BF2S Forums what do you think of these lyrics

HurricaИe wrote:

(yes I'm a fast reader)

I'm not saying violence is NEVER unwarranted, but at least do it against the right people! If some cop is brutalizing you take it out on THAT cop, not some random other cop. If some guy is giving you shit, take it out on HIM and not some random passerby who is the same color as the guy who pissed you off.

Anyway, I have to go to bed / kill a fly that's in my room.

Masques wrote:

Instead of talking about "black culture" I think we should draw a distinction between mass culture and the particulars of a community.

Mass culture of any type tends to be pretty poor (The Bachelor, America's Got Talent, American Idol, etc.) and I think rap music is fairly indicative of mass culture at this point. You won't find any real authority figures in the black community downing education or any similar nonsense.

Last edited by Home (2008-07-10 00:22:59)

Turquoise wrote:

You do realize that corporations like Pizza Hut do franchising.  So really, when you rob a Pizza Hut, you're robbing the owner of the franchise more than the corporation overall.  In other words, you're dicking over the "little guy" not the "man" (i.e.- Pizza Hut).

Turquoise wrote:

Masques wrote:

Instead of talking about "black culture" I think we should draw a distinction between mass culture and the particulars of a community.

Mass culture of any type tends to be pretty poor (The Bachelor, America's Got Talent, American Idol, etc.) and I think rap music is fairly indicative of mass culture at this point. You won't find any real authority figures in the black community downing education or any similar nonsense.

And honestly, blaming some broader amorphous entity like "black culture" is just the same as blaming the broader face-less entity "the man". In either instance it undermines the case for individual strength and ability. Both are blame paradigms.

There is some truth to that, but there are also statistics.  Blacks have disproportionately higher incarceration rates and single parenting rates.  Black men have a shorter life span than white men, and for reasons beyond diet and general health.

In their decision to limit the size of their family, the Lawrences are an example of a little-noticed but striking trend in the nation's black population: a steep decline in the birth rate for married African-American couples. Married black women gave birth to 357,262 babies in 1970. But by 1996, the last year for which complete figures were available, that figure had dropped to 179,568, a decline of nearly 50 percent, nearly twice the drop in the birth rate among married white women.
...
But statisticians and demographers point out that the startlingly high percentage of black children born outside of marriage is not merely the result of more single black women giving birth. The percentage of single black women giving birth has been declining since 1989, and reached a 40-year low in 1996. Instead, the high proportion of black babies being born out of wedlock is now mainly a function of its statistical comparison to the steep drop in the number of black children being born to married black women.

In March, studies published in the journal Circulation showed that blacks tend to get older heart drugs, are less likely to have surgery, and got less effective treatment for heart problems overall than whites.
...
In 2002, the Institute of Medicine, an independent group, reported that members of racial and ethnic minorities are given lower quality healthcare than whites even when they make as much money and carry the same insurance.

A UC Riverside study found that African-Americans and Latinos seeking treatment for back pain were prescribed pain relievers less often than were white patients.
...
Early studies have explained the variations in pain treatment across racial and ethnic lines as a function of differing levels of medical coverage, the authors say in the introduction to the 30-page paper. Later studies, including this one, have taken that and other financial factors into account and still find deep differences.

The study focused on three variables: whether patients were advised to take any pain-relief medication; whether prescription drugs were ordered; and how many medications were prescribed. Results were given for Hispanics, African-Americans, whites and Asians across several age groups.

African-American men were least likely to get prescriptions, the study indicates, followed by Hispanic men. African-American men also were least likely to be advised to take over-the-counter pain relievers.
...
The study blames differences in treatment on stereotypes embedded in the culture of the United States and reflected, consciously or not, in the attitudes of health care providers. Two such stereotypes, it says, are beliefs that members of minority groups, "particularly African-American men," are responsible for most drug offenses, and that they more at risk than whites for substance-abuse problems. Health care providers who accept those stereotypes, the study contends, would be less likely to prescribe painkillers to African-Americans and Hispanics. The study argues that the health care system, in effect, is using racial profiling on its patients.
...
Kposowa speculated that another stereotype -- that Asian women are submissive and will obey doctors' orders -- is responsible for the study's finding that Asian women were more likely than white women to be prescribed pain medication.
Kposowa and Tsunokai chose back-pain treatment for their study because "virtually everyone" suffers from back pain at some point, and it is an ailment for which medications are routinely prescribed. And since pain, unlike actual damage to the body, can't be measured by diagnostic tools such as X-rays, MRI tests and CT scans, doctors must decide what -- and whether -- to prescribe by listening to their patients.

These data, from police departments of all kinds from all over the country, allowed the study of "hit rates"—the success rates for police stops and searches using racial profiling as opposed to those stops and searches using traditional, nonracial criteria that focus simply on observation of suspicious behavior. Hit rates indicate the rate at which police find what they seek— drugs, guns, people with arrest warrants, and the like—when they execute a stop and search. In these studies, stops and searches of Caucasians were not counted as profiling because they were based not on race, but on observed behavior that appeared suspicious. Stops and searches of African Americans and Latinos, on the other hand, may have been based on some suspicious behavior, but were driven, overwhelmingly, by race or ethnic appearance. This is why, in all of these studies, African Americans and Latinos were stopped in numbers greatly disproportionate to their presence on the highways, roads, or city sidewalks. With these data broken down by racial categories for each of the police departments studied, I was able to make an apples-to-apples, side-by-side comparison of police behavior within particular police departments, both with and without the variable of race or ethnicity. (See David A. Harris, Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work, chapter 4 (The New Press, 2002).)

The results of these hit rate studies were striking, all the more so for their consistency across many different jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies. The data on hit rates show that targeting law enforcement using racial or ethnic appearance does not, in fact, improve policing. It actually makes policing worse—less successful, less productive, less likely to find guns, drugs, and bad guys. Contrary to what the proponents of profiling might expect, hit rates were not higher using racial profiling. In fact, hit rates for race-based stops were lower—significantly lower—than the hit rates for traditional, nonprofile-based policing. That is, when police used racial and ethnic profiling to target black and brown populations as suspicious, the results they got were uniformly poorer than the results they got when they stopped whites simply on the basis of suspicious behavior. Racial profiling, then, doesn’t improve policing; it pulls it down, delivering less bang for the law enforcement buck. Even if we ignore the high social costs—distrust of all government, including police and the legal system; exacerbation of existing problems such as residential segregation and employment discrimination; and destruction of valuable law enforcement initiatives such as community policing—racial profiling as a means to crime reduction simply does not deliver.

* Drugs. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, among youths aged 12 to 17, the rate of current illicit drug use was 11.1 % among whites, and 9.3% among African Americans. [5] In a previous year, the same survey found that white youth aged 12 to17 are more than a third more likely to have sold drugs than African American youth. [6] The Monitoring the Future Survey of high school seniors shows that white students annually use cocaine at 4.6 times the rate of African Americans students, use crack cocaine at 1.5 times the rate of African Americans students, and use heroin at the same rate of African Americans students, and that white youth report annual use of marijuana at a rate 46% higher than African American youth. [7] However African American youth are arrested for drug offenses at about twice the rate (African American 314 per 100,000, white 175 per 100,000) times that of whites, [8] and African American youth represent nearly half (48%) of all the youth incarcerated for a drug offense in the juvenile justice system. [9]
    * Weapons. According to the Center on Disease Control's annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, in 2001 whites and African Americans reported similar rates of carrying a weapon (whites 17.9%, African Americans 15.2%), and similar rates of carrying a gun (whites 5.5%, and African Americans, 6.5%). [10] African American youth represent 32% of all weapons arrests, and were arrested for weapons offenses at a rate twice that of whites (69 per 100,000, versus 30 per 100,000). [11]
    * Assault. According to the Center on Disease Control's annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, African Americans report being in a physical fight at a similar rate (36.5%, versus 32.5% for whites), but were arrested for aggravated assault at a rate nearly three times that of whites (137 per 100,000, versus 48 per 100,000).

CameronPoe wrote:

God Save the Queen wrote:

HurricaИe wrote:

Can someone explain to me why if the song's about robbing white people it's fine

says who?

Turquoise wrote:

Masques, it is true that black people often get harsher sentences (blacks do disproportionately receive the death penalty more often than whites).

However, I question the ability to determine whether or not an arrest is made due to profiling as opposed to behavior.  For example, in the study you mentioned by the American Bar Association about profiling, how do we know that the info really suggests profiling taking precedence as opposed to behavior?  Police don't pull over every black person they see, so they usually narrow it down to black people that behave in certain ways.  This might be construed as a more limited form of profiling, but honestly, if said behavior produces more valid arrests, then what's the problem?

This is kind of like blaming the victim for the crime.

Profiling happens partially out of necessity, and many black officers will even support that notion.

HurricaИe wrote:

Because it's not the civilized thing to do?

ZombieVampire! wrote:

HurricaИe wrote:

Because it's not the civilized thing to do?

D'you ever find it funny that the civilised thing tends to always benefit the one with the power?

ZombieVampire! wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

ZombieVampire! wrote:

D'you ever find it funny that the civilised thing tends to always benefit the one with the power?

Do you ever find it funny that the uncivilized thing tends to worsen the fate of the oppressed group who engages in it?

Tell that to the French Resistance.

Turquoise wrote:

ZombieVampire! wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

Do you ever find it funny that the uncivilized thing tends to worsen the fate of the oppressed group who engages in it?

Tell that to the French Resistance.

That's why I said "tends".  It worked for us as well, but the odds were certainly not in our favor against the British.

Last edited by ZombieVampire! (2008-07-10 03:57:02)

Turquoise wrote:

So, is it racism if a police force profiles blacks who behave and dress similarly to the most prominent criminal elements of an area?  Is it racism if the police profile Hispanics in an area dominated by MS-13?

It wouldn't make much sense for police to evenly focus on each race in an area if the crime distribution isn't equal.

HurricaИe wrote:

@Braddock, would you be more cautious of a clean-cut, calm looking businessman in a suit (yes, of any race) or a guy (again, of any race) who looks unkempt, dressed like the stereotypical 'gangsta' (accusations of racism really don't faze me so bring 'em on) and is acting quite a bit hot headed?