How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom • Hacker News Board

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#81

Post by ikeboy » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

RodericDay wrote: post #4

It's shocking to me how the comment section is replete with "a felony is a felony!" and "it's not a race issue- it's a criminal record issue!" messages. A few of them even go further and proudly proclaim they only read the first "paragragh". Too bad, they missed a critical point: > Even though research shows people of all races are about equally likely to have broken the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana,…

Reply to the edit:

The study he references is trying to figure out whether there's bias in "pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults". To determine that, you need to control for anything that should matter to such determinations. Of course prior record matters to sentencing etc.

Whether prior record is itself biased has nothing to do with investigating bias in sentencing etc, and is properly controlled for.

What assumptions are "sketchy"?

"about equally likely to have broken the law" is misleading, when blacks break the law more often. Equally likely in the last year, not the same number of times. If they'd said "blacks are more likely to break the law by growing, smoking, or selling marijuana, but they get arrested at a rate that's between the same or double that of other races, depending on whether you trust their self-reports on whether they've taken drugs, which they're known to lie on at twice the rate of white people", I'd have no problem.

I haven't asserted that it's parity, just that claiming otherwise hasn't been supported. If someone has a good counter-argument to SSC's applying black drug honesty rates to their supposed discrimination by police, I'll be happy to consider it. But just making a blanket statement like buzzfeed is misleading.

>> There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

That does nothing to justify buzzfeed. Sentence length doesn't change whether someone has a criminal record, which is buzzfeed's mechanism for "racism in drug industry".

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#82

Post by ikeboy » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #80

pakled_engineer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law enforcement to control it. I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting…

Yes. Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not (a) white people weren't doing drugs (b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using t…

Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#83

Post by drunken-serval » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

rfrank wrote: post #40

greenisland wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your remarks. But -- what I'm saying is that no one should feel sorry for this guy. It pains me to see the vast numbers of Americans who but a few years ago were for tough legislation and tough policies and who now desire to see criminals released from prison because the sentence may be too harsh. Really? If you do the crime, you do the time. We should not undo sentencing. It was all done legally at the…

> The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s. oh man

Only because beating blacks and wives was considered moral behavior in the 1950s.

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#84

Post by LordKano » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #14

fiatmoney wrote: post #8

"Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record" You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons. It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state. That keeps regulators off your back and eventuall…

Everything you say is entirely logical, but omits the reality that as a black person in america you are vastly more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. Not more likely to DO drug crimes, just more likely to get caught. This means profiling and racist policing directly leads to economic exclusion. If the american dream is upward mobility, that means black people get a smaller shot at the american dream. But all tha…

I am a black person in America and I think you're half right.

White people and black people use illegal drugs at approximately the same rate. Black people, despite being a population only 1/4 the size of the white population, are arrested for drug crimes in both greater numbers and in greater proportion.

Into my mid-to-late 30s, when I would get pulled over by the police, roughly half of the time, the officer would ask me if I had any drugs in my car. My response was usually "No more than you do, officer". The police profile and harass us. There are even rogue officers who plant evidence to manufacture crimes.

We all know this. As a result, many of us are more staunchly against even casual drug use in our personal lives.

It's not fair. It's not right. It's just the way it is.

I have a friend whom I have known since childhood who is currently serving 20 years in a federal prison for marijuana related offenses. He made a choice and it turned out poorly for him.

I'll save my outrage for the people who were falsely convicted. I'll save my outrage for the victims of planted evidence and corrupt cops.

If someone is actually guilty of the crime, their case is far less sympathetic.

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#85

Post by jdmichal » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

savanaly wrote: post #51

kbutler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word choice is problematic: "vanillify" (exceedingly rare, new jargon "to make bland" doesn't even show up in google ngrams) is too similar to "vilify" (to demonize) to use in a context of "to un-demonize". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=vanillify&case... "face of" or "poster boy for", rather than the mixed-up "poster face for". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=poster+boy%2Cp... But then,…

I read it twice and then saw what he meant. I think he's alluding to how since the flavor vanilla is associated with whiteness, "vanillify" has a cheeky double meaning: make more respectable and make more white skinned.

Funnily enough, vanilla is actually very dark. The bean itself is dark-brown-almost-black, and the extract is also a dark brown liquid. Vanilla ice cream is white because milk is white, and because it doesn't take a lot of vanilla to flavor it. If you have a good vanilla ice cream, you'll see little black specs in it; that's the vanilla.

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#86

Post by chimeracoder » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #82

chimeracoder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not (a) white people weren't doing drugs (b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using t…

Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.

No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually higher, though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people were also 45% more likely to sell drugs as well[0].

The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade and drug usage.

[0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_t...

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#87

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #18

MrsPeaches wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really want someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you're trying to vanillify ? This seems like a poor choice of words at best.

Word choice is fine. Vanilla means plain, unremarkable, blends in well. To become an unremarkable part of the economy. Taking an altogether different meaning not fitting the context says more about your interpretive frame of reference.

Conversely, polysemy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy) is a concept that exists, and please consider this person's /nom de mic/ in this context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#88

Post by ikeboy » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #86

ikeboy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.

No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually higher , though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people were also 45% more likely to sell drugs as well[0]. The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental d…

>Hindelang, Hirshi, and Weiss (1981) compare police records on arrests to self-reports for a sample of individuals and find these to be similar, with the exception of self-reports for young black men, which appear to understate the amount of crime committed.

If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more.

The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions.

You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf

>Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly and 32% reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly and 20% reported using them weekly.

I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#89

Post by hnmcs » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

hnmcs wrote: post #9

feintruled wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of Iain Bank's books "The Business" where the corporation in question was sitting on the perfect cocaine snorting delivery device ('the Incan'), speculatively developed and just waiting for the day the drug might become legal.

A tail wagging the dog is the notion I wish to deplore the most. Way too many people think that pure logic (and wisdom of experience) is what leads to their value-judgements and opinions. Like my example mom-and-pop broker above (who is no fat cat in the scheme of things, just someone too invested in the neoliberal capitalist paradigm to think straight anymore), they will switch their value judgements when their one…

> "mom and pop broker"

/s/broker/asset manager/

Re: How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

#90

Post by traviswingo » Fri, Mar 18, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

atonparker wrote: post #72

traviswingo wrote: post #20

> But it can’t be someone who got caught. Which for the most part means it can’t be someone who is black. It's thinking like this that pisses me off. Henderson wasn't hired because of a record. Yes, racism still unfortunately exists, but in order to move towards an equal future we need to stop bringing it up and searching for problems where there are none. Fucking Buzzfeed and Huffington post are constantly using the…

There is a very real problem here, and you don't have to search hard for it. An entire sub-population of this country was disproportionately sentenced to felony convictions. If we don't recognize that for what it was, we are condemning a generation of black people to just "suck it up, because we're thinking about the future now". That is a mistake because these people are part of the future, and they deserve a fair c…

Agreed. I don't think we should ignore the problems, I just think we (and especially the heavy-influencing media) should be much more intelligent about crying "racism" when the issue was not a racist one to begin with.

There are far too many publications going out that overreach and point out minor details to make something seem racist or sexist. It's total bullshit and out of context.