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Comment by chitowneats | Hacker News Reader

You must be referring to the crack/cocaine sentencing distinction. That policy was rectified many years ago. Besides that, you're incorrect that black and white Americans consume "different drugs". I would argue that your argument is also "decades old". And the way in which you suggest that issues of race and crime in America are settled, or that we've "learned" the right answer, suggests that you believe people on the other side of this issue are somehow remedial. Surely you see how this can be an obstacle to convincing them you are correct.

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>That policy was rectified many years ago.

You're half right - the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act reformed the punishment ratio from 100:1 to about 18:1, and later in 2018 Congress made this change retroactive. This certainly improved the issue, but lawmakers continue to discuss whether it should be eliminated entirely.

Source: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/19/22336224/equal-act-cocaine-sen...

Thank you. I was not aware of this.

If black Americans smoke weed rather than alcohol then yes, they take different drugs. Weed is criminalised far in excess of any justification based on personal or social harms. It just seems normal to drink, in a rational drug policy it would be more controlled than many other drugs.

I'm sorry but you're just incorrect if you're suggesting white Americans don't consume cannabis at high rates.

No I wasn’t suggesting that. However in black populations in the UK at least smoking weed is more ‘normal’ than it is in white populations. By normal I mean accepted and not deviant, not necessarily to imply higher consumption.

I see. There is a history of racist or xenophobic criminalization of marijuana (when it was called that commonly) in the US. See reefer madness and associated politics. Disparity in use is no longer the case in the US.

Cannabis is typically used a pretext to police Black people for other things (that is, police assume they can get them for another crime, and even if they can't, they can still use cannabis charges).

White people consuming cannabis is not typically a police priority.

You're speaking with a white person who has been charged and convicted of cannabis possession. It certainly seemed like a priority for them when I was in the back of the squad car, and when they knocked on my door and arrested me at 5:30 AM in my underwear for supposedly failing to pay a fine I had actually paid.

I listed a few examples; there are many others that are well known and easy to learn about. If you want to provide evidence, address the issues, and advance our knowledge, please do!

> you suggest that issues of race and crime in America are settled, or that we've "learned" the right answer, suggests that you believe people on the other side of this issue are somehow remedial. Surely you see how this can be an obstacle to convincing them you are correct.

But these strawperson characterizations and this victimhood are more distractions from the issues, as is the ignorance of the GGP post I responded to above - they are well-known ways of halting progress. And yes, there are some things that are well-established (though again, I haven't said the words you put in my mouth); I'm not going to spend time reviewing all human knowledge (also a well-known technique of stopping discussion). I'm here to move forward.

I'd be happy to. A good place to start is the excellent, nuanced commentary on this topic from black professors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0H4M5uP_y8

One thing they reference during this podcast but don't talk about in much detail is the case of Tony Timpa. Many of the things many claim only happen to black Americans are in fact more general issues of police brutality, poor training, or hard realities of policing. And that means yes, it happens to white Americans too.

The last thing I want to do is distract from the issues. I want us to move past these surface level discussions that we are inundated with in both the professional and social media realms. Please watch the Glenn and John episode above for more on what I mean.

Edit: Apologies. To be clear, Tony Timpa was a white man killed by a police officer in Dallas a few years ago via knee on neck. No media attention or mass protests.

Edit 2: For those more textually inclined, here is McWhorter's most recent post on the topic https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-victorians-had-to-a...

The thing is, it can be true that the police are both generally brutal and racist. In fact that seems the most likely thing given my limited observations of US policing.

Please show evidence for your claim. Anecdotes not accepted.

Edit: Both links I posted discussed studies, statistics, and analysis relevant to this that belie your claim. Please rebut those or post your own.

It seems like it’s quite widely known that US police shoot everyone at a higher rather than any developed country. You can google those stats as well as anyone. That’s evidence for ‘brutality’, not excluding the possibility that they may also be brutalised by a difficult job with poor training.

That is known. I'm asking for the evidence of racism. That charge is much more suspect when looking at the data, despite it being widely believed.

I'll add that much of the international criticism of the number of police shootings in America fails to take into account the number of guns the citizenry has, legally registered or otherwise. This leads to greatly increased risk for all involved and leads police to use tactics that might not be needed elsewhere.

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