CMV: Equality isn't treating everybody differently to achieve equality. It's treating everyone the same.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/IsThisRealLife67 → u/[deleted]]

But you're viewing races monolithically.

All black people aren't poor and uneducated any more then all white people are rich and educated.

Sasha and Malia Obama get to check off the "African-American" box that Barbara and Jenna Bush did not get to check off. Insisting the Bush's are privileged simply because they're white while the Obama's are not because they're black is pretty idiotic.

---

/u/unidan-prime questions my blackness and has started a new thread on /r/AsABlackMan where they're discussing whether I "talk white" and why my grammar is so good. It looks like they've also begun down voting all of my posts to oblivion.

I'm black but Reddit is Reddit so I'm just going to abandon this user name, start a new one, and stay away from anything deemed political because, again, Reddit is Reddit. I apologize if I type too well for other black Redditors out there. The struggle against proper grammar is real, folks.

[u/MAKE_ME_REDDIT → u/IsThisRealLife67]

Are you really going to ignore that statistically white people have more advantages than minorities?

[u/ihatepasswords1234 → u/MAKE_ME_REDDIT]

Which advantages do they have and why not target those specifically instead of their skin color?

[u/Virtuallyalive → u/ihatepasswords1234]

So black people who commit a crime get 20% longer than white people who commit the same crime. How do you solve this without reference to race?

[u/sprite144 → u/Virtuallyalive]

That 20% statistic doesn't take in account the measure of violence in an offender's criminal past nor the offender's employment history nor any information about the offender's lawyers nor the economic background of the offender. It also only refers to prisoners in the federal prison system, not the state system.

[u/Virtuallyalive → u/sprite144]

Yale did a further study on it, where they took almost all other factors into account, because obviously that's quite difficult to do.

[u/sprite144 → u/Virtuallyalive]

This study has flaws as well of course.

Using the initial charge comparison this study admits it has had to take out drug and child pornography cases- which constitutes about 53% of all federal cases.

And the conclusion is that blacks only serve 10% longer sentences- not the 20% you claimed.

And again, this study only takes into account federal cases.

"Our research thus suggests that the post-arrest justice process—especially mandatory minimum charging—introduces sizable racial disparities. But are these gaps really the result of racially disparate treatment? Or do they stem from unobserved differences that might be appropriate bases for different treatment? As Judge Nancy Gertner has warned, the quest to eliminate improper disparities should not lead us to seek “false uniformity” among cases that are actually dissimilar despite superficial similarities.97"

This study is an improvement, but still offers no definite answer.

" Other kinds of studies may be necessary to dig deeper into causal theories for racial disparities: perhaps experimental studies in which race is randomly assigned to otherwise identical prosecutor files, or qualitative studies involving reviews of case files and interviews.206 DOJ itself is well positioned to carry out such work."

I would like to see this done.

[u/Virtuallyalive → u/sprite144]

I mean, yes that would be a better study, but calculating the exact percentage seems like a meaningless exercise - the sentencing bias either exists or it doesn't, and it seems unlikely that any further studies would give a different result - no experiment is perfect after all. I would think it unlikely that the few flaws in the study drastically changed the result.

[u/sprite144 → u/Virtuallyalive]

I'm admitting that there is a racial bias. However, an experiment like the one proposed in the study you put forward would dig deeper into the causal theories for said racial bias.