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[flagged] Why did Oxford circulate a criminalised image of me – because I’m a black man? (theguardian.com)
9 points by gellman on Feb 11, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


I remember going to UMSL to look up programs and classes for going there. My mother dropped me off near the Psychology building because it had a bench and I did not drive.

I got some flyers and a course catalog and called my mother on a pay phone.

Psychology called a security guard on me because I was sitting on a bench and reading papers. Didn't seem to believe me that I wanted to be a student there. This was in the early 1990s. My mother picked me up but security said someone had panicked in the building because they saw me.

I'm white by the way, never had a criminal record or anything. I decided to wait to go back to college later.

But yeah, security can be paranoid based on one's looks or people calling and complaining until security does something.


I was at Oxford from 2004-2007. There were two black students in my year (of around 3-4k), one of whom was an Old Etonian and stood as a Conservative candidate at the last election. I can fully believe this.


[flagged]


We've banned this account. It's an abuse of HN to use it primarily for political or ideological battle.

HN exists for intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Political flamewars destroy this, so we can't have both kinds of site.


> Blacks are 6.6 times more likely than whites to commit murder

That should be "be found guilty of murder", not "commit murder". Ideally committing murder and being found guilty of murder would be perfectly correlated, but in reality they might not be for a variety of reasons.


Actually it make sense.

Looking at the figures in this report https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... - see for example chart 3.09 and 3.11, whites tend to be murdered much more by people they know / in their home.

Therefore it's more likely that a white murder victim was killed by someone they know - hence likely to be solved & convicted. Blacks have (relatively) higher chance of being killed by strangers outside - hence lower probability of arrest & conviction.




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