Race and Inclusion in America and Beyond

[GolfLug]

Wow... That's  KKK stuff.. they exist amongst us. We have cameras all over our facilities. They would be fired in a heartbeat.

@ChetlovesMer tell your friend there is more love and support for him and his family than he may be feeling at the moment. 

 

Edited June 16, 2020 by GolfLug

[boogielicious]

52 minutes ago, ChetlovesMer said:

I agree. Especially at your, and his, place of employment. What is going through a person's mind? Did this person wake up in the morning and go "You know what would be cool....." ??? I really and truly don't understand it. 

Again, I just don't understand it. I truly would like to know why a person would choose to do that????

They are cowards like most racists. Small-minded, insecure, underachieving cowards. The only way for them to make themselves feel empowered is to think they are better than someone else. It gives them a rush to try and intimidate.

I am with Erik on this. At my last company, if they found out who did this, they would have been fired immediately, walked to the door and met by police. That is one way to fight it. The other is education.

[ChetlovesMer]

16 minutes ago, GolfLug said:

 

 tell your friend there is more love and support for him and his family than he may be feeling at the moment. 

 

Thank you. And I did. And so did my wife.

We talked all about it for a while last night. He and his wife, me and my wife. We all realize that most people (at least we assume) are not complete idiots like who ever did this. It just sucks that complete idiots have to ruin it for everyone else. 

[mcanadiens]

The business of leaving a noose seems to crop up as a sort of backlash against protests by blacks. You do get into some murky territory between where it is an offense a perpetrator gets fired over or something worthy of a criminal charge.

In my opinion, the noose is beyond a racial slur and is, in fact, a threat of physical violence. Yet, often, people seem to get by with simply getting dismissed from work or even less. From what I've read, it's the sort of thing that is really a case-by-case basis and different states can have substantially different laws.

@ChetlovesMer,your friend should consider strongly bringing this to management's attention. Simply to protect themselves from lawsuits, most large companies will have policies for such things. Getting the incident on the record in a timely fashion may be important down the line.

[Vinsk]

13 hours ago, ChetlovesMer said:

I would love to know who did it and just ask them "Why?" 

I’d be inclined to have a much less civil interaction I must say..

2 hours ago, ChetlovesMer said:

Thank you. And I did. And so did my wife.

We talked all about it for a while last night. He and his wife, me and my wife. We all realize that most people (at least we assume) are not complete idiots like who ever did this. It just sucks that complete idiots have to ruin it for everyone else. 

So sorry to hear this about your friend. Just awful. Glad he has you and your wife to talk to.

[billchao]

13 hours ago, ChetlovesMer said:

A good friend of mine told me when he arrived at his workplace this morning he found somebody had hung a noose in his work area.

Repugnant.

[boogielicious]

8 hours ago, mcanadiens said:

In my opinion, the noose is beyond a racial slur and is, in fact, a threat of physical violence.

It is assault and a crime in some states. Assault is the threat of harm vs. battery which requires contact.

[dennyjones]

22 hours ago, iacas said:

I'd do more to that person than ask them why.

Firing. I'm not all that legally knowledgeable, but I feel like he/she could be arrested, too.

Despicable.

How are we not past this kind of shit in 2020?!?!

I'm with you, thinking this.   It's like a gut punch...  

[iacas]

Just Because They’ve Turned Against Humanity Doesn’t Mean We Should Defund the Terminator Program

---

“Following weeks of national protests since the death of George Floyd, President Donald Trump...

This initiative, also known as Skynet, was created by Cyberdyne Systems for the Department of Defense as a way to keep Americans safe. Critics have said that spending half of our country’s GDP on developing an army of state-of-the-art cyborgs with advanced weapons systems and an AI specifically trained to neutralize threats was a bad idea. And while the recent killings might seem to confirm that, we feel that, despite a few stumbles here and there, this program has still been an overwhelming success.

Don’t get me wrong, we all remember Judgement Day, when the Skynet gained self-awareness and initiated a nuclear holocaust, killing millions. That was a terrible moment in our nation’s history. And the human uprising led by John Connor was definitely justified even though we felt like some of the violence and destruction of Skynet property was a bit unnecessary. But it’s important to remember that Judgement Day was initiated by a few rogue Terminators, and isn’t indicative of a widespread problem with Skynet.

[mdl]

On 6/14/2020 at 5:38 PM, saevel25 said:

Stories and Data

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Reflections on race, riots, and police

 

As my best black friend would say, not all skinfolk are kinfolk.

And (as a person with a PhD in statistics I feel highly qualified to say), the data argument is hogwash and deeply uninformed. The argument from ignorant academics (yes, much of academia is statistically illiterate) is that controlling for levels of police violence by taking into account arrests and convictions will make it look like high levels of police violence against PoC are justified, or at least no worse than experienced by white people. More black people are criminals, so of course they interact with and are shot by police at higher levels.

Except criminal records in America aren't a measure of how often people commit crimes we want to sanction as a society. They are, in aggregate, mostly a measure of how much police target people in different groups*. If the police target PoC, then PoC will have more extensive criminal records on average and will interact with police more often. So it's a circular argument.

 

*It's very hard to measure/prove that, but there has been some work in that vein. For instance, basic facts like the proportion of white and black teens who smoke pot is similar, but the proportion of black and white teens who've been arrested for pot is nowhere close to the same.

[saevel25]

10 minutes ago, mdl said:

And (as a person with a PhD in statistics I feel highly qualified to say), the data argument is hogwash and deeply uninformed. The argument from ignorant academics (yes, much of academia is statistically illiterate) is that controlling for levels of police violence by taking into account arrests and convictions will make it look like high levels of police violence against PoC are justified, or at least no worse than experienced by white people. More black people are criminals, so of course they interact with and are shot by police at higher levels.

I agree. Still it's hard to say what is a justifiable amount of policing to combat obvious higher crime rates. Especially in really bad urban neighborhoods.

I am not saying that the current level of policy attention is warranted. It would be bad to say that it isn't part of the equation. It would be bad to just use that piece as a way to justify the police, and disregard why those neighborhoods are in those situations to begin with. 

12 minutes ago, mdl said:

Except criminal records in America aren't a measure of how often people commit crimes we want to sanction as a society. They are, in aggregate, mostly a measure of how much police target people in different groups*. If the police target PoC, then PoC will have more extensive criminal records on average and will interact with police more often. So it's a circular argument.

This is true with respect that not all police are looking to find someone guilty just because they look a certain way. You can't have it all one way or the other. There are police who do their job well, and then there are police who do not. 

14 minutes ago, mdl said:

*It's very hard to measure/prove that, but there has been some work in that vein. For instance, basic facts like the proportion of white and black teens who smoke pot is similar, but the proportion of black and white teens who've been arrested for pot is nowhere close to the same.

This sort of stat is just crazy in terms of how it happens. I for one am on the side of not sending people who smoke pot to jail, but to unequally persecute a certain segment of society because of how they look is asinine. 

Also, there has been some looks into police statistics. Example, here is a summary article from R.G. Fryer (a black professor at Harvard) who went deep into the statistics. 

Opinion | What the Data Say About Police

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There are racial differences in use of nonlethal force, but not in officer-involved shootings.

To summarize, the statistics show that black people get accosted by police at a much higher rate than other race/ethnicity. They get arrested more. They get stopped more often and questioned. They get handcuffed and restrained more often.  Yet, when it comes to when police decide to use deadly force or use a technique that happens to cause a death, there is no correlation to race/ethnicity. If you search, you can find videos of cops doing the same thing they did to Floyd to a white person. I am not saying that the cop who did that to Floyd didn't do it out of racism or out of hatred because he had past dealings with Floyd. The technique he used has cost the lives of white people as well. The story of police causing deaths is more of lack of training in de-escalation and lack of training in use of proper restraining techniques. If cops are going to be the people who keep us safe from people committing violent crimes (rape, assault, looting, etc..) then they need to spend more time training. 

An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force

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Roland G. Fryer J. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy. Forthcoming.

 

[dennyjones]

I live near Flint, MI.   After the many protests, I decided to watch Flint Town again.   I look at it in a different light.  

[mdl]

On 6/23/2020 at 6:19 PM, saevel25 said:

I agree. Still it's hard to say what is a justifiable amount of policing to combat obvious higher crime rates. Especially in really bad urban neighborhoods.

I am not saying that the current level of policy attention is warranted. It would be bad to say that it isn't part of the equation. It would be bad to just use that piece as a way to justify the police, and disregard why those neighborhoods are in those situations to begin with. 

This is true with respect that not all police are looking to find someone guilty just because they look a certain way. You can't have it all one way or the other. There are police who do their job well, and then there are police who do not. 

This sort of stat is just crazy in terms of how it happens. I for one am on the side of not sending people who smoke pot to jail, but to unequally persecute a certain segment of society because of how they look is asinine. 

Also, there has been some looks into police statistics. Example, here is a summary article from R.G. Fryer (a black professor at Harvard) who went deep into the statistics. 

Opinion | What the Data Say About Police

---

There are racial differences in use of nonlethal force, but not in...

To summarize, the statistics show that black people get accosted by police at a much higher rate than other race/ethnicity. They get arrested more. They get stopped more often and questioned. They get handcuffed and restrained more often.  Yet, when it comes to when police decide to use deadly force or use a technique that happens to cause a death, there is no correlation to race/ethnicity. If you search, you can find videos of cops doing the same thing they did to Floyd to a white person. I am not saying that the cop who did that to Floyd didn't do it out of racism or out of hatred because he had past dealings with Floyd. The technique he used has cost the lives of white people as well. The story of police causing deaths is more of lack of training in de-escalation and lack of training in use of proper restraining techniques. If cops are going to be the people who keep us safe from people committing violent crimes (rape, assault, looting, etc..) then they need to spend more time training. 

An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force

---

Roland G. Fryer J. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in...

 

I don't have a wsj subscription, do didn't read the op-ed. But I read the paper. The lethal force finding is essentially meaningless. Aside from all the caveats they give about potentially (and given it's police data, likely) very large unknown biases in the data, the estimate is a 25% decrease in likelihood for African Americans but that estimate is not statistically significant. 25% is an enormous practical difference. If they couldn't detect an effect that large as statistically significant, really all that means is their study didn't have the power to identify an effect. They're reporting noise and pretending it means something.

[iacas]

When it comes to making golf more diverse, it's time for a new approach

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The game’s decision-makers need to diversify the pool of golf’s stakeholders and find ways to get black communities more invested.

An acquaintance (he might say friend, but I've never met him in person) and a student of mine wrote this piece for Golf.com and I think we should all read it.

[boogielicious]

7 hours ago, iacas said:

When it comes to making golf more diverse, it's time for a new approach

---

The game’s decision-makers need to diversify the pool of golf’s stakeholders and find ways to get black communities more invested.

An acquaintance (he might say friend, but I've never met him in person) and a student of mine wrote this piece for Golf.com and I think we should all read it.

Good article.

[Beastie]

Perhaps not familiar to US golfers but Michael Holding has a lot of interesting things to say. 

Michael Holding says racial 'brainwashing' must end with black people growing up feeling 'lesser' | Cricket News | Sky Sports

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Sky Sports Cricket's Michael Holding has passionately dissected the

Also in the UK

Met apologises to sprinter over stop-and-search

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Dame Cressida Dick also says a senior officer will review the Met's handcuffing practices.

[saevel25]

25 minutes ago, Beastie said:

Perhaps not familiar to US golfers but Michael Holding has a lot of interesting things to say. 

I agree. There are a lot of black people who have not been given their due credit. Heck, they should be praised more for the hurdles they had to jump that most white people do not have to. 

[mclaren4life]

On 6/23/2020 at 9:19 PM, saevel25 said:

To summarize, the statistics show that black people get accosted by police at a much higher rate than other race/ethnicity. They get arrested more. They get stopped more often and questioned. They get handcuffed and restrained more often.  Yet, when it comes to when police decide to use deadly force or use a technique that happens to cause a death, there is no correlation to race/ethnicity. If you search, you can find videos of cops doing the same thing they did to Floyd to a white person. I am not saying that the cop who did that to Floyd didn't do it out of racism or out of hatred because he had past dealings with Floyd. The technique he used has cost the lives of white people as well. The story of police causing deaths is more of lack of training in de-escalation and lack of training in use of proper restraining techniques. If cops are going to be the people who keep us safe from people committing violent crimes (rape, assault, looting, et

I disagree about it being a training issue. You see examples all the time of white offenders who have shot and killed people taken into custody without any use of force at all. They have the training it’s just used on the people they want to apply it to. I will say that a part of the problem is there are a lot of calls police answer that they have no business dealing with and don’t have the training to deal with. That’s an entire different subject. I agree with the part about not all cops being bad but if they aren’t exposing the bad ones then they are just as guilty. There are so many layers to the problems with race relations in this country. I hope it’s finally time that they begin to actually get fixed and not just given lip service.