Just read a thing, and would like to see if the internet destroys it the same way I think it can be.
The claim is: Poor white people and poor black people have equally hard lives. That police shootings affect poor people more than black people, and that black lives matters should be porlivesmatter.
Here's my thought:
Grant the premise that, as the argument claims, poverty is a more important variable in police shoots than is race. [ Please Note: Granting the premise is a rhetorical technique, and in no way should be taken to denote my own beliefs. ]
It is still easily the case that poverty more easily affects people who society does not view as white, perhaps most obviously African-Americans. That is, poor white people have resources -- including societal privilege -- that is not granted to African-Americans. I'd suggest the burden of proof is on anyone arguing against this.
Which, in case I need to go further, means that race is more important than class when it comes to such matters as police brutality.
That's how I'd quickly deconstruct that argument. Anyone else want to take a shot?
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Exhibit A of (a fuck of a lot):
ReplyDeletecnn.com - Cops pull over Florida state attorney - CNN Video
#blacklivesmatter
Doesn't matter what you make. In fact, a cop might think you stole it if your color doesn't match the price tag.
Institutionalized generational poverty. Student -> prison pipline, Red lining, wage theft, jim crow, internment camps, ect. leading to compounding losses over generations, means more POC are in poverty than would otherwise would be.
ReplyDeleteExhibit b
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/e68CoE70Mk8
Exhibit c
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theroot.com/california-woman-sues-walmart-for-locking-black-beauty-1822493134
In Beverly Hills:
ReplyDeletethewrap.com - Black TV Producer Wrongly Detained in Beverly Hills Says 'Ferguson Resonated in My Mind'
washingtonpost.com - Oprah and the View From Outside Hermes' Paris Door
ReplyDeletehttps://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/10/210574193/why-didnt-the-store-just-let-oprah-buy-the-38-000-handbag
ReplyDeletehttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/forest-whitaker-falsely-accused-shoplifting-frisked-new-york-deli_n_2719712.html
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/barneys-accused-stealing-black-teen-article-1.1493101
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Alexander_case
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Akai_Gurley
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Rekia_Boyd
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Texas_pool_party_incident
ReplyDelete/misha's posts
ReplyDeletehttps://plus.google.com/photos/...
And those are just the top of mind ones
ReplyDeletePut another way, I wouldn't count on being in the top 20% income bracket to keep my Black ass from getting shot if a cop looked at me sideways.
ReplyDelete"is a more important variable" => estimating effect sizes and comparing. No anecdote will help establish one claim or the other; we need some data.
ReplyDeleteIf the claim is that only socioeconomic status is important, or that the effect of race works entirely through socioeconomic status, that would require some pretty compelling evidence. Hard to say without seeing the thing you're referencing though. However, it seems unlikely.
I could imagine a more nuanced claim which is that maybe socioeconomic status is more important than previously thought relative to race. (Though such a claim wouldn't imply that slogans referencing race should be replaced.)
Is the thing you read an internet opinion think piece or is there an empirical component?
If by Thursday morning I haven't come back to this with a preliminary statistical analysis, ping me? Because there are enough numbers to address that first premise and its implications.
ReplyDeleteResponse way too long. Sorry in advance.
ReplyDeleteI strongly suspect this thing you read is meant not to shed light on the problem but to avoid solving it. It seems like a "but the holocaust was just as bad as slavery so stop complaining about slavery" argument. But let's take it at face value.
I'm a big advocate for looking at how poverty affects people of all races, including poor white people, but saying poor white people and poor black people have equally bad lives is saying that racism doesn't exist. That is ridiculous.
And even if poverty has more of an effect on police shootings than skin color (and I'm not sure that's true), they both have an effect. So does being mentally ill. So does being male. It is true that unarmed white people have been shot by the police, and it would not surprise me at all if they were predominantly poor. But it is also true that if you are a black man, you are far more likely to be shot by the police while you are unarmed than is a member of any other demographic group. If there is some reason for that other than racism, I can't think of what it is.
So here's my question: why does it even matter who is the biggest victim? If unarmed citizens were being shot by the police in perfect proportion to their racial, socioeconomic, and gender proportions in the general population, would that be okay? Would we find consolation in the fact that Jews, Asians, Latinas, people who make between $75,000 and $125,000 a year, women, transgendered Puerto Ricans, the super-rich, and straight, white males were all being killed at exactly the same rate as black men and poor people and the mentally ill?
I don't think so. I think it would still be a problem. In fact, I think a lot of people would find it an even bigger problem, because suddenly they would be the ones getting shot.
And since that would be a problem, it's also a problem that unarmed black men and poor people and the mentally ill sometimes get shot by the police.
There are police departments that have solved this problem, or at least made dramatic improvements. We know what the solutions are. We can replicate them everywhere if we just demonstrate the political will to do so. There is no excuse for not solving this problem.
Racist policing is bad policing. Cops who are afraid and quick to use deadly force are dangerous to everybody. Constant, senseless traffic stops of people of color takes police officers away from more important duties, wastes money, and pisses off people who might otherwise cooperate with the police. It's terrible because it's racist, but it's also terrible because it's wasteful and alienating and destructive of the entire community.
Training cops in de-escalation helps everybody. Better policing helps everybody. It even helps the cops. Obviously, the people it would help the most are the groups getting shot.
Who would it help more, black men or poor men? I don't really care what the answer to that question is. Maybe it would help mentally ill people the most. I don't care. I just want to solve the damn problem.
Class-biased policing exists, and is bad. Race-biased policing exists, and is bad. Both deserve attention.
ReplyDeleteTrying to hijack a movement about the racial bias to be about the class bias, under cover of whatever statistical hokum, is bullshit, and smells of the attempt to sweep racial bias under the rug to me.
William, I don’t know if I can grant that premise. You can conceal poverty... put on blue jeans and a t shirt or a suit, groom, cut your hair and a person can appear to be greater than their class. You can’t do that with skin.
ReplyDeleteEspecially when your modes of escape require a certain skin color... employment, scholarship, a better address, credit.
(Re: "can't tell if someone is poor" - you can't tell if an individual is poor, but if you shoot people disproportionately in poorer neighbourhoods....)
ReplyDeleteI adore everyone who has shown up to this little thread. This is more or less what I expected. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI'll leave comments up, because daaaaang you guys.
Ok, so this is based on what data I could find. When interpreting it, you should treat it like clues for what avenues of further investigation should bear fruit, not as definitive assertions of truth.
ReplyDeleteThe Washington Post has a database of fatalities by police shootings. I'm having trouble getting the 2015 data so we'll run with the 2017 data for now (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/).
Fatalities by police shootings are divided into the following: white, black, hispanic, other and unknown. Removing the unknowns from the total, we end up with the following percentage breakdown:
White - 50.61%
black - 24.70%
hispanic - 19.82%
other - 4.87%
Now, that's fatal shootings, not other forms of death caused by police, nor does it track non-fatal, physical altercations.
US populations demographics as of 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity) shows the following breakdown for certain ethnicities:
white - 73.6%
black - 12.6%
hispanic (of any race) - 17.1%
US poverty rates as of 2014(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_and_race/ethnicity)
overall - 14.8%
white, non-Hispanic - 10.1%
hispanic (of any race) - 23.6%
black - 26.2%
It is actually weirdly hard to find demographic information on poor folk. You have to extrapolate from the total population based on poverty rates. So, doing some math using poverty rates and total percentage of population:
% of total population that is poor and white: 7.43%
% of total population that is poor and black: 3.3%
% of total population that is poor and hispanic: 4.04%
Ok, so right now you should be side-eyeing the data because I used numbers from different years to come to very rough estimate of folks who are poor. And I'm going to compare it to data that's from 2017 (if I can get the 2015, I'll redo this bit). This is not a strong analysis!
That being said, it's worthwhile to see if there's a compelling story is being suggested so we can look for better data and investigate. According to my math, there are about twice as many poor, white people as poor, black or hispanic people. If you look at the shootings data, you'll find the ethnicity breakdown for victims is similar - roughly twice as many white folk as black or hispanic folk. Now, the Washington Post data doesn't have class data, so we can't be sure it has anything to do with class. But it certainly matches up more closely than to the basic population demographics, where there's more than 5 times as many white people as black people and more than 4 times as many white people as hispanic. I've also seen some articles pointing to data that police shootings are more likely to happen in poorer neighbourhoods as well, though I'm hunting up some raw data to see if that holds up.
All this to say: the premise that poverty is a strong factor in the likelihood of being the victim of a police shooting isn't inherently flawed. There's evidence that suggests that this is a worthwhile avenue of research to pursue.
But also note that black and hispanic folk are disproportionately poor in comparison to white folk. If you want to make a point of focusing on poor people, you have to look at who tends to become poor and how that can affect the police's view of those demographics as a whole. If poor=criminality and more black and hispanic are poor, it's not a hard leap to connect black/hispanic with criminality just by simple transference, which would disproportionately affect non-poor black and hispanic folk with police violence.
ReplyDeleteSo Poor Lives Matter probably isn't a bad idea, but it should be a movement that marches side-by-side with Black Lives Matter, not replace it.
I 🖤 Kimberley Lam
ReplyDeleteThank you, Kimberley Lam, for showing evidence for the side I didn't think had the burden of proof anyway.
ReplyDeletebloomberg.com - Why Black Americans Stay Poor
ReplyDeleteHeh. I just finished binge watching Crash Course: Philosophy, and by philosophical standards of dialogue, each interlocutor is required to propose properly fashioned and supported arguments, including for counter arguments.
ReplyDeletebrookings.edu - Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go
ReplyDeleteKimberley Lam Yes. We're not doing formal philosophy. Besides, Kant was a jerk and Heidigger a drunk. And Neitzche was maybe a racist, but his views are too tied up in misunderstandings to really understand.
ReplyDeleteOh, sure. I suppose what I'm getting at is that the construction of the original claim has one premise that isn't inherently flawed ("Police shootings affect poor people more than black people"). This means that if you want to dismantle the argument, you have to attack the other claim ("Poor black lives and poor white lives are equally bad") and the conclusion ("Poor Lives Matter should replace Black Lives Matter"). Those arenas will bear much more fruit.
ReplyDeleteAs note above, it doesn't matter which one has a greater effect. The fact that they both do is sufficient reason to not have one absorb the other. That's how I would dismantle the argument overall.
Looking up supporting articles is so depressing because there is so much racist kkk nazi stuff online.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes. He's not so good at stating his premises, which is pretty common. And our esteemed interlocutor, whose humble servant I of course am, is unlikely to treat disassembling his unstated assumptions in anything approaching the dialetic.
ReplyDeleteOh, interesting! My approach almost always investigates unstated assumptions because in the act of trying to form a coherent whole out loud, the person I'm talking to usually discovers their own flaws. And then, when I've gone off to have lunch or whatever, they can carry on their internal scrutiny.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying everyone suddenly becomes philosophy students, attacking their own ideas in attempt to find the truth, but if they can get into the practice of doing the work, maybe they'll be a little better at it.
My favorite conversation starter from someone else is "So, I was thinking about what we were talking about the other day and...."
It is absolutely possible for our society to work on more than one problem at a time, especially if those problems are intricately related as racism and poverty. You want to start a Poor Lives Matter movement? Awesome! Maybe you can work with Black Lives Matter to get better training for all cops and to get rid of the ones with the most excessive force complaints. Admitting racism exists might be a good first step.
ReplyDeleteIn my youth I larped with mostly middle class peeps in a city that was already well known for its police murder rates (the not entirely funny joke went, "Blam Blam Blam! Freeze! Police!") It was made clear to me that if the cops showed up and no white or Asian adults were handy, I needed to go talk to them in order to keep my brown and black friends from being shot, middle class though they were. Because the cops were a LOT less likely to shoot a white teen girl with a day-glo squirt gun than, say, a Latina with same. And also less likely to shoot my friends if I was actively engaging them, there to witness (which was why I shouldn't leave to find an adult.)
ReplyDeleteQED
This goes counter to every activity I ever did in white only groups, where the status quo while I was a minor was invariably "get an adult" if it was necessary to talk to any police. We also got the police called on us an awful lot, even though we'd inform the police ahead of times of our events, get buy-in from the property owner, etc.