Read on Twitter
TW: This is racist af.
Sometimes I think about how arbitrary our relationship with numbers is. According to this, somewhere between the level of white crime and the level of black crime, you cross a magic threshold that means you should probably just criminalize all black people
Sometimes I think about how arbitrary our relationship with numbers is. According to this, somewhere between the level of white crime and the level of black crime, you cross a magic threshold that means you should probably just criminalize all black people
This is aside from the fact that this leans on incredibly racist tropes about black criminality and flawed data gathered from institutions that are also racist by design. That should go without saying, but if often needs to be said. Black people are not inherently criminal.
But what we don't talk about enough is how supposedly educated white men work to actively pervert data and science in service of white supremacy. The goal is to manipulate otherwise smart people into believing that racism somehow emerges naturally through cause and effect.
Once you have awakened to the lie that is white supremacy, you can easily dismiss this as racist drivel. But we know that there are a lot of people who are swayed by this kind of rhetoric. People who consider themselves free from bias because they rely on "science".
So let's take a moment to pick this apart a little. First off, the idea that Black criminality is rampant can be easily debunked. It requires one to actively disregard other factors in explaining criminal data in order to land on the racial component.
Poverty, forced segregation, and intentional over policing are the combined factors that contribute to the demographic trends in crime statistics. Whenever someone says "blacks commit more crimes" but don't want to address these, they're selling you white surpremacist propaganda.
After that, you get to the comment about "playing the odds". This is where you really start to understand that this isn't about conclusions gleaned from data. Ask these folks what framework they use to decide how much crime is enough to justify criminalizing a whole people?
Ask them at what specific point we go from "individual case by case" to "arrest anyone who looks like this". Ask them why it always seems to fall in-between the white number and the black number. No matter what dataset is used.
And finally, you can recognize the egregious double standard that rests at the root of this kind of rhetoric. These same white people are the ones who talk about freedom and individuality. It is *only* with Black people that they start to become interested in the numbers.
The thing to understand is this. There has always been an active and intentional effort to criminalize Blackness. These efforts have always leaned on a thin veneer of "science" to justify oppression. And if you don't learn to recognize it and reject it, you risk normalizing it.
So I'll leave you with this. That tweet is intentionally and undeniably racist. Will there be any consequences whatsoever for that man? Or will men like him to get to continue spreading this harmful message as if it is an acceptable part of discourse? https://twitter.com/polotek/status/1265134076702322688?s=19
