Let's say you were born into a secret society that values lineage, bestows wealth upon your family and acquires the money to do so through serial murder and theft, and on your 21st birthday, you are made aware of this.
If someone tries to prove a group of people is worse than another by comparing the number of arrests between the two... ask a few key questions...
1) What percentage of the population was arrested? This is because there's usually only a teeny tiny sliver who was
2) How many people are represented in those arrests? This is because 10 arrests of the same person shouldn't be presented as 10 different arrested people, inflating numbers.
White people made racial laws about who could marry, who could bank, where you could live, who your children could be, what job you could have, what school you could go to, what bathroom you could use...
But it's us obsessed with race.
White people divvied Black people down to Hectadecaroons, concerned with categorizing the amount of Black in someone down to the smallest fractions.
If people from the last group are spouting nonsense, but of the type I think it's important for people to see dismantled, then I'll draw out the logical pitfalls and move on.
Otherwise, I'll either ignore them or hand them some rope.
It's amazing the lengths white people will go to avoid simply saying "Wow. We've made it suck for you for a long time in myriad ways and still are. That's pretty shitty of us, we're sorry, let's fix it."
And even the most superficial understanding of racism in America warrants it.
But it's frequently easier to just lash out at people who have already been hurt for daring to step up and say so.
But instead, white folks will double down,
they'll deny,
they'll solicit academic debate, they'll give statistics a workout,
they'll insist on exemptions, they'll complain that you didn't address their harm nicely enough...
Anything to avoid the slightest bit of introspection.