The last gun-like object I owned was a squirt gun that looked like a Colt 1911. It was actually battery powered, and made a bit of a "crack" when it fired. Then a buddy borrowed it and blacked out the orange tip. That was in 1987.
I've only touched 2 firearms since then, both belonging to others, handled in the privacy of my own home. I'm simply not going to give someone good odds of making a bad mistake.
It's not good that the world still works that way. You should get the same levels of treatment i get. Period.
Solve poverty. I think that's part of the key to the treatment issue.
For cops, a rookie cop starts out all squeaky clean with no bias. After a year, the majority of perps he busts are black or hispanic. Makes him start thinking it's the blacks or hispanics that are the problem. Thus everybody fitting the profile starts off as "probably guilty" because in his limited experience of only dealing with bad people, that's what he's been conditioned to.
For teachers, they all talk about schools as a percentage of white, in order to provide a metric to the quality of the school (even at interviews). Same reason as the cop, the list of troublemakers trends to blacks and hispanics.
What's really going on:
A typical "good" school in Houston starts off pretty strong with a white demographic. Then the apartments come in, which leads to the poor flooding the school (there are schools in Houston with population rivaling towns and colleges). The poor are predominantly hispanic and black. Guess what kind of people don't value education or are more likely to have a parent in jail or get into crime? Poor people.
Its the alignment of the hispanics and blacks to being poor that reinforces the racial profile and negativity. Fix the poverty and the crime rate goes down, and hopefully the mix of crooks across all demographics levels out. Cops stop seeing the same colored people in the back of their car. This is where Quannel X gets biased that the cops are out to get the blacks. In Houston, they have a very diverse police force. That means the chance a perp gets busted by a black cop is just as likely as a white cop. The problem is there really are more poor blacks than whites, and the most desperate of poor turn to crime.
CPS has the same problem. If they remove a kid from the home, statistically, it's a poor family, and almost always in a non-white neighborhood. The law says they have to try to place the kid back with family, except that everybody in that family has likely done time, making them unsuited for re-homing.
I think the hardest thing to learn is to not blame the race for the pattern we see on the surface. Black folks doing more crime isn't because black folks are more crimey. It's because they are poor. They occupy the largest segment of the total poor in America. Couple being poor with the stigma we talked about in another thread about being unsuccessful implying you are lazy, bad.
Solve Poverty. Helps the crime rate. Helps end racism.
I have no clue how to do that.