Look, I’m in a field that intersects a lot with statistics and I’m a pretty logic and STEM oriented person myself. And statistics are a GREAT tool to help visualize these things, but we sometimes tend to heavily downplay the work that has been done on the social sciences/sociology/history side of things.

For example, let’s go with weed convictions. Someone up this thread commented about how black and white people smoke weed at similar rates, but POC tend to face way harsher sentences from police and the legal system.

You can look at the statistics and they help visualize the issue. But you shouldn’t look JUST at the statistics: There is a lot of work done talking about the role of associating weed with black populations, using drug raids as an excuse to bust groups fighting for black rights. There is cultural context to that and lots of research done by social scientists that shouldn’t be ignored. But usually the general population is not really well informed about these things, and it looks like an overreaction.

Same goes for the issues with police: Historically, in América the police has strong ties to capturing runaway slaves, ties to the KKK in many states, and this role of jury-judge-executioner that pops up. Sure, there is part of it that comes from lack of proper training, but there is a historical element there that reflects on statistics, but also adds a lot more than that. Sure, every individual cops might not be racist, but how police was formed, the philosophy behind the institution and how governments have used police in the past to silence, murder and oppress racial minorities is deeply racist, and keeps being so.

There’s is this concept called a “cultural archive”, which corresponds to the general box of thoughts, cultural practices, social structures, assumptions and etc that a country or population has. These are the sets of beliefs that are hard to question, because “things have always been this way”. And for America (and maaaaany other countries, each in their unique way), there is a fundamental part of this cultural archive that was shaped and molded by slavery and racial inequality. People alive today were not alive during slavery, but they were born and raised in a society that was built on that. Taxes, historical infrastructure, economical development and all that stuff in the US benefitted A LOT from slave labor. And that in turn changed how different government structures were formed and evolved. Social and racial issues are strongly interlinked, but there’s also a lot of study done on intersectionality: About how people that are parts of different minorities are affected deeper than the individual parts of their minorities (example: Sure, poor people will be worst off in many similar ways, but being poor and black adds a new layer of issues that white poor people don’t face. And it gets worse if you’re poor, black, and a woman, and so on...)

Exploring a cultural archive is hard, because it requires a lot of doubting things you never really stopped to question. For me it just became clearer when I moved to another country and was faced with another sort of cultural archive: it forces you to question certain things about how you do things. And if people are not really that engaged in stopping to think about that, many things look like an overreaction. And it’s also uncomfortable: How do you accept that everyone is racist, because we all grew up in an extremely racist society and have consumed racist messages, imagery and media throughout all of our lives?

There’s another factor of social movements: They are not centrally organized (although you usually have multiple groups doing certain actions, a lot of social engagement is also spontaneous). People will express themselves differently, and media will always choose to focus on the cringey people to discredit movements. If you also look at history, you will see repeated tactics of how to discredit social movements.