It's Not Racism (but here's why it might look that way)
The main problem with the police is not racism. The main problem is brutality.
I mean two things by this: first, the evidence for racial bias in police violence is much weaker than you think it is. Second, whether the violence is equitably distributed is not the main thing we should be concerned about anyway. The main problem we should see is murder. If the police are full of non-racist murderers, that is not a lot better than being full of racist murderers.
Are Police Shootings Due to Racism?
I have no doubt that there are racist cops, just as there are racist plumbers, racist car salesman, and so on. Are racists overrepresented among cops? I don’t know for sure, but I would not be surprised by that. But is racism the main explanation for police shootings? No, it isn’t.
American police kill around a thousand people a year -- so about 3 a day -- though almost none of these make the national news. Around a quarter of the victims are black; three quarters are non-black (https://mappingpoliceviolence.org). That doesn’t seem like the striking evidence of racism that you would probably expect from listening to media reports and popular discourse.
However, black people constitute less than a quarter — only about 13% — of the overall U.S. population. So they are overrepresented among victims of police shootings. That is the main evidence of racism. If blacks were 13% of the police shooting victims, then presumably we would not ascribe racial bias. So the racial bias is invoked to explain an excess 12% of shooting victims. The other 88% are due to something else. There is something off about responding to the news of 1,000 police homicides by saying, "We need to stop one eighth of those!"
But it’s not even clear that police racism explains that 12% of cases. This is how police sources explain it: Usually, when the police make contact with a suspect, it is because some citizen has called the cops to report some suspicious behavior. When they do, the caller usually gives a description of a person whom they (the caller) believe to be committing or about to commit a crime. Now, the racial composition of those descriptions matches the racial composition of the victims of police shootings — i.e., black people are overrepresented in citizen descriptions by the same amount that black people are overrepresented in police shootings. So taking that into account, the overall picture does not suggest racial bias on the part of the police. (Source)
Aside: You might think that it suggests racial bias on the part of citizens. Maybe, but that’s not our topic. I’m only addressing racism by police.
Why Are We Talking About Racism?
Why are we constantly on about racism? Because hard core ideologues can’t talk about or care about any problem that isn’t ideologically slanted. They can’t just protest some non-ideological, non-partisan injustice. No problem matters unless it feeds into the preferred narrative. Murder doesn’t matter unless it’s racist; poverty doesn’t matter unless it’s America's fault; diseases don't matter unless they target minorities.
Why Does it Look Like Racism?
Media bias
I don't expect this to convince SJW’s. It is in general impossible to convince SJW’s that anything isn’t racism. So I’m not going to try to convince them (in general, I don’t try to convince them of anything).
But this is to explain why it looks to a lot of people like police violence is about racism. First, the media gives drastically disproportionate attention to police abuse of black people, as compared to police abuse of white people. One reason for this is that the media is full of left-wing people. Another reason, maybe the main reason, is the media bias toward click-bait. “Racism” pushes people’s buttons. It stimulates outrage, it makes people click, and it makes people share. Just telling a story about how an innocent person was murdered doesn’t do those things. Telling a story that feeds into someone’s preferred narrative about what's wrong with America — that gets people to click and share.
That is what the media cares about. They are not in the business of trying to provide an accurate picture of our society. They’re in the business of capturing attention so they can sell it. Sowing outrage and division is just a side effect of that.
Confirmation bias
As a broader point, here’s why everything looks to leftists like racism (sort of like how “to a kid with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”): They start with the assumption that America is a thoroughly racist society. From there, they interpret every event they see in light of that assumption. When you do that, you “see” a lot of racist incidents. You then take all those incidents and feed them back into your belief system as evidence of how America is a thoroughly racist society. Rinse and repeat.
Example: Someone once told me that Star Wars was a racist movie. The evidence for this? Darth Vader, the primary evil character, is dressed all in black. What later occurred to me is that the stormtroopers (also evil) are dressed all in white. Why did my interlocutor take Vader’s outfit as confirming that the movie has an anti-black bias, but not take the stormtroopers’ outfits as confirming that the movie has an anti-white bias? I’m sure someone can come up with some rationalization for this. But here’s the real reason: Because everyone knows to begin with that America is prejudiced against blacks, not against whites. Therefore, the anti-white interpretation just wouldn’t occur to us, or if it did, it would immediately strike us as totally implausible, and we’d forget about it.
That’s how ideological bias works. You take a general belief and use it to interpret cases, then use those cases to support the belief. This can get you extremely high credences in the general belief, as years go by and you accumulate more and more cases. After a decade of being on a particular political side, the generalizations of your side’s ideology will seem absolutely indisputable, as you have mountains and mountains of apparent evidence for them. Changing to a different belief becomes almost impossible, as you would have to change so many other beliefs, which have all been constructed in accordance with these ideological assumptions.
That’s why it looks to left-wing people as if everything is racism. They hear so many remarks as racist because they already “know” that racism is pervasive . . . which they know because they have heard so many racist remarks. And so it becomes basically impossible to change that belief system.
Part of it is also motivated reasoning: people on the left want to see racism because they have constructed an identity for themselves as “anti-racists”. (For more on this, see https://fakenous.net/?p=1354.) That identity is only meaningful and emotionally satisfying if racism is a huge problem. So any idea that magnifies the racism in our society feels emotionally satisfying.
“Anti-Racism” Is Pro-Racism
So maybe the left overestimates the prevalence of racism. So what? Racism is still a problem, and maybe overestimating it will make people do more to combat it. What’s wrong with that?
One problem is that the messages of the “anti-racists” are helping to keep racism alive. How so?
(a) The “anti-racists”’ views are themselves often extremely racist. They basically think that the white race is inferior to other races – a paradigm racist view. “Anti-racist” activists and intellectuals are working to preserve resentment and hostility toward whites, and thus to stoke racial tensions.
(b) I suspect that this also creates a kind of backlash – that the rise of the alt-right is partly a reaction to the “anti-racist” left with all of its messages about the evils of white men, and so on. Most people, when told that their group is evil, will not just accept that and turn against their own. They will feel obliged to come to the defense of their group, and part of that 'defense' will be to attack rival groups. So the left is strengthening both anti-white racism, and, indirectly, anti-black racism.
(c) Just the practice of constantly talking about race – whether or not you say one race is superior or inferior – has the effect of making race salient, making people think of their race as their ‘identity’, which in turn causes tribal humans to feel a sense of loyalty to their race. The idea of dividing everyone into races, and treating someone’s ‘race’ as an essential trait of import, is one of the stupidest and most destructive ideas we ever came up with.
The "anti-racists" say, "We have to keep talking about race as long as America remains a racist society!" Reply: Your going on about race all the time is keeping it a racist society. There's no way that ever ends if you don't stfu about race at some point.
The traditional racists of the past, who thought whites were the superior race, were very dumb and immoral. So naturally, humans pick the most benighted, most racist possible lesson to draw: “Oh, traditional racism is wrong? So . . . whites are the inferior race?”
No, you idiots. Races are just arbitrary groupings, no more morally meaningful than groupings by what day of the week one was born on. “The white race” isn’t a person and cannot owe anyone anything or be blameworthy or praiseworthy for anything. Every person is a separate individual, every one has to be evaluated based on that individual’s own actions and no one else’s. The problem with traditional racism was not that it misidentified which races are good and which are bad. The problem was the whole bullshit of treating individuals as representatives of a ‘race’.
All of that really should go without saying; that should be the obvious lesson of (genuine) anti-racism. Somehow, America can’t seem to grasp that.