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Response to Ken Burch (Original post)
Response to Erich Bloodaxe BSN (Reply #7)
Response to gollygee (Reply #9)
Why do so many of them feel obligated and entitled to harass and intimidate every black person they deal with?
Even innocent bystanders? Even witnesses who are trying to cooperate? even crime victims who happen to be black?
Why do they automatically treat any black person in a predominately white neighborhood as suspicious?
Every black person driving a nice car as suspicious?
And every black person as a potential killer, when they NEVER make the same automatic assumptions about every white person?
And why DOES Chris Rock constantly get stopped for "dwb"
driving while black) while no pale, pink movie stars get hassled for driving while white?
Do you NOT see the problem?
(btw, I was talking about whites as a whole-not whites on DU.)
For a variety of reasons.
(1) If I go up and say something to a person and get different responses and reactions, it takes a lot of effort to continue to treat them exactly the same. At some point we're human, not superhuman or non-human robots.
No, I'm not a cop. But in some ways my job is like one, and some people profile you as soon as they see you, some don't; with some you share a common style of upbringing, not with others; some have a sense of dignity and believe they are weak or servile if they comply, some don't; some play to peers in one way, some don't.
That makes for a different set of responses.
You also get "color blind" treated as a curse word. After all, people routinely and foolishly think in terms of indices. Skin color is an index for culture, they say, and that's identity; they are their melanin content. It's absurdly reductionist and misses the big insights from a century ago that says this is a correlation but no more than that, so it's often false (in so many ways we're stuck in 1920). It helps preserve this "I'm not you" thinking that so many have (see below). So while we're supposed to treat people equally, that doesn't mean we treat them the same. Nor is there an infallible a priori method of knowing how to treat them, but if you're fallible you're somehow inferior to our judges.
(2) Moreover, we're bad at stats but convinced we're great at stats. Look at the #s. If you're black you're more likely to be killed during a police encounter if you're unarmed than if you're white. At the same time, you're a lot more likely to be killed if you're black and armed than if you're black and unarmed. The numbers are disproportionate; this is grounds for blacks suspecting that if they're stopped they'll be killed. There's rather less than a 1 in 200,000 that any random unarmed black person in the US will be killed. This is far higher than for whites, to be sure. If you look at the chance of being one of those killed above and beyond the rate for whites, it's far more than double. But the chance of being hit by lightning is on the order of 1 in 280,000. People laughed when a student I had was scared during a thunder storm--she took that risk far more seriously than others. They sympathize and understand when an AfAm kid says he's afraid of being killed by police. After all, they look at the stats and see a difference: police are disproportionately more likely to kill blacks than whites. The reality is that the stats are about the same (lightning/death by cop). Yes, there's disproportionality involved in unarmed-death-by-cop, but even then the numbers are actually quite small: Almost 10x as many people have already died in Texas this year from traffic accidents than unarmed blacks will die this year because of the disproportionality in police treatment. (Added: Yet my AfAm students fear cops more than bad driving.)
Now, if you look at homicide rates in the "black community" or if you look at stranger homicides (where the victim and murderer don't know each other) you find that blacks kill more. Their numbers are disproportionately high. In fact, if you look at the differences in rates they pretty much parallel difference in the death-by-cop rates. That means blacks are disproportionately more likely to kill than whites. The same kind of reasoning that "my" AfAm kid uses is just plain human. And, again, cops are human. (Added: And use the same kind of reasoning.)
(3) We distrust people across group boundaries. Look at partisanship: We're in one group, and have a set of stereotypical attitudes towards those in the "other" camp. The essence of groups is "the worst member of my group is better than the best member of their group". We tone it down a bit, but I've heard that here. I've also heard extremist members of various ethnic groups say it. My brother's grandmother was Sicilian, and said that about the Calabrese, for instance. I've heard Muslims say it; I've heard whites say it about blacks; I've heard blacks say it about whites. Some boundaries matter more than others; for some, there are no class boundaries that matter, while for others they're crucial. For some, South/North matters; for others, meh. For some, race is the end-all of group boundaries. For others, meh.
But we're very sensitive to what happens across those group boundaries important to us. They take on an outsized importance. It's how we cast social reality, and for many that's far more important than physical reality. So if there are about equal chances of being killed by lightning and killed by cop, one is trivial and one's huge if there's a sharp boundary between your group and cops. If there's not, they're the same. If you make race into a sharp boundary, suddenly every incident becomes important. One way of doing this is to split off histories, so your history isn't theirs. (Of course, if you want a community you need a shared history. By splitting histories, you split communities; the options are to find a consensus, or assimilation. We've decided assimilation is wrong, but that's the end-game for some arguments and approaches, even if they don't think that far ahead.)
Group boundaries also mean we justify and try hard to make members of our group into angels. Trayvon was a saint. Sandra Bland's working on it. To say bad things about either isn't to say they're people; it's to say that they're bad people and deserve what they get--so we have to defend them, and in defending them against others "we" defend our group. Communal thinking is evil, IMO. It's KKK and NBPP thinking if you take it just a bit further. It's keeping "our women pure" from "them people" and killing to protect the honor of an individual and of a group. We stereotype and profile--cops profile black citizens, many blacks profile cops (but can't call it 'profiling' because that would be dissing their own group). Heck, as a teacher under federal law I have to profile kids as "at risk" based upon income and ethnicity--but since it's "good" profiling, it's okay stereotyping.
It's the same mechanism as racism, but applied to things other than race. All the blather about institutional racism aside, without personal bigotry and with equal treatment and good will, if we thought of ourselves as one group, in a couple of generations there'd pretty much be vestigial institutional racism at best.
Much of the tech history of humans has been allowing a single person to manipulate and leverage more energy--first his own body's, perhaps 1/10 horsepower, then animals', then water, then fossil fuels (etc.). For that there's just mechanical devices.
Much of the social history of humans has been to form larger communal units. First families and small clans, perhaps 20 people in a unit. Then larger clans. Tribes came along. Warlords and minor "kings" squashed dissent and everybody was loyal to their local warlord or king. They united to form larger kingdoms; empires got larger. Religions helped to unify people into larger units. Force and oppression helped to keep people united. Then we had nation states and nationalism, where we internalized our membership. Even then there were subgroups, but in most cases most people still had an overlying sense of membership in something bigger. Now that this is often gone or diminished, worldwide you see elites feeling like "I'm a citizen of the world" while the less educated often revert to tribes. The middle course is nationalism, still--and we both hate it (Ukraine, bad) and love it (Venezuela, good). Depending entirely on the economic system that the nationalists prefer and how they make us, in our particular tribe, the (D), feel. The problem with this is that we're creatures of evolution. We evolved for smaller networks. We're comfortable trusting smaller networks; conversations with 4 or 5 people break up; we seldom have more than 5-10 friends; our de facto families tend to not be more than 20 people at most, often less (even if the relations are more numerous, it takes exceptional people to keep them all feeling like "family"; we can have a network of associates around 150 or so before it gets to be too much. Once we're past that we tend to start looking for mechanisms of social trust to kick in. If you have them, you trust local systems because you're in the same community; if you don't, you start looking for strangers because local out-groups are going to be more of a threat than distance out-groups.
(4) A lot of the "defenses" of police aren't defenses of the individual or the outcome. Often it's just "we don't know what's up" or "this isn't where the problem is." But since it goes against the group's rush to sit as judge and jury and executioner, it's evil. The thinking is stark, black-and-white, binary, and deeply communalistic. Just defending due process for everybody instead of due process for selected groups is seen as a bad thing. "I don't know" is virtually the same as whistling Dixie while dressed in white and shoving a Confederate flag mounted on a burning cross at somebody. Hint: It's not just different by degree, it's different by category.
Asking somebody to step out of the car? It has to be racism because we need cops to be the embodiment of evil--and if you say otherwise, you're defying the group. But it's likely that's an okay thing to do, some just can't admit it because it's conceding something to the enemy. It means maybe their group member wasn't a pure angel. And in stark binary thinking, that's bad.
(5) Random samples. We assume that we're seeing random samples of behaviors. So twice as many unarmed blacks are killed each year as unarmed whites. I can rattle off a list of AfAms that have been killed. I can "say their names."
I can't say the name of one white that was killed. All I see are blacks. By my reckoning, it's not twice as many, it's many more times than that. My perception's whacked.
Now, some of those "unarmed blacks" whose names I can reel off weren't, strictly speaking, killed when it was obvious they were unarmed. So my operating definition isn't the same as the official statistical report's. My definition's different. Again, my perception's not only whacked, but I'm arrogant as hell--because my perception 8 months after the fact and 2500 miles away is and ought to be utterly irrelevant to the person trying to decide whether to shoot or not. It makes for nice politics, but it completely fails any critical thinking standard beyond, "Me group smart, them group dumb. Mine good, they bad. Want cave, grubs. Og."
Chris Rock gets pulled over a lot? Tell me the rates for other, non-black actors with the same behavior in similar context. (Ah. You can't. First, you can't control for behavior. I can't define what "context" even means. And if they're in different jurisdictions, then I can't control for differences in policy that would affect both black and non-black drivers so I can separate out the effect of race. I've seen too many studies that showed race was a huge factor, until somebody put in controls and found that unstated assumptions and non-racial factors that were ignored handled 90% or more of the variance, and race suddenly accounted for a small proportion of the variance. It's the same with equal pay for women: Controls reduce that to a small amount. We can ask about the relationship between race/sex and those other factors, but typically that makes us uncomfortable. And by "us" I don't include "me."
Whatever the cop says is gospel
Obvious bias for them over the other guy
True if the guy was not guilty the cops would not bother them
No faith in the system
Didn't mean to convey that these ideas didn't exist or expressed elsewhere. should have made that more clear.. 
Really makes you think. 
1. If the person identifies with "heritage" or some other such tribal organization, it's because they automatically view people who aren't with their tribe as threats and/or criminals, and those non-tribe members are animals who don't deserve any rights or due process.
2. If the person is uncertain about people other than him or herself, yet claims to be educated, liberal or a "live and let live" type, they would not tend to question profiling or bullying based on race - (or added for the sake of those who complain about the term "privileged", any other obvious characteristic that could reflect a different social status than "normal people" - because they don't want to admit they are afraid of people that aren't like them, and don't realize that because they are afraid of people who aren't like them, the automatic reaction is that those people are a threat to them, and thus somehow deserve whatever they get.
and finally 3. The average person don't understand that police, judges, supervisors, politicians, pastors - or any other persons who are in legal positions of power or authority - are people first, and the job second.
Positions of power are attractive not only to the helpful do-gooders who really like people and want to make the world a better place (the idealized "default" person for the above type of work), but to people who are control freaks, cowards, or otherwise looking for a position that they don't really have to work hard at for the reward they seek once they get the job.
People who are naturally not thinking about the make-up of other people doing the dirty work governing and policing will typically think of those people as "Andy Griffith", "Barney Miller" or "Judge Harry T. Stone (Night Court)" - the genial, fair minded grown-ups who are the type of people you could sit down and comfortably catch a ball game or have a beer with. This is especially true for your average middle class dude and dudette, doing their fairly stable 9-to-5, raising their 2.5 kids, and unconsciously living with the privilege of being considered "normal US citizens".
The legal authorities they typically identify as Andy, Barney, and Judge Harry aren't:
- dealing with the latest round of frustrating personal issues that can be transferred onto the next person they have to deal with on the job rather than taking care of, or
- either should have stayed home sick, hung-over or hopped up on steroids or some other substance instead of plopping themselves into a patrol car, on a court bench, or behind a government-provided desk, or
- are so full of themselves and their own sense of importance that any bit of resistance to their "awesomeness" needs to be met will overwhelming total force...
- and aren't employing a method of profiling in which potential criminality threat begins with "looks like most criminals around here (profile - race)", then goes to "acting impaired (profile - acts impaired or lost)", then goes to "doesn't belong (profile - appearance;"out of area" markers like license plates, accents, or style)", then ends up with "looks like a potential prey or someone who can be bullied (profile - gender or class)"
Unlike for "normal" people who don't stand out and meet enough of the above profile markers to have to interact with the law, to the general population of all the "others" Andy, Barney, and Judge Harry are fiction, and their reactions and interactions are as scripted as a politician's speech.
And to most people who aren't prone to thinking much about almost everything that crosses their path, if they didn't experience it, it doesn't exist. Bringing up some other group of people's problems in comparison to what they would experience in pretty much the same situation does not sync up in their brains, causes a conflict which causes a discomfort, which can be perceived as a direct attack, even if it is simply a legitimate statement of a problem for that other group of people.
Frankly; because White people (and I include myself here) don't usually start at the beginning of the profile queue, most don't understand how race tends to be the primary method of all legal profiling, because they don't experience it.
White people start getting profiled at the second level, not the first. So unless there's a personal connection to something that pisses off or attracts the police, prosecutor, judge, social worker, or any other person in authority, we don't get noticed unless we do something that actually has the potential to be of legal concern.
We don't get pulled over for DWB because the automatic assumption due to the skin color is that we belong to the Crips or the Bloods - or that we stole the car; we white people get pulled over for no apparent reason when we look like out-of-towners or slacker hippy dope fiends, or because the cop was bored or needed to make his/her ticket quota and we committed a minor traffic violation.
Just my two cents.
Haele
so this is sort of in my ballpark
