i’m kind of confused
In: Other
It’s when the system as a whole tends towards negative treatment of certain racial/ethnic groups.
Take drug policing – in NYC surveys have found black and white people use pot at more or less the same rate, yet during “stop and frisk” the vast majority of people frisked, arrested and convicted for possession of pot were Black. Now there were some white folks who got frisked, and some white folks were convicted, and it was also technically the act of individual cops deciding who to frisk, but the entire system as a whole took a nominally even set of policies and applied them against certain racial and ethnic groups.
Or more recently – there have been protests where a large group of armed people turn up to force their way into government buildings and get right up in the faces of police officers while yelling at/disrupting the state governments and the police were extremely restrained, stoically stood there while armed protestors got within inches of them and didn’t deploy the riot squad with tear gas to disperse protesters. This is in stark contrast to the police response to protestors upset a cop murdered a dude while a bunch of other cops prevented bystanders from stopping him – the “step 1”response was to deploy the riot police and heavily armed cops against unarmed protesters, with a somewhat lower tolerance for protesters getting up in police faces and airing their grievances. At some level the difference is due to a series of individuals making decisions, but they’re doing so collectively as part of a system.
Latest Answers