Quote:
Originally Posted by Basel A
If you're waiting for the police department to release a statement stating that they are racist and discriminate against brown people, I think you'll be waiting a very long time.
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QFT.
As engineers, we love when we can measure and quantify things. Discrimination and bias is _very_ difficult to objectively judge except in the aggregate. This is partially because those who perpetrate discriminatory practices are unconscious that they are doing so...and also because in many cases, it is too easy to plausibly deny that any discrimination has occurred absent an extensive third party investigation (and even then, most of the evidence often winds up being circumstantial). If you examine 100 individual cases of suspected institutional discrimination, you probably end up being unable to prove wrongdoing in 90 of them. But clearly the macro effects of discrimination are present at a greater scale than if you assume institutional innocence in all disputed cases.
In light of this challenge, celebrating the positive aspects of this story (Ahmad's interest in STEM) while not specifically scapegoating his district, his community, Texas, etc., is as good an outcome as we could have hoped for. Besides, blaming racism on an individual, a town, or a state is extremely lazy and naive.