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677 points saeedjabbar | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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wottamap[dead post] ◴[] No.23544704[source]
The messages that need to be said right now are very difficult to say because people have steeled themselves. But they need to be said. This is not meant to be flamebait, I truly deeply believe these messages need to be heard and understood, so please understand that I'm speaking in good faith here. If you feel strongly that I am wrong, please reply with well thought out reasons why. I will listen.

Articles like this do the black community a disservice.

Society pretending that there is massive racism when there isn't is itself structural racism.

If you believe you cannot succeed due to all this racism, that will be sulf-fulfilling.

Blacks that believe in widespread racism will be less likely to go to university and get a job.

Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed.

I'm not saying there isn't any racism. But I am saying that the level of racism is low, and the remaining racism is probably impossible to eliminate. The way to improve the lives of blacks is to stop focusing on and zooming in on racism, which makes it look a lot bigger of a problem than it really is.

Lived experience is not the way to determine why people do what they do. The hearer is not the expert on what the speaker means when he/she speaks. Like hanlon's razor, don't attribute to racism that which can be attributed to a simple embarrasing mistake. If you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The recent protests due to police behavior is justified to call attention to a real problem, and police need to be less militarized and better trained. However, the belief that they are systematically hunting down black people for extermination is untrue and only harms the black community, because if you believe that, you are more likely to consider lawful persuits hopeless, more likely to engage in crime instead, and more likely to resist arrest which means you'll be much more likely to be killed by the police. It's self-fulfilling.

adjkant ◴[] No.23544884[source]
> Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed.

Statements like this make it clear that this opinion is either highly uneducated or clearly not in good faith.

Time and time again, black people in America will tell you that they have to sit their kids down and explain in fine grain detail what do to if the cops pull them over so they are not killed, a conversation virtually no white people have. People don't have death wishes.

And even when people cooperate to the letter, people who do everything right still get brutalized or killed regularly.

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1. wottamap ◴[] No.23545314[source]
Thank you for this perspective. I was unaware of what you describe. Also, thank you for not assuming bad faith.

This conversation is difficult to have, but I would be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't state what I thought was true and if I was unwilling to be publicly wrong. Downvotes are more instructive than upvotes.