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Joined 10 months ago
Cake day: August 16th, 2025
  • Horsecook@sh.itjust.worksBannedtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Hypothetically, if a Black Millionaire had their home broken into by a poor White person, how much danger is there of the Black Millionaire getting shot by cops "by mistake"?English
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    3 months ago

    and is definitely much higher than for white people.

    That’s not necessarily true. While blacks are shot by police at a higher rate than whites, blacks are also arrested by police for violent crimes at a higher rate than whites. If you adjust for apparent difference in violent criminality by race, it suggests that police are actually more willing to shoot whites than blacks.

    Now, it is possible that the data is bad, that the bar for arresting a black is so significantly lower than for arresting a white, as to give incomparable racial violent crime rates by which to estimate how often police shootings might occur. Similarly, it is possible that blacks are more likely to display exaggerated passive body language for fear of being shot, while whites are more likely to present themselves in an ambiguous or hostile manner as they don’t believe it is likely they will be shot.

    However, an argument in favor of what the data suggests, is that police shootings of blacks are far more likely to result in protests, riots, and rare criminal prosecution of the police, while police shootings of whites, no matter how unjustified, never receive such responses.

  • Horsecook@sh.itjust.worksBannedtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•I get Scandinavian DNA, but where does Spanish DNA come from?English
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    3 months ago

    Depending on how long your family was in the US, it could have been a Spanish ancestor here. There was a lot of undesirable ancestry that was deliberately forgotten by families, until genetic testing revealed it.

    It also could have happened in Europe. People did move around in the past, just not as much.

    There’s a common story in Norway of Spanish sailors surviving wrecks of the 1588 Armada against England, as it retreated to the North Sea and rounded Scotland, subsequently marrying into the Norwegian population. Norwegians will tell you this is a bunch of bullshit, like white Americans claiming an Indian princess as an ancestor. But my Norwegian-born grandfather did have genetically-proven Spanish ancestry, and claimed to have found genealogical records in Norway that proved that story.

    Funnily enough, I also have genetically-proven indigenous American ancestry from the American side of my family. Couldn’t say it was an Indian princess, though. Any records are lost. The family myth was 100% Northwestern European until the tests came back.