Just because there exist immigrants who have fled their home country to find a better life in US doesn't invalidate the plight of other groups in the US right now: just look at the police brutality protests.
If your bare minimum is "at least your family didn't get incinerated so get over it", that's extremely heartless and cruel: the US can and should do better than such a low baseline.
Which policies or lack thereof specifically target the black people? We should definite fight to abolish them. Otherwise, wouldn’t it fair to say that the US legal system has flaws that every group may suffer, and therefore it’s really about law and order?
Just so I understand your framing: Do you consider the poll taxes and literacy requirements for voting of the Jim Crow era to have been policies that specifically targeted black people or not? They were written in a racially neutral way (and the 14th and 15th Amendments were in effect then, and they were ruled constitutional).
We haven't had poll taxes or literacy requirements in a long time, so what are the specific policies in effect right now that you propose to eliminate?
I think we have other policies today that are similar in effect - gerrymandered election districts and intentional poor placement / management of polling stations being the most obvious examples in my eyes.
Gerry-mandering is pretty race neutral, though. That isn't to say that districts are never carved along racial lines - they absolutely are. But plenty of districts are drawn to disenfranchise white voters, too.
It's hard to call gerrymandering "racist" when there isn't inherently any right way to draw district lines and then you consider the implications of what the opponents of existing districts call the "wrong" way.
The way gerrymandering works is that you start off with a town with 1000 black Democrats, 1000 white Democrats and 2000 white Republicans, and you have to draw four districts of a thousand people each.
If you put a random sampling of voters into each district then you get four districts evenly split between the parties but which are all white-majority. If the Republicans gerrymander the districts then they make one district which is 100% Democrats so that it creates three safe seats for the Republicans. If the Democrats gerrymander the districts then they do the opposite.
But which seems better for black people to you? The random sampling which causes the black votes to be spread across enough districts that they don't have a majority anywhere, or the gerrymandering that puts them all together and allows them to elect a representative which by the numbers they should have one of?
> intentional poor placement / management of polling stations
Black voter turnout was the highest of any racial group in one of the last three Presidential elections and was the second highest in the other two, so this doesn't appear to be having a major impact.
Despite, nit because of the way US elections work. Limited number of poling places, especially in poor neighborhoods, affecting people of colour more because of past zoning laws? Check. Elections held on workdays, making it harder for poorer people, again more often people of colour, to vote because they have to take a day of? Check. Mail in ballots being very hard to come by, see above? Check. An electoral college and a senate that gives more weight to votes from states with a higher percentage of whites? Check.
Compared to any other western style democracy, and the differences become clear.
And arguing gerrymandering, proven to benefit one party only at the disadvantage of people of colour, is actually a good thing, is just plain manipulative.
> Compared to any other western style democracy, and the differences become clear.
And yet still can't be seen to be having a major effect on black voter turnout, which implies that either the issues are not actually that common or the effect is inconsequential.
Also, this one is a blatant lie:
> An electoral college and a senate that gives more weight to votes from states with a higher percentage of whites?
The states with the highest percentage of black people are Mississippi and Louisiana. They're both over-represented in the electoral college. So are Maryland, South Carolina, Alabama, Delaware and Arkansas, which are all have a higher than the national average percentage of black people.
The states that get most screwed over by the electoral college are California and Texas. They both have below the national average percentage of black people. So are Pennsylvania, Ohio, Washington, Arizona, Massachusetts and Indiana, which all have below the national average percentage of black people.
And most of the states that get screwed over and do have an above average percentage of black people are only barely above the average.
Exercise for the reader: Of the 17 states with less than proportionate representation as a result of the electoral college, which one has the highest percentage of black people, and which party are their Senators?
> And arguing gerrymandering, proven to benefit one party only at the disadvantage of people of colour, is actually a good thing, is just plain manipulative.
It benefits whichever party was in when they drew the most recent lines. You can hardly claim that's "racism" just because that was most recently the Republicans and the result was to elect fewer Democrats.
And you called it "manipulative" without actually explaining how it was wrong.
You're distorting what I said.
As regards these protests I believe that they will probably only make things worse. Black areas are where the most crime occurs so there is going to be more police activity in those areas. The protests encourage a feeling amount black people that the police are the enemy and that if you're stopped it's always only because you're black. On the police side this means that the typical interaction with a black person will be more difficult on average, leading to a perception on their side that black people are trouble. Put the two together and you have a greater potential for someone to get hurt.
"White collar crime" means things like fraud and embezzlement. It overwhelmingly happens over the phone or the internet or in corporate offices, not in residential areas.
Yeah but the financial irregularities and crimes around events like the '08 crash are, I'd think, much bigger, in terms of dollars, than those other things?
Why aren't the victims of white collar crime in these white neighborhoods out protesting in the streets about the lack of police help, if what you say is true?
If your bare minimum is "at least your family didn't get incinerated so get over it", that's extremely heartless and cruel: the US can and should do better than such a low baseline.