@portable Well, nearly all murders are committed by men, as opposed to women. If it was about who commits murders, the cops would all be female and the media would spend its time stereotyping all men as criminals. Through most of the years when they were big on how all muslims were terrorists, more terrorist-style killings were done by white right wing militia types than by muslims. So if it was about who actually did terrorism, any time a militia type showed up with a gun they'd be slammed to the pavement or shot as a danger to the public, like what happens to blacks when they "reach for their waistband" (which doesn't actually have a gun in it).
Clearly it's not about that.
Also as a side note, if it was about who "belongs" here and who doesn't, the ancestry of most blacks goes back longer in the US than the ancestry of most whites, and of course all of both are ultimately immigrants. If it was about who really belongs here, those people we Canadians call "first nations" and you Americans call "Indians" would be respected wealthy landlords.
One thing we can be clear on is that differential policing based on race is not some kind of illusion. If we look at New York city, for years the rules explicitly called for semi-randomly stopping and frisking passersby, but most of the semi-random passersby that they stopped were black. And then surprise, surprise, most of the people they put away as a result were
also black--who'd have thought it? And then they said look, it's right to stop mostly blacks because most of the people we put away are black. So if 80% of the people you search are black, and 80% of the people you find drugs on are black, that means criminals are mostly black. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy! Especially when you can bet half of the people they put away, it was for "resisting arrest", "assaulting an officer" etc., which basically means "Looking at us funny while we were harassing them". Of course, the statistics are also very clear that blacks arrested for a crime are more likely to be charged than whites, more likely to be convicted than whites, get longer sentences for the same crime than whites, and are overwhelmingly more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime than whites. So for whatever reasons, there's a bias at every stage.
But the differential is much bigger than even that kind of thing makes it look. Consider: Major banks in the United States commit massive, systematic fraud in which they effectively steal billions of dollars from their customers. There was one case a while ago in which it was found that one of the biggest banks in the US was systematically creating accounts for customers that they hadn't asked for, doing "services" that customers didn't want, and charging for it; bank customers were losing hundred of bucks each to these scams. It was widespread; dozens and dozens of employees were involved, ordered by upper management to do whatever it took to extract more money from the customers, given quotas and so on. The total was huge, hundreds of millions of dollars, the equivalent of millions of 7-11 holdups.
Now, if it had
been millions of 7-11 holdups by young black men, we would have been hearing of nothing in the media except the massive crime wave for months. There would be massive funding for more police, new laws passed to make sure the perpetrators did longer, harder time, a million more black men in jail, oodles of law-and-order candidates elected and so on and so forth. But since it was, instead, respectable, well off white people committing the crimes in respectable, well off ways, not a single person went to jail, nobody even got handcuffed or perp-walked or shoved in pre-trial detention and interrogated. The bank paid a fine which was smaller than the money they made on all the scams. It's as if a black kid holding up a 7-11 for $100 could pay a fine of $40 and walk. And the number of people investigating such things has since been reduced, not increased--there hardly are any in the first place. And the whole thing made barely a ripple in the media. And that case is just the tip of the iceberg--in terms of dollars, the crime committed by white pillars of the community is dozens of times as big as the crime committed by the poor and coloured, and in terms of people it seems at least as widespread; if you can talk of a culture of lawbreaking in poor communities, you can certainly talk equally of a culture of lawbreaking (and law-buying) in the rich white financial community. But the former, who tend to commit crimes out of desperation, are policed literally to death while the latter, who commit crime to get more even though they already have plenty, are largely ignored or even looked up to for their successful crimes. We're so used to it that it seems normal, that even talking about white collar crime as if it was, you know, actual
crime, that the police might enforce the way they enforce other crime, feels crazy . . . but surely stealing $100 is still stealing $100 if it's done by a white guy with a computer and official access to your bank account.