against black people than white people. The data you're using from statista seems to have many equally plausible explanations, but you've chosen to only accept the racism one.

> He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interaction with police on a per capita basis would increase.

"Interaction" is one thing; police killing people is another.

(An aside: if we dig deeper to figure out why black communities often have higher crime rates... welp, there we go again, it usually boils down to some form of systemic racism.)

> ... but you've chosen to only accept the racism one.

Why do you feel the need to steer people away from racism as a cause? Nowhere did I say that racism is the "only" thing; please don't put words in my mouth. But it is, by and large, the root of the majority of the problem.

I've already spent more time than I care to on this topic, so I'm not going to go digging again, but if you look at studies around general police behavior (who they are interested in, who they detain, how long they detain them, stats around escalation, arrest vs. warning rates for same offense, etc.), it's pretty clear that police target -- whether consciously or subconsciously -- non-white people, and black people in particular. You can call that "bias" or "prejudice" or whatever you want; I call it racism.

But regardless, bottom line: black people are killed by police at a disproportionately large rate when compared to people of other races. That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as that's clearly false. If you want an acknowledgement that racism isn't 100% the entire picture, then sure, ok, fine. (Though you don't seem particularly interested in venturing forth any suggestions or data pointing to other causes, so I question your motives here.) But racism is a huge contributor to these disparities. If tomorrow we could magically eliminate racism from everyone's mind, I guarantee you ant disparities would be so small as to not really garner anyone's attention.

So here's my question for you: what are those other non-racism causes of this disparity? And if you can name some, do the causes of those causes not actually boil down to systemic racism in the end?

> That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as that's clearly false.

I understand why it feels that way, but all this data does is show correlation. As soon as you attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions about causation, the data is lacking.

I think the focus on racism is detrimental to the truth because it forces a feedback loop: we're tracking the race of victims of police shootings so that we can show more correlation that feeds back into the same narrative that racism is the problem. There's no data that shows poverty level, education level, etc. in these shooting statistics. If being poor increased your chances of being shot by the police, it would certainly explain the numbers, but since we're only interested in the race variable, we'll never know.