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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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While there is certainly an element of this, it heavily depends on where the trial is held. Progressives and blacks have their biases and will be much more lenient towards black on white crime than vice versa, so in San Francisco a "sickle-cell crisis" can be used as an excuse for murder. The reverse biases do exist, I'm sure there are towns in the US where whites are advantaged by the local judges, police, and jury pool, and the "gay panic" excuse for murder would be accepted. The point is that neither are universal at the criminal justice level, because criminal justice is mostly a local system.

The main issue as I see it is that the interests of one tribe are disproportionately advanced by the federal government. Local group bias in either direction is unavoidable, but the federal government seems to fall quite firmly on one pole of the bias. SCOTUS obviously contradicting the letter of the law forbidding discrimination based on race to allow discrimination beneficial to blacks is probably the most flagrant example, but there are many others. I agree with Richard Hanania that this general pro-black and pro-"protected group" bias on the part of the federal government falls under the umbrella of civil-rights law, and that much of the cultural down-stream effects we see today such as "wokeness" and progressive insanity in San Francisco criminal justice are largely a consequence of these laws and how they're enforced.

Cherry-picked examples of terrible jury and prosecutorial decisions relating to street-crimes are the lowest-level example, both causally and intellectually, of the wider trend in America of the federal government protecting some groups more than others. All of this is to say that yes, blacks are certainly privileged in the courts of some parts of the country, but imo that will always be true under any reasonable local or national policy. The issue that should be addressed, and that charitably I'll assume he's trying to address rather than just riling up his readers, is the bias on the part of the institutions that are supposed to be universal. It's axiomatic to me that institutions serving and governing everyone should be objective in the race-blind sense, but they aren't and many people don't even seem to think they should be. I don't think Greer's argument well supports his conclusion that blacks receive legal preferential treatment in this country, although I agree with that conclusion at least on the federal level.