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  1. Paul Canis's avatar
  2. Rachel Laudan's avatar
  3. UAB's avatar
  4. Rollo Burgess's avatar
  5. Tad Brennan's avatar
  6. Brian Cutter's avatar

    It’s likely that Notre Dame will return to a policy of requiring GREs next year (this year they’re officially optional…

  7. Michael Kates's avatar

The NYT tunnel vision about race comes up against reality

Perhaps someone there should look at the evidence:  "The fact that the five officers charged with Mr. Nichols’s murder are Black complicates the anguish."  That's because in police killings, race is the not the primary variable, but rather class (as with Mr. Nichols:  a high school graduate and unskilled laborer with very little money)–class, plus the pathologies of police culture.

ADDENDUM:  As one reader points out, blacks are three times as likely as whites to be killed in police encoutners.  That is, alas, not surprising given the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America, with its history of apartheid:  "In 2014, about a quarter (26%) of blacks were poor, compared with 10% of whites. The black-white poverty gap has narrowed somewhat since the mid-1970s, when 30% of blacks were living below the poverty line – a proportion nearly four times the share of whites living in poverty (8%)."   The hard empirical question is disentangling the effects of race and class in police violence, a point the murder of Mr. Nichols by black officers drives home.

 

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