[Content Note: White supremacy.]
"But when crime is really a proxy for talking about race, the threshold for conclusions to be seen as scientifically rigorous always shifts. Always. Were the issue actually crime, statistics would tell you that crime continues its longitudinal trend downward nationally. Were the issue criminality, science would tell you that civil unrest stems from very different social processes than those which produce criminals. Were the issue safety, public policy would protect black taxpayers from being indiscriminately murdered by the police. But the issue is race. There, the scientific threshold bows to the superiority of racial logic. Suddenly, crime waves exist in a vacuum and have arbitrary beginning and end points. The poor become at once both fragile and super predators. Blackness assumes the essential, biological, and irrefutable character of criminality."—Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom, in a must-read piece for The Atlantic, "Race Is Always the Issue."
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