You're right, but I think more importantly sometimes data is not data. A white suburbanite will collect anecdotes from other white suburbanites, like for example that the police are to be trusted. Then a study which doesn't properly control for these variables says the same thing. The anecdotes are actually more informative, since they are passed by word of mouth among similar people: they get at facts about the world that are true about the people you associate with. A black person would be unlikely to trust these anecdotes, but dress it up in SASS and call it a study and everyone pretends it's objective. More insiduous yet is that selection biases are usually this damning but much less obvious, and most studies are run on a select group of upper middle class educated psychology majors..
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You're right, but I think more importantly sometimes data is not data. A white suburbanite will collect anecdotes from other white suburbanites, like for example that the police are to be trusted. Then a study which doesn't properly control for these variables says the same thing. The anecdotes are actually more informative, since they are passed by word of mouth among similar people: they get at facts about the world that are true about the people you associate with. A black person would be unlikely to trust these anecdotes, but dress it up in SASS and call it a study and everyone pretends it's objective. More insiduous yet is that selection biases are usually this damning but much less obvious, and most studies are run on a select group of upper middle class educated psychology majors..