Why are, in the 991 cases of police shootings investigated by the Washington Post, black people overrepresented? The ratio of white/black people in the US is 6:1 according to census data, yet the ratio of white people to black people shot is 2:1. If you look purely at the cases of *unarmed* people being shot, the ratio drops further to 1:1. In a country where institutionalized racism does not exist, why are you six times more likely to be shot whilst unarmed as a black person as opposed to a white person?
because...
There are 5 1/3rd as many white people relative to black people. All things being equal you would expect roughly 20% (18.75% to be a bit more precise) of crimes (lets go with murder, cause that's one cops would be keen to kill you to stop you from committing) to be committed by black people.
According to
FBI crime statistics in 2013 there were 2755 murders committed by whites, and 2698 by blacks. That is approximately a 1:1 ratio, despite there being a 5:1 ratio in the population size. For some reason black people are committing murder 5 times as often as you would expect (or whites 1/5th as often). Does it not make sense that if there was no institutional racism on the part of the police that you would expect any and all police action to be in proportion to the number of crimes committed rather than the population size? I mean I don't see you arguing that cops are biased against men because 95%* of all rape convictions are men.
Now, surely you knew this argument was coming, I don't know why you bothered to wait for someone to post it before writing up your rebuttal.
But I will not make the same mistake you did, I know what the next move in this opening is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are now going to argue that my data is flawed. That black people are watched more carefully and punished more severely than white people. It's racism all the way down. Well, if that were the case then you would not expect there to be approximately 5 times as many per-capita violent deaths among the black community as you see in the white community. Deaths are fairly objective things, you can't let someone out of a body bag because you are unconsciously biased in their favor and have them skip home, and there is a fairly clear trend that you are far more likely to be killed by a member of your own race than by a member of another race. So it's pretty clear that even if this data was biased, it can't be that biased unless there were literal white right wing death squads infiltrating black communities and murdering thousands of black people only to then have the cops pin it on some hapless black patsy. I don't think you would make that argument.
Now here's the part where you or someone else strawmans me as a racist, I'll preempt that too. I am not saying that there is anything ingrained in black skin that causes this. I cannot say what causes it for absolute certainty, but this being entirely environmental factors seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation. Namely there is something else black people tend to have in common in this country other than their skin color and probability of committing a crime and that is they are also far more likely to be really ****ing poor. Poverty, while being far from the only factor, is well known as
having a positive relationship with criminality.
Now you can tell me that poverty in the black community is caused by systemic cultural racism, and to that I'll say ok fine, I won't challenge that for this argument. Because at this point we are apparently dealing with a situation where the police are possibly the one and only institution in the country acting without a racial bias, and that's what this argument is about, the police specifically. For
some reason black people in aggregate commit more crime mostly against other black people and so are also 5 times more likely to be victims of crime. In aggregate they deal with the police more often. At least for murder this proportion seems to be about 1:1 murder/police shooting. Police are in black communities 5 times more often, dealing with black people 5 times more often, protecting black victims of crime 5 times more often, it's not surprising that there will be 5 times as many random accidental shootings by police of black people proportionately.
It is worth noting that this should not be a racial issue, twice as many white people are killed than black people each year. It might not be proportional but this is a problem that affects everyone and trying to solve the non-exsistant racial cause is only going to make things worse.
*I made up this number because the actual number is irrelevant to the point I'm making and I don't think think you'll say the number is lower