What evidence do you have that it was because your boss was black? X happened and the target was black doesn't mean X happened BECAUSE the target was black. Did the cop use any sort of racial insult? I can share all kinds of negative interactions I've had and other white friends and family members have had with police for reasons unknown - including with black officers.
I don’t have any. But I can’t recall ever seeing or hearing of a white businessman in a suit getting ordered to the ground without cause.
It is fully possible this was random chance. It’s an anecdote, not statistics. But if you want to look at statistics, there are plenty of studies. From the first hit on Google for police stops: a black person in North Carolina is 95% more likely to get pulled over than a white person, over twice as likely to be searched, but less likely to be in possession of contraband or get a ticket.[1]
I'm not claiming that there aren't some people in positions of authority that don't make prejudiced assumptions. What I'm saying is that you can't assume every time something like this happens it's due to race.
Statistics without context are often misleading. I read the article and it's hardly objective. I would prefer to see the dataset as well as other demographics and details of who was stopped, the kind of cars they drove and other such detail. Often, people don't analyze very deeply and start with preconceived notions, especially around race. In addition, how many of these cops actually saw the driver before making the stop - especially highway stops.
It is hard to think of any rational to stop a well-dressed person engaging in no shady behavior and immediately escalate to “lie face-down with your hands over your head.”
There are other news reports of similar incidents with black men. If race is not a factor, we would expect to see many more white than black men wrongly treated in this way, as they are a larger share of the population. I’m not aware of similar reports for white men, but would be interested to see them.
Re traffic stops: The idea that you can’t see the race of a driver while driving behind them is ludicrous. Next time you’re on the highway look in the rear view mirror of the car in front of you. You can see the person’s face.
If they’re actually stopping and searching people on some heuristic that just happens to be correlated with race, they should stop - it’s a bad heuristic. They’re searching black drivers at double the rate of whites, but finding contraband at a lower rate.
Clearly something they’re doing is broken, and it manifests as an undo burden on black drivers.
I used to think like you - Wheres the evidence? They don't have a swastika tatooed on their face and didn't call you a slur, how can you know they were racist?
But here's the thing, not all racism is overt. There's more subtle ways it plays out too - patterns of behavior and the like.
When I was in my early 20s I worked at a bar owned by a black man, and I'm a white man. His role was basically manager, and I was basically assistant manager - and in the small bar world that meant we both were jacks of all trades. We did janitorial work and bookeeping and serving and really all the jobs of a bar. Depending on what each of us was doing that day, we could be dressed down and dirty, or dressed up and looking like a million bucks. Some days i would look basically homeless and he would look like a well of guy, and some days it would be the opposite. Some days we'd both look the same in that respect.
Over time I noticed a pattern - independent of what task we were doing or how we were dressed, I would be approached by people wanting to do business first. Distributors, musical acts, promoters, maintenance workers, and even cops would approach me for manager intereactions more often than they would approach the owner. No matter what the outward appearances were, I was the first person approached 2/3-3/4 of the time.
Any one of those instances could easily be rationalized away - Oh the well dressed guy was approached as manager, or they didn't want to bother the manager to begin with so they approached the worker first, or they approached who they saw first, or ..., or...
But after a couple years of this, there really was only one pattern that was consistent: they approached the white guy first more often than anything else. Most of the people who came in to do business never said or did anything overtly racist. I suspect most of them wouldn't consider themselves racist and they likely have black friends and think the concept of racism is irrational. Yet the fact remains - in a 50-50 situation, the white guy was selected as likely to be the boss a lot more than 50% of the time.
Yes this wasn't real science and theres a multi-variable statistical analysis that would be needed and all that jazz, but it was enough for me to become aware of the pattern - as i said any one of those situations can be rationalized away, but the fact that each situation needed a different rationalization and the racial bias explanation was much more consistent throughout was enough for me to believe that maybe there's more to racism than wearing a hood.
Relating this back to the cop story above - sure you can rationalize this one incident however you want. But over time, pay attention - you'll find disproportionately more stories about such cases of 'mistaken identity' being applied to minorities than white folks in the US. This is what people are talking about with institutional racism or societal racism, the fact that it's assumed that a person is a criminal or a boss or whatever based on thier race (not the race of the assumer, that in and of itself is a racist notion - "oh the black cop assumed the black person was a criminal disproves racism because all black people are a single group and represent a single viewpoint").
Try it on yourself - walk into a high end or middle class establishment where most of the people are a different race than you and pay attention to your comfort level. Compare it to your comfort level in a similar establishment where most of the people are the same race. When you meet a person, pay attention to how surprised you are that they have some role, or some power level and if that matches what you expected first looking at them. Racial bias comes in part from how our society is set up wrt race - you probably aren't racist, but I bet you have racial biases anyway. I do - most people do, a lot of it is taught long before any experiences. The best we can do is acknowledge to ourselves the times we made stupid assumptions that had no merit, and update our priors - this can be upsetting sometimes, I know I would love to say I got where I am on my own, but my observed reality is: there's a lot of racism in the world, and I'm in the "easy mode" group.
More white people own businesses and there are more white people in the USA. It was likely an innocent assumption where no offense is intended. Not everything is as sinister as "anti-racists" claim. I refuse to subscribe to their conspiracy-based hidden racism theories.
I'm "glad" you were able to claim your "white privilege". Coming from a low class background, I was not afforded such and have had to struggle to get where I am. However, according to your own definition, you are now guilty of the racism you decry. You assume because you took advantage of "white privilege" every white person had the same. Not all white people are well connected or come from money. The percentage might be higher but that means zero to those of us that did not have an easy go like you.
But hey, do whatever you need to do to assuage your guilt. I have no such burden and I resent people like you for trying to lay one at my feet. It seems like most of your response is based on projection.
I wonder what would happen if you weren't so condescending. Your opening statement was "I used to think like you" as if you have evolved and are somehow morally superior. I see no evidence of this assumed superiority. You made a ton of assumptions in your post and it was mostly about your own white guilt since you are on "easy mode" as you put it. You sound like you have some unresolved issues and I encourage you to get help.
My bad, I assumed that some amount of thought went into your response - I was clearly wrong, apologies.
Under that assumption I (again, the whole "you thought about your reaction" thing was a bad assumption on my part, sorry) related my own past thinking and how it changed. There was no moral superiority there, just my story about how my thinking changed and what I have observed. You seem to be reading a lot more into it than I wrote.
