Teed Rockwell
2 min readJan 6, 2023

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First of all, from the statistics I have seen, Black people are not in fact statistically more likely to engage in criminal behavior. The appearance of this is caused by among other things 1) The fact that black people are more likely to be poor, and poor people are more likely to engage in (violent) criminal behavior 2) Black people are more likely to be arrested, convicted and sentenced for the same criminal behaviors engaged in by whites. That's one reason so many black people are imprisoned.

Secondly even if we ignore these causes of the imbalance, these prejudgments are based on a logical fallacy: inferring that a high percentage of blacks are criminals (false) from a high percentage of (arrested) criminals are black (true). The actual danger is very small of any encountered black person being criminal. There are numerous other much smaller dangers we ignore. For example, we drive regularly without fear, even though the danger of being in an auto accident while driving is much much greater than being robbed while passing a random black person on the street.

The chances of a black person encountering some form of racism while interacting with a white person is much much greater than the danger of being robbed by passing black person. If you read any of the racism writers on medium you will see that even most conservative black people acknowledge that dealing with racism requires a strategy that is frequently, even constantly, in play. That strategy is going to have to generate a lot of false positive judgments in order to keep black people reasonably safe.

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Teed Rockwell
Teed Rockwell

Written by Teed Rockwell

I am White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male Heterosexual cisgendered over-educated able-bodied affluent and thin. Hope to learn from those living on the margins.

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