Ken Hanly
Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Here is what Sleeper said. He is arguing that if there is a correlation
> between violent crime and non white skin, then discrimination against all
> non whites is not racism but a sort of rational statistical
> discrimination based on hard won experience. You know, even Anthony Appiah
> is more critical of statistical discrimination for which Sleeper argues.
> rb
> _________________________________
> Sleeper says:
>
> No one should have to die as Diallo did. To affirm this, many New Yorkers
> got themselves arrested at police headquarters, ceremonially but no doubt
> sincerely. Had he been white in a mostly white neighborhood, argues New
> York University law professor Jerry Skolnik, cops wouldn't
> have cornered him in a vestibule and shot him. The Bronx
> district attorney accused the cops of harboring racial preconceptions
> that, beneath the formal courtesies of everyday etiquette and the
> law, deny blacks a chance to change misperceptions of them.
> And in this case Diallo paid for that misperception with his
> life.
>
> But that argument itself harbors a
> preconception of what was in these cops' heads. Diallo's death may
> have reflected not the "racism" that looms so large in the
> liberal imagination but the stark correlation of violent crime with
> nonwhite skin -- in statistics and in cops' hard-won experience. The
> Diallo cops' Street Crime Unit doesn't operate in middle-class
> neighborhoods, black or white, as much as it does in poor black ones. But
> racism doesn't explain that discrepancy; the demographics of
> violent crime do. A disproportionately high number of police
> killings of blacks are by black cops. Washington, D.C.'s heavily
> black police force uses deadly force far more often than New
> York's does.