People denying racism is a systemic problem in American policing repeatedly cite as “proof” a study published by Roland Fryer, which they particularly love citing because Fryer is black. The thing is though, Fryer’s study proved systemic racism in American policing. And you should know this in case anyone tries citing Fryer at you.

First, Science Is Not Just One Study

First, of course, scientific facts do not rest on single studies. You can find studies proving and disproving almost any proposition; because an enormous percentage of scientific results are false. The reproducibility project has found nearly two thirds of papers in psychology fail replication, and in methodological reliability psychology parallels or even exceeds all other social sciences, which this subject falls under. So single studies are highly unreliable here. Consequently what you want to see is what’s been reproduced, what the majority of studies find, and what’s based on a large and reliable set of data (and is peer reviewed by a legitimate science journal, of course; but I assume you’re already doing that—if you’re using crank science we have a bigger problem).

When you stick to that standard, the evidence for systemic racism in American policing is literally vast (and that list is even endorsed by the conservative Cato institute). It’s a problem in juvenile crime enforcement. It’s a problem in sentencing. It’s a problem in proactive policing. It’s a problem even in trying to effect reform. And yes, all of that has obviously gotten better since the mid-20th century but remains a persistent problem with cumulative effects. And much of that is only caused by implicit racism. Yet pick any city at random, and kick over the rock, and underneath we keep finding even explicit racism (Baltimore; Charlottesville; Chicago; Maryland; Ferguson; Minneapolis; seriously, Minneapolis; even San Francisco; and countless others). And this is all easily found. (And on and on. There is this. There is this. And so on.) If you research critically rather than just listen to racist propaganda attempting to dismiss it all, you’ll see where the evidence trend-line is.

Second, Understand what “Systemic” Means

To understand through a parallel case, consider how systemic racism lies in our enduring obsession with the criminalization of drug use. Even if (if?) we are maintaining that now for some other reason, those laws were originally implicitly designed to target racial and political minorities and continue to do so (see Yep. Criminalizing Pot Might Be a Subconscious Plot to Punish Liberals & Minorities). Just as Republican efforts to restrict voting rights are specifically designed to target racial and political minorities and continue to do so. They’re even still admitting it on paper (albeit paper they hoped we wouldn’t get to read). These are systemic efforts: racists rig the system to enact their racist will (by lying about their real motives); such that even if the system they then set up is not itself being run by racists, the system is still racist: it discriminates unjustly based on race.

Thus systemic racism isn’t just about the explicit racism of yore. It’s in many cases about systems engineered to enforce racism even if no one sustaining that system is themselves racist. Additional to that, it’s also mostly about implicit racism now (example, example, example; summary here). At this point in current events I should hope I don’t have to explain the difference between subconscious racism and conscious racism. But I will anyway, just in case. One is autonomic, the other malicious; one can’t be corrected by changing cognitive beliefs, the other can. To conflate these two creates an equivocation fallacy of the “I’m not a member of the KKK, therefore I am not a racist” variety. Which is only the most extreme version of that fallacy; a more common version is “I am not a bad person, therefore I cannot be a racist,” wherein “racist” is here conflated entirely with “cognitive racist” (wherein racism is a correlate or product of malice), the only kind of racist who is “a bad person,” when in reality most racism is noncognitive: the person exhibiting it, isn’t even aware of it, and it isn’t based on cognitive beliefs they could even articulate, much less would ever defend.

Noncognitive racism is not a correlate or product of malice, but social programming. Like when people “panic” disproportionately at the sight of a black person but can’t even explain to themselves why, or why their positive beliefs and feelings toward black people doesn’t stop this emotional reaction from occurring (see my similar discussion of noncognitive sexism). Noncognitive racism is more like all cognitive biases that plague all human brains, all of which are subconscious, and can only be consciously controlled for, not removed. One has to consciously make an effort to override or work around those inborn subconscious reactions (though racist bias is not inborn and thus can conceivably be deconditioned—just not without a long span of continual cognitive effort, so it’s effectively similar). But people can confuse this scientific fact of all brains being irrational with calling someone “irrational” as an attack on their character, just as they confuse what racism means in the same way.

Admitting your brain is irrational—that in fact it operates on all those standard cognitive errors, because it evolved to do so, and thus was genetically programmed to do so—is not equivalent to calling yourself irrational, in the sense of “a person committed to being irrational.” You can be a rational person—someone committed to watching out for and overcoming all those irrational biases—who still always has an irrational brain. That’s actually a sign of good character: the true rationalist wants to admit to this neurological problem so they can continually do something about it (yet you won’t, if you won’t even admit to the problem). Likewise with racism: you can have a racist brain without being a racist person. The effect on the system you inhabit is then to make the whole system racist, even though you never intentionally do anything racist in that system.

That’s what systemic racism means: it means that, for whatever reason (and there can be several operating simultaneously), the system itself is acting in a discriminatory way. How you experience the system, the way it distributes opportunities and setbacks, difficulties and advantages, will differ depending on what color skin you have. There can also be many other reasons it does so, making it worse: e.g. past systemic racism has helped keep more people of color in poverty, and poverty begets many other ills all on its own (see Intersectionality: A Guide for the Perplexed). But that does not replace, but compounds, the problem: even controlling for poverty, the system still treats even comparably situated people of color (which means mostly, Black and Hispanic people) differently than White people.

The causes of systemic racism can be several: some percentage of it can be caused by explicit bias in a few people operating in the system or designing it; some percentage of it can be caused by implicit bias in many people operating in the system or designing it; and some percentage of it can be “zombie” features of the system, like the criminalization of drug use, which were created for racist purposes but now are (at least possibly) continued for other reasons (police resistance to themselves being policed is an example of an unrelated system failure that just happens to also inadvertently perpetuate racism in policing; likewise how damages are assessed in court; how educational systems punish and reward students; and so on). One of the most pervasive examples of this kind of feature is the denial of systemic racism itself: sometimes that is indeed born out of racism (explicit or implicit), but often enough it is born of completely unrelated cognitive errors (such as the conflation of implicit racism and bad character, resulting in an ego-defense that denies facts in order to avoid the perceived charge), yet it has the systemic effect of sustaining racism in the whole system by doing nothing about it, or even motivating actions to thwart any effort to do anything about it (just as denying the innate irrationality of the human brain has the systemic effect of sustaining an irrational society—by again, doing nothing about it, or even actively opposing any effort to do anything about it). But no matter what the combination of causes, when you add them all up, you get statistically observable disparities across the whole system.

As I pointed out before, imagine if a video game—some first-person shooter, say—secretly but automatically inflicted damage on any character controlled by a Black player at the start of every game. It wouldn’t mean White players always win the game. Many Black players will overcome the disadvantage. But it will mean White players would win more often. Not because they are cheating. But because the system is cheating Black players. Yet White players still benefit. They have the privilege of not starting the game with docked hit points. If you interact with a system, such that every time you do, there is only a 10% chance of a disparity in treatment (every other interaction carries off fairly, but 1 in every 10 times some racist causal factor results in a worse outcome for you), overall the system is docking you a lot of hit points. Because you have to interact with the system a lot. And that shit adds up. Add the realization that luck matters more than talent in getting ahead, and you’ll start to realize how serious this is.

When it comes to policing it’s important to remember how catastrophic such implicit racism can be. It’s not just like an employer having a “gut feeling” that they don’t like or trust or get a good impression of a Black applicant as much as a comparably situated White applicant, without their being aware of the cause of this feeling—and thus we get a cumulative “hit point” cost on employability. Rather, when cops are involved, lives are destroyed or ruined. If you can’t catch a break but instead get pipelined into prison and criminality at a disproportionate rate, for example, that’s not just “not getting a job,” it’s an entire ruined life—and ironically, this is actually self-destructive to the White community, as all it does is make the crime they fear worse. But, and this is what comes to the fore in recent events, it can be even worse than that: you can be outright killed—including in death penalty states, resulting in a legacy of murder against innocent Black people. But not only there.

As I wrote once before, when Philando Castile was killed by police officer Jeronomo Yanez despite breaking no laws and complying calmly to every stated request, this was almost certainly racism in action. Because we rarely see this happen when the person in the car is White. But this was not racism because Yanez is consciously racist. He’s not, so far as I know, a supporter of the KKK or a reader of The Daily Stormer or constantly thinking of ways to keep the Black Man down or wishing he didn’t have to hide all the reasons he is sure Black people are bad. I doubt that. More likely Yanez just intuitively felt scared of people with dark skin. And this caused him to delude himself into a panicked sense of danger, resulting in the crazed, undisciplined shooting of another human being to death. Almost certainly his racist bias, an inherent panic at Black people, causing one to interpret everything Black people do as menacing, was not the product of conscious beliefs. But it’s racism all the same. If Castille had been White, statistically, Yanez probably would not have imagined himself in danger, or would have been more cautious in assessing it. His brain would have delivered him a more positive spin on what Castille might have been doing, rather than an ominous one. He’d have been more measured in his response. He wouldn’t have panicked. And Castille would still be alive. That’s how most racism works. In policing as everywhere else. But “everywhere else” usually doesn’t result in being gunned down in your own car. Or pipelined into a life of crime.

So this shit matters.

Third, No: Asians Don’t Disprove This

“But aren’t Asians all better off than white people? Why do they keep complaining about racism then?” Of course, there is already a non sequitur here: e.g. you can be rich and still targeted with racism. As long as you are being treated worse than comparably situated White people, you are on the receiving end of racism. And because that’s unfair, you get to complain about it. But this argument is also factually skewed: systemic bias has actually created the perceived “advantages” of being Asian.

United States immigration policy prioritizes education and wealth over blue collar skills and actual applicant needs (we dislike paupers and refugees and working class skillsets; but love Crazy Rich Asians), so without a land border to jump, Asians have a very hard time immigrating to the US unless they already bring wealth, or an education that generates wealth. This isn’t necessarily racist (presumably White immigrants face the same requirements). But the effect is the same: successful Asians end up here at a higher rate than our native population or any other large immigrant group. We’d see the same thing in the Black community if Africa produced the same scale of educated, wealthy immigrants to the U.S. It’s just historical happenstance that Africa is not as populous or well off as Asia (though there is of course a racist legacy as to why that is). But the upshot is: the only reason Asians “poll” as better off than White Americans is that statistically, most Asians aren’t from here, yet are the creme of the crop of where they did come from. Because we rarely let any others in.

There is also a differential in the degree of racism endured between Asians and anyone of dark skin (Blacks and Hispanics mostly; though several numerically smaller groups get the same end of the stick). American racism against Blacks and Hispanics has historically been more stalwart and severe, suppressing inter-generational wealth and status accumulation in them much more than in Asians. If you don’t believe me, set yourself the research project of looking at numerous studies of the history of racism (and even recent racism) in housing and real estate (and related ghettoizing) between Blacks and Asians. You’ll find that “zoning” Asians into ghettos died out more generations ago than for Black people; as did anything the equivalent of Jim Crowe laws. The Internment, for example, only affected the Japanese; and they (unlike Black people) received reparations (albeit nowhere near comparable to what they lost).

But even with all that in mind, if there were no Asians immigrating to the US, most likely Asians would statistically be closer to but still below Whites in wealth and education averages. Hence, still behind; but a lot better off than blacks. Simply because the racism against Asians has been less virulent and has been declining in its severity at a faster rate. Which, honestly, is illustrative of the effect of doing something about it. Yet it’s still latent and real.

Now to the Fryer Study

Roland Fryer completed his study, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It passed peer review and was accepted for publication in Harvard’s Journal of Political Economy. You’ll see this cited at you as disproving systemic racism in policing. It was even (infamously) misquoted in a broadcast interview by a major police official in Tulsa to that very effect. But when you actually read Fryer’s study, you get quite different results…

Fryer found that in New York City, “Black civilians are…more likely to have any force used against them conditional on being arrested. They are…more likely to have any force used against them conditional on being summonsed and…more likely conditional on having weapons or contraband found on them.” He also found these disparities worsen in daytime (when someone’s race is more visible). That’s systemic racism. He also found a national dataset confirms this pattern everywhere:

Relative to whites, blacks and Hispanics seem to have very different interactions with law enforcement—interactions that are consistent with, though definitely not proof of, some form of discrimination. Including myriad controls designed to account for civilian demographics, encounter characteristics, civilian behavior, eventual outcomes of interaction and year reduces, but cannot eliminate, racial differences in non-lethal use of force in either of the datasets analyzed.

So, even accounting for differential rates of poverty and criminality, even circumstances of encounter, People of Color are still beaten and attacked by police more than similarly situated White people. That’s one of the major conclusions of Fryer’s paper. Yet it’s being claimed it said the opposite.

“Strikingly,” Fryer said, “both the black and Hispanic coeficients are statistically similar across…income levels—suggesting that higher income minorities do not price themselves out of police use of force.” In other words, this disparity is not explained by poverty or criminality. It’s race. Even upper class people of color are being mistreated. As Fryer’s conclusion holds, “On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences—sometimes quite large—in police use of force, even after controlling for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction.”

Indeed, Fryer adds, “even when we take perfectly compliant individuals and control for civilian, officer, encounter and location variables, black civilians are…more likely to have any force used against them in an interaction compared to white civilians with the same reported compliance behavior.” In fact, Fryer’s own modeling shows “the net benefit of investment in compliance is lower for blacks relative to whites,” which “is precisely what the model predicts if racial animus is an important factor in explaining racial differences in use of force.”

Fryer also found that “racial differences in police [use] of force does not seem to vary with civilian gender or officer race especially for black civilians.” So Black officers can be racists too. We already knew that (discrimination is discrimination; it doesn’t matter who is doing the discriminating), but racism deniers have a hard time grasping this one. Racism benefits White people, but is still often reinforced by Black people internalizing the same (in this case usually implicit) racism and acting in the same way, with the same biases.

The One Odd Finding

Deniers of systemic racism will ignore all those findings of the Fryer study, even pretend they aren’t in it, and instead cherry pick the one thing in it they want to hear—and even that they get wrong:

Only in Houston (not nationwide, take note) Fryer found that “Blacks are 23.5 percent less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites, in an interaction.” But…wait for it…that’s just citing the raw numbers. “Including encounter characteristics…creates more parity between blacks and non-black non-Hispanic suspects, rendering the coecient closer to 1.” In other words, the Yates quote, that “we ought to be shooting them more” is not what the Fryer study he cited said: to the contrary, it found Houston cops (and only Houston cops) were shooting Black and White suspects at exactly the same frequency, when you account for encounter characteristics—which, uhem, are written up by the shooter. And we all know how reliably cops report what actually happened. If you weren’t aware, there is a systemic lying problem in American police culture: not just in the Floyd case (evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence; indeed he had been a victim of police lies even earlier in his life) but all across the country: in the Gugino case, in the Taylor case, in the Lakey case, in the Smith case, in the Toledo case, in the Green case, in the Carroll Gardens case, in the Nichols case, in cases all over the country, from rough-and-tumble Chicago and Baltimore to free-loving San Francisco to middle-of-the-road Columbus, to the point of being well and widely documented as a systemic problem (and we knew this even before the widespread availability of video proved it). Indeed, we now know police nationwide have been hiding a lot of violence they perpetrate, especially against Black and Hispanic victims, as well as their lies and corruption generally, specifically to avoid being caught at it (example, example, example). Indeed, American police have almost uniformly opposed any system of holding them accountable for even criminal malfeasance, much less civil. Police are commonly dishonest. They therefore cannot be trusted as witnesses any more than any other criminal.

But even if we believed cops are robotically honest, Lawful Good Paladins the lot of them, with electronic brains lacking all the standard human cognitive biases in memory and reportage, the data show parity, not “24%” less than “should” be the case. Even when Fryer adds the point that “when we include whether or not a suspect was found with a weapon” the data are slightly below parity, he adds: “though the racial differences are not significant” in statistical terms. So, still parity. And again, this assumes these claims of “he had a weapon” are all true. We know for a fact that they often are not (example, example, example, example, example, example, example).

This is the only finding of the study that racism deniers latch onto. And even that they misreport (as Yates did)—not only by getting what it said wrong, but also by confusing results from one city’s police department as if it applied to the whole nation, and only using data the police “self-report,” which we all now know is dubious. As even Fryer notes, “an important caveat to these data is that the sequence of events in a police-civilian interaction is subject to misreporting by police” and “it is plausible that there are large racial differences that exist that are masked by police misreporting.” And here we have reason to suspect. Because multiple national studies—which often also relied on the same kind of skewed source data, but again skewed in favor of making police look good—found uses of lethal force were roughly two to four times as likely for a Black person than a White person—not 24% less likely, much less parity.

The Hidden Significance of Even That

It’s actually more ominous when you pay more attention to that one finding for Houston in Fryer’s study. Notice how even that anomalous Houston finding mathematically supports Fryer’s other evidence of racism in policing, when we account for the use of any force, not just lethal force, and combine that with the lower frequency of Black suspects doing anything to warrant their being stopped and interacted with in the first place. Both facts Fryer’s study confirmed (and that’s all we need to establish systemic racism in American policing). But now pause for a moment to think this through…

Fryer found no evidence of a plague of unjustified shootings of White suspects. So in order for 24% fewer black people to be shot than white people except when encounter characteristics are accounted for (in other words, “justification”), encounters with White people must have been consistently more dangerous than encounters with Black people. Yet everyone thinks it’s the other way around (implicit bias at work). Why were encounters with White people so much more dangerous? Is it because cops are getting into confrontations with Black people more often than White people…and discovering they shouldn’t be, because they are stopping too many innocent Black people, while more reliably stopping White criminals? That’s the most likely explanation of Fryer’s finding. The only other possibility is that White people are more dangerous than Black people. Which is a possibility I doubt your average racism-denier would like to entertain. Yet they’d be right not to; I am not aware of any evidence for it, whereas Fryer’s own study presented evidence supporting the contrary hypothesis: police are getting into Black people’s business way too much; while only messing with White people when real shit is going down.

Fryer’s data—along with numerous other studies—confirms that’s the case: cops stop Black people more often than White people, yet they find contraband (in other words, a reason to have stopped them) more often in the White suspects. As Fryer describes this, “black stops are significantly less productive than whites and [this] is evidence for potential bias.” So even Fryer’s lethal force finding confirms systemic racism in Houston’s policing practices: they are more reliably finding dangerous criminals to confront (and thus shoot) when they are White; whereas they seem to be engaging Black suspects more randomly, and thus not efficiently zeroing in on the actually dangerous ones in the way they are with White suspects. This is corroborated by all the other tests of the “productivity” of involuntary police interactions that Fryer measures.

Fryer also ran some controls for the theory that officers are “afraid” to shoot Black suspects for fear of being called racist; he finds no evidence corroborating that hypothesis. The racial disparities he found in abuse and assault by police alone refute it. But he also tests it by finding there has been no decline in shooting Black people in Houston as attention to racist policing increased over the last twenty years. Fryer hypothesizes that the costs to an officer of any lethal shooting (regardless of target race) are so high that Houston police are much more careful about when they deploy that measure, to the point that they shoot everyone at the same rate, when accounting for all other factors, especially encounter circumstances (thus washing out all racism from their decision-making). Whereas no one cared much (until recently) about beating people up or treating them more harshly or disrespectfully, so when those actions are contemplated, racism has been allowed to flourish. Even Fryer’s theory, however, was based on already-suspect police self-reporting, so it’s not so reliable a conclusion. Which may be why studies using national data argue against his lethal force finding being typical. So one might want to do a deeper dive into the reported shootings in Houston than Fryer did—to see what actually turns out to be true, and how often discrepancies arise between independently verifiable facts and police reports (and whether more such discrepancies more often pop up when the target is Black, for example).

Another thing to consider is that, as Fryer proved, police engage in unprovoked violence with minorities more often than White people. That could cause escalation to a lethal shooting, which would even be reported in Fryer’s data as justified, and thus not show racial bias—even though in fact racial bias caused it. The “he went for my gun” excuse, and all its variants (as South Park poked fun at with the “he’s coming right at me” joke), could be because the target feared for his life because the police initiated dangerous, unprovoked violence against them—and that’s unlikely to go well for a victim when everyone believes anything police say. In other words, a lot of self defense from suspects is likely being “coded” in police reports as justified violence against suspects. Fryer’s study had no means of detecting this. One would have to engage a closer look to rule it out.

But as I already noted, Fryer’s one finding that police shoot more white people than black people before accounting for things like encounter escalation, could also be because police are more reliably stopping criminal suspects when they are White. And indeed, it could be several of these things at the same time, all adding up to the net effect observed in the data by Fryer. Including a finding found in another limited set of data (discussed among other studies here) that in some datasets police shoot at the same rate regardless of race but force interactions twice as often with racial minorities (despite evidence of that being counter-productive rather than justified), resulting in minorities facing an unjustly higher risk of being shot by police.

For instance, supporting the racism-initiated escalation hypothesis, Fryer proves a disproportionate number of Blacks are being assaulted by police, and that the measurable benefit of a Black person’s compliance with police is lower than it is for White people; which must necessarily cause more escalation that leads to a lethal shooting. So the fact that Houston cops are still catching (and thus shooting) White violent offenders more reliably than Black ones could mask racism in the very sequence of events that leads to the lethal shooting of Black suspects. Fryer’s data won’t show this, either.

Yet we see this very dynamic playing out in protests these last couple of months: police are usually the ones causing the escalation that leads to what they then report as “being attacked,” which results in their escalating the violence to levels resulting in injury or death. All too often (and we have many documented cases) it is indeed the police who are causing this, not the people they are attacking (this has been extensively and repeatedly documented for years and is now a standard doctrine in evidence-based policing: see summaries at The Marshall Project, FiveThirtyEight, CU Commons, and The Washington Post). Fryer also mentions this as a possible cause of his own data.

I would suggest this explains even a reverse finding in Fryer, that with lethal shootings in Houston, “the only statistically significant differences by race demonstrate that black officers are more likely to shoot unarmed whites, relative to white officers.” That could be because white people are less likely to cooperate with a black officer, causing an escalation that results in a lethal shooting. Thus what looks like black-on-white racism, could just be more white-on-black racism—combined with American police culture’s obsession with resorting to lethal violence generally: even unarmed White people are far more likely to be murdered by police in America than any other country; in some cases as much as thirty times more likely (this is a serious problem even White racists should be worried about: see summaries in Business Insider, The Washington Post, and Quartz). In other words, American cops just love thrashing and killing people; their racism in doing so is almost lost in that much larger aberrant signal.

So even if you don’t care about racism, the rampant nationwide corruption and propensity for violence in American police should concern you (see my many links to countless examples of both above). It harms even White people. A lot.

Don’t Confuse Statistics for Geography

Another factor Fryer’s study does not address (nor any does so far as I know) is geography: almost all the violent crime in the United States that makes us a disturbing outlier as a nation in the First World occurs in a very small number of neighborhoods (in fact, in areas and networks even smaller than neighborhoods). And I don’t mean cities; one section of one neighborhood within a city might contain nearly all the violent crime shown in statistics for that city. So when you look at, for example, “violent crime in Chicago,” you are not, in fact, looking at violent crime in Chicago. You are looking at violent crime in a tiny little area of Chicago, such that if you didn’t include it in your stats, Chicago would look like any low-crime European city.

This creates a problem when we try to say, for example, “Black people engage in more violent crime than White people,” because that’s actually not true when you control for neighborhood. Very few Black neighborhoods, even fewer integrated neighborhoods, contain the crime that these small number of violent outlier neighborhoods across the county do, yet those neighborhoods generate most of our nation’s violent crime. It just so happens, of course, that those few anomalous neighborhoods are predominately Black: because White America ghettoized Black populations throughout the 20th century. Indeed, usually deliberately (and if you don’t believe that, do some honest research on the history of racism in housing and zoning in the United States; or just read A Bayesian Analysis of the Winling-Michney Thesis on Redlining).

But this leads to implicit racism by a common human cognitive error we formally call the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent: “The worst neighborhoods are Black, therefore Black people are worse than White people.” That doesn’t follow. “If all the cats in the Gumdrop Forrest are feral, and Jonesy is a cat, therefore Jonesy is probably feral” doesn’t follow—because there are far more domesticated cats outside the Gumdrop Forest than all the cats within it in it, so it’s actually the other way around.

So you can’t just “control” for rates of violent crime by Black people when assessing likelihood of a Black person being shot, as Fryer did. Fryer made no control for neighborhood of incident. What we need to know is where Black people are being shot. If cops assume all Black people they meet anywhere are dangerous, simply because there is one dangerous black neighborhood in town, this will result in a disproportion of shootings of Black people who aren’t even a part of the “dangerous” population they are being presumed to be a part of. That’s racism by definition: assuming they “come from there” because they are Black.

If, for instance, an unusual number of shootings of Black people occur outside high-crime neighborhoods, and this happens more often than for White people, you’ve found racism. Even if the overall rate is lower. No one has checked this yet. And yet it needs to be checked, because it more accurately describes public perception: that all Black people are being punished for the behavior of a few Black people in a small number of ghettos created by centuries of White power. This is reflected in Fryer’s own finding of racist application of uses of nonlethal force and of involuntary encounters generally. When police choose to interact with someone, their decision, Fryer documents, exhibits a racist trend overall; in addition to those encounters being more likely to result in violence from the police based on race, as Fryer found even after controlling for all other factors.

Back to That Systemic Racism Thing

The whole idea of systemic racism is that not everyone in a system need be racist for the system to be. That’s practically the definition of systemic racism. So, suppose only 10% of every police force is racist. Indeed, let’s assume, even cognitively racist. Although most racism is noncognitive, we do also have a lot of evidence of explicit racism in police departments in every part of the country: we just got a shocking example in Wilmington this week; but we have many others. Just see my earlier links on specific police departments (Baltimore etc.); when investigated for racism, usually tons of it turns up.

So let’s say, just to illustrate a point, that this is everywhere: most cops have zero racism, but 10% are full-on “let’s kill the n****rs” style racists. This could explain all the racial disparities in the data. But then everything those cops do is protected by 100% of the police force. As we saw with George Floyd: one officer committed the murder, while numerous officers did nothing about it; and the department even tried lying about what happened until video came out exposing them. That latter action need not be racist at all, it’s rather simply generic corruption: cops back each other with lies, report-faking, and intensive intra-group peer pressure no matter what crimes they commit against whoever, regardless of race or anything else (see the many links I gave above of exactly this kind of corruption and lying from police departments all across America). The effect, however, is to maintain a racist system: we get that 10% disparity in treatment of citizens by race from the whole system, and nothing is ever done about it. In this scenario, in every case, a whole police department is causing this disparity, even though only 10% of it is cognitively racist.

That’s a simplistic model meant only to reflect the point of what people mean by a “system” being racist without the people in it all being racist. In reality, most racism in police departments is noncognitive; and most if it is not “pure” (it doesn’t cause a racist decision in 100% of interactions), but has to be triggered by a confluence of events that override officer judgment. So it’s not 10% bad cops; it’s more like 90% of cops acting on unknowingly racist instincts 10% of the time—and then 100% of cops covering that up for reasons having not to do with racism but rampant, nationally standardized police corruption. The effect is the same: a system that sustains different treatment of people by race.

When White people “deny” systemic racism exists, they might have all sorts of generic motives that don’t have to do with race (ego; political groupthink; a fear of having to do something about any problem in society should they dare admit it exists). They might also be emotionally “triggered” by the race question to want to deny systemic police abuse and corruption altogether (which are not race-specific but are demonstrably rampant, and harm even White people), so they don’t even take action on that (which does not require them to believe in racism at all, yet would help Black people as well as White if they did anything about it). But that’s precisely systemic racism at work: the evidence is overwhelming that it exists, yet by denying it exists (regardless of why), it is given “cover” and thus allowed to flourish, unchecked, unpoliced. The system becomes racist because we let it. So stop letting it.

Or if you don’t believe in racism, please get angry about all this massive nationwide evidence of police corruption, violence, and abuse of power. Believe it affects White people equally. I don’t care. I’d rather you did something about it. Sso whatever delusion you must entertain to motivate you, go to it. Because if you care about democracy, if you care about government overreach and assaults on Constitutional liberties, you sure as hell should care about this. Because, after all

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

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