And.....We're back! Now that our new children are all grown up we're starting up again. This episode is the last of the racial issues discussion. We promise! With all new common ground reached at the end. It's like a happy rainbow of togetherness! We're totally thrilled. Now if only the world would listen. Or at least you can. Enjoy!
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Conflating abortion to lynching seems like at least a debate technical foul, jumping back to an earlier topic more to inflame than enlighten. Though if the larger point is that blacks are disproportionately affected by a lot of things, that's solid. (As often is the case, The Onion put it well.)
ReplyDelete(And now Dan's going back to the abortion debate, too. Stay on topic, you guys!)
Matt's right that America has come a long way. (I think Dan eventually came around to that, but he overstated his case at first.)
I think Matt overstates in saying that it's all about socioeconomic status. There are racial differences in outcomes, even correcting for income (and related socioeconomic attributes).
(It's not until you try correcting for other attributes, especially heritable attributes (aside from skin color), that things get really radioactively interesting.)
I think the bit about whether Darren Wilson was ultimately acting in justifiable self-defense is not as relevant as both sides make it out to be. There's something disproportionately compelling about personally demonizing one or the other of the people at the center of an incident, sure, but that's not compelling for virtuous or rational reasons.
But a lot of the outrage in Ferguson has to outrage has to do with the wider context in which that killing happened. Yes, that context does affect who wants to give who the benefit of the doubt when evaluating specific claims of self-defense, but it also involved a lot of practices that might have escalated the odds of a fight happening or escalating, including on particular racial lines. Lack of trust increases the risk of escalation a great deal.
(Side note: Given the tendency to make criticism like this all about these central incidents (the "big man" theory of history writ small), why are activists doing such a poor job of choosing test-cases relative to the Civil Rights Movement in the past? Maybe activists are just less organized, or maybe controlling the narrative like that is just difficult given social media. e.g. Perhaps Twitter would have been all over Claudette Colvin.)
There's an important distinction to be made between bias and animus. Many of these incidents could have happened without bias. I think the police in these cases likely killed in legitimate self-defense (Wilson) or panic (Loehmann) or desensitized recklessness (Pantaleo). I don't think any of those police officers were motivated by hatred, or eager to kill black people in general, so long as they could get away with it. I want to give a little push-back on Matt's (conservatives' in general? I'm not totally convinced that generalizes, but maybe it does) "conscious or it doesn't count". Yes, many of these situations are "about choices", but there are all sorts of factors that make choices easier or harder, or change the context in which those choices happen. I think there's a tendency to paint this debate as a false dichotomy between a belief that personal choice is totally unconstrained and a belief that free will is effectively nonexistent. There's middle ground, where people make real decisions (and act with real thoughtfulness or recklessness), but psychology is still a thing.
P.S. I hope you'll discuss some of those parenting-related political topics (like this) now that you're both in that arena. (On a related note, again: Congratulations, Dan!)