Is there a way to quantify oppression?

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If there were actual opression it could be quantified, maybe.

Recreational red snapper fishermen are oppressed.

Yes. Ranging from 1 closed fist in the air up to 10. Sort of like two thumbs up rating system. 1 equaling not interviewed for an NFL coaching job and 10 equaling the Holocaust.

E= (40 acres + 1 mule)²/?

Apparently this site can't support the delta symbol, but imagine that instead of the question mark.

Is this about marriage? I quantify it by how much involuntary couch sleep I get.

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Oppression / victim mentality


Same thing

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per demographics of course. Wanting to learn and research factual data.

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Is this really the best way to approach this? We have a lot of data points that economically things are getting better for minorities in the country, but we also have to deal with certain realities about how people perceive events. For instance, something like 30% of African-Americans earn above the median wage, which is impressive if you contextualize it with the fact that they effectively earned full rights 50 years ago (which is 1.6 generations ago if we are averaging generations to be 30 years). I'd wager if you found a similar situation in some other country, you'd find much more poverty and less integration on the same timescale.

What they lack is generational wealth, due to some factors out of their hands. The War on Drugs also disproportionately affected them, made their homes fatherless, destroyed families, and neighborhoods. A certain segment of the population has felt left out of prosperity making, partly due to damaging governmental policies, like the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and the sub-poverty, and some due to individual mistakes.

In that context, its easy to see how something that might be becoming increasingly rare is seen as another instance of state violence in a long line of uninterrupted state violence. There have been a hundred or so riots in the US that can be directly linked to some poorly handled police-citizen interaction, from when Clifford Glover to the Harlem Race Riots to Red Summer to Evansville in 1903. Those sorts of events live inside people, get passed down, and discussed, and can become framing points by which they digest new information. After all, the "medium is the message" and we all do this, as it's become a fundamental part of how humans process data about events unrelated to our tactile environment. In this sense, you see over and over again, that "people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them," to quote Baldwin.

So while the data might indicate that deadly interactions between police and black people might be dwindling, one event can easily be framed as part of a history of uninterrupted state violence, and can undo the perception that things are "working" rather easily.

I don't think anyone who is in BLM (or against them, for lack of a better term) will be swayed by data, because data is its own medium, with its own message, and isn't likely to be believed unless it confirms preexisting notions, which you see on pretty much every side of the aisle.

If you read African-American literature of the 20th century, you can see a consistent them of narration that, I think, does a superb job of giving a guide to how people might be feeling. Feelings in politics matter more than people want to admit, and until people address the pathos of a situation, the logos will fall on deaf ears.

But how many people are willing to read Charles Chestnut, WEB DuBois, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, or Toni Morrison, among many others who make up the incredibly rich history of African-American literature in this country? How many people are willing to have an open mind reading things with which they might profoundly disagree, for as reasons as simple as it doesn't reinforce their own perceptions, or because they don't find the writer credible, or because of some error of the time? Not many, and for that reason, I believe people will continue to talk past each other. But there is a chance for real dialogue here too. I don't know how many people will take it though.

Thats a good start. I am also looking for actual data and research on police interactions vs demographics.