We moved away from intent in the 1970s.
What matters now is impact, not intent. If excessive police stops disproportionately affect black drivers those stops are racist, and the people performing the stops are racist.
But we know this, from Fergusson and similar.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
> This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety.
> The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety.
So black police in those jurisdictions are racists against blacks because the jurisdiction as a whole disproportionately stops blacks?
I don’t think that’s how it works.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. Impact can reveal underlying issues but is not necessarily racist in and of itself.
Consider the policy of "draw 100,000 names out of a hat and search those people for drugs". It is very unlikely that the demographic of those arrested as a result perfectly matches the demographic of the nation as a while, but I think it is hard to argue discrimination or prejudice here, because there is not even an opportunity for a human to have exercised discrimination.
Fishing stops like the OP posted try to be like this policy - a random dragnet. The issue, of course, is that the randomness is implemented by a racist police force. Black people are "randomly" stopped disproportionately, and treated harsher during the stop. So the disproportionate result is plausibly explained by racist intent.
Is there any other occupation(s) you strip people of their racial identity Or just police?
So, just in case you actually mean what you say, what I'm getting at:
if your colleagues have a certain conduct, you follow suite. It's human nature. That doesn't mean every police officer, black or other other ethnicity is inherently racist. But they as a group act according to a pattern. A Blue pattern. You watch out for your own, no matter race or creed. I hope that cleared things up.
That is the complete opposite of being a racist.
James Mickens, using logic and humor, makes this point in a way that even geeks might understand.
"Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?"
You're probably right, but suspect you'd find quite a few of people who would not agree (we have a whole legal system based on intent for all sorts of crimes -- most people think it matters.)
With that assumption, don't think it's super constructive to harden oneself to an academic definition that can interpreted as weaponization. There are so many unambiguous examples of racism that can galvanize the majority / help facilitate understanding -- don't see the point in the flippancy / pushing to ball to a place that will be polarizing. You're not changing any minds.
At what point do these abstractions become ridiculous? White and Black are races but Blue is a different category and yet equivalent?
Thanks for writing that