Sometimes the difference is in the intention, and it’s difficult to prove to an outside observer. Consider this:
a) The sheriff ignores crimes done by white people, and only responds to crimes done by black people.
b) The sheriff receives 5 phone calls telling him that 5 different crimes are happening in different parts of town at approximately the same time. Unable to handle all of them, sheriff chooses one of them at random, arrives there and arrests the person. The person happens to be black. The sheriff didn’t know this before arriving there.
As I described it, the former is obvious racism, the latter is perfectly okay. Yet they may seem the same.
In this specific situation, we could tell the difference by long-term observation, because these things happen repeatedly and if the sheriff always happens to choose the 1 in 5 crimes with the black person, that just sounds unlikely. The problem is, we cannot apply the same logic to the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime.
Sometimes the difference is in the intention, and it’s difficult to prove to an outside observer. Consider this:
a) The sheriff ignores crimes done by white people, and only responds to crimes done by black people.
b) The sheriff receives 5 phone calls telling him that 5 different crimes are happening in different parts of town at approximately the same time. Unable to handle all of them, sheriff chooses one of them at random, arrives there and arrests the person. The person happens to be black. The sheriff didn’t know this before arriving there.
As I described it, the former is obvious racism, the latter is perfectly okay. Yet they may seem the same.
In this specific situation, we could tell the difference by long-term observation, because these things happen repeatedly and if the sheriff always happens to choose the 1 in 5 crimes with the black person, that just sounds unlikely. The problem is, we cannot apply the same logic to the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime.