Vanity Fair published a whole bunch of statistics about blacks and police. So people think they are doing a lot of thinking about the subject. So here is my simple question. Can you identify racial bias?
I don't want to be too clever here, because I see a very simple way out of this descent into statistical madness, which is to avoid statistical morality in the first place. But when we think about 'racist white cops' and 'unarmed black men' we've already stepped into a pile.
Here's the problem put as simply as I can put it. The racism of 'racist white cops' is not the same as the racism of the KKK. Furthermore the 'profile' of black males is not the same across America. This is a logical assertion that cannot be proven or disproven by statistics, and that is because nobody really disambiguates the racial culpability of the victims, nor of the virulence of the racism of the perpetrators. So the inherent problem is that 'racial bias' could be criminal, or it could be offensive.
Why are black women not the target of racist white cops? If white racist cops were really out to get black people, wouldn't there be a lot more accusations like those made by Al Sharpton similar to that about Tawana Brawley? Is our press missing that, or is the racism of 'racist white cops' only directed at a certain specific kind of black male? What about the culpability of black males? If Barack Obama says 'I am Trayvon Martin', does he become that? Well if you were a KKK member, it wouldn't really matter what Barack Obama says, he's the same as any other black, male or female, ie worthy of being lynched.
