Why DO so many of my fellow whites automatically defend ANYTHING cops n' judges do to black people?

[Igel]

25. Because the responses aren't exactly the same.

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.&quot