Hi there everyone, I'm white...

[jobycom]

71. Take drug use. White people use drugs more, black people are sent to prison more.

You explain that in a way that doesn't imply bias.

The way it works is that at every step of the process, racism is institutionalized. Take crack cocaine, for example. In the 80s Reagan allowed crack to be smuggled into the US by terrorists he supported in Central America (yes, the CIA has admitted this). At the same time, he made prison sentences stiffer for crack than for other drugs, claiming he wanted to clean up the inner cities and rid them of the predators who were selling crack to children. What this meant is that the police flooded the inner cities with cops, narcs, sting operations, and police informant payoffs to arrest as many people as they could, work out plea deals to get more people arrested, etc. What race do you think wound up getting arrested the most in inner city police raids? Yes, black people. So, under the guise of helping black people rid the inner cities of crack, Reagan pushed for stiffer sentences and increased arrests of black people, whereas white people suffered no such increased scrutiny or penalization.

That's one way.

Another way is societal assumptions. For instance, shoplifting. If you've evver worked security or retail, you've been told that black people shoplift more than white people, and you've been given profiles of shoplifters that, even if they don't mention race, describe blacck people more than white people. I worked retail and did an experiment for a year. I refused to watch black shoppers more closely for shoplifting. During that year, at my store we caught ten shoplifters. One was Latina, four were black. Of the four who were black, two of them were together, so that was really one event. They were all caught by the rest of the staff, which varied between five and twenty people, depending on time of year (Christmas has more staff). The other five were all white. Every one of them was caught by me, because I was the only one watching them. And when I say caught, I mean I saw them pocket a wallet (that's what we sold), walk to the door, and set off the buzzer. Here's the really good part. Every one of the people of color went to jail. They were arrested and plead or went to trial, and they all received sentences. Not one of the white people did. In fact, not one of the white shoplifters was even sent to jail. In every case, they talked and bought their way out of it, meaning they begged the manager not to call security, and offered to pay for the merchandise. Yes, the black suspects did the same thing, but were denied that right. And you know the kicker--the manager wasn't even a racist person. She would have been horrified if someone else had presented such numbers to her about someone else. She just couldn't see that she was doing it, too.

So yeah, white people and black people are just as likely to commit crimes. Statistics show--and you can google and find endless well-researched stats to demonstrate this--that a black person is more likely to be arrested, more likely to be charged, more likely to be sentenced, and is going to serve a longer sentence than a white person charged with the same crime and having the same level of criminal background. So, at each stage of the process, from the making of the law to the final sentencing (and that's not even mentioning parole), bias slants the numbers just a little bit, until by the end you have a system where by the end of sentencing, a black suspect is many times more likely to have gone to prison for the same crimes the white person committed and caught a break somewhere in that chain of processing.

So, yeah, absolutely the entire system is biased based on race. Black people are no more likely to commit crimes than white people, and once factors like poverty are adjusted for, or actually less likely (because they know they are less likely to get away with it). But our prisons are filled with people of color.

THAT is white privilege. It's quantifiable.