I Think There's Bad Racism And Good Racism

Treating people as individuals is hard. In fact, on a societal level, it’s too hard.

Once your society gets beyond a certain size, it’s foolish to ignore the patterns that show up as you look across populations. The question is; how intelligently do you define those populations?

In my article, BIPOC Is the New Ni**er, I wrote about the problem of treating people of colour as if their skin is the only important meaningful about them. I pointed out that this tactic has been used for generations, usually to convince black people that there was something fundamentally wrong with them. 

I made the radical suggestion that the problems black people face aren’t a result of the levels of melanin in their skin, but of a range of cultural and socioeconomic factors that we all need to think about more honestly and carefully. 

Apparently, Amber also found that too hard.

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Ashley:

I think there's bad racism and good racism. Sometimes, some things that are racist, by some definitions of the term, are GOOD. Saying Black people are more prone to committing violent assaults on subways than those of other races is a GOOD thing to say, and we should be having a national conversation about it. San Francisco won't even publish the mugshots of BART attackers because doing so would reinforce often useful stereotypes.

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Steve QJ:

Saying Black people are more prone to committing violent assaults on subways than those of other races is a GOOD thing to say

Yeah, if this is true, then it isn't racism, good or otherwise, just a statement of fact. The question is, is the fact that they're black the most useful thing to be having a national conversation about?

How about "people who are POOR are more prone to committing violent assaults on subways..."

Or "people who have MENTAL HEALTH issues are more prone to committing violent assaults on subways..."

Or perhaps "people who are UNEMPLOYED are more prone to committing violent assaults on subways..."

These are all much more likely to be relevant, and more importantly, solvable than the colour of somebody's skin. It might even spark a conversation about whether black people are more likely to suffer from these problems and why that might be.

The point is, the factor that you initially hone in on is important. Skin colour is unlikely to be a useful one when you think about it.

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Ashley:

Once people ask why a disproportionate number of people in jail for assaults and muggings on subways and streets have dark skin, their questions need to be answered: because a disproportionate number of those committing such attacks have such a skin tone.

Poverty does correlate with certain violent crime, but the correlation is not as strong and it's not a social catalyst for sparks. For example, if someone said "I'm in a poor town in West Virginia. I better watch out for meth and fentanyl dealers", nobody would care and people might even agree. However, if that same person said "I'm in a rough urban neighborhood in the Bronx now, I better get out quickly before I get mugged", people would be outraged.

Ironically, a stranger passing through is statistically far more likely to be attacked in a Bronx neighborhood than in a poor town in West Virginia even though the West Virginia town is actually poorer by most metrics.

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Steve QJ:

Once people ask why a disproportionate number of people in jail for assaults and muggings on subways and streets have dark skin, their questions need to be answered: because a disproportionate number of those committing such attacks have such a skin tone.

I feel like you just completely ignored the point in my previous reply. Which is that there are better, more illuminating questions to ask.

I didn't say that poverty was a univariate cause of higher crime rates, I said that the link between poverty and crime is a better, more solvable avenue than the link between black skin and crime. There's also black people's increased exposure to criminality which comes, in part from the legacy of living conditions that black people were forced into until fifty-seven years ago.

There's the disenfranchisement that comes from living in a country where people who look like you were legally discriminated against until sixty years ago and are still discriminated heavily against today depending on where you live. That inevitably has an impact on your psychology and the way you view your options in life.

As I mention in the article, there's the glorification of black criminality and violence in the music and film industries. Record labels don't pour millions into music where people of any other colour talk about killing each other or selling drugs (more here if you're interested).

As for fentanyl and meth, these are drugs that derange people's thinking, leading to a corresponding increase in criminal behaviour. The same is true for opiates and drugs like heroin that are ravaging white communities (so is meth actually). It's just that the way these drug epidemics are treated and reported on is notably different (more here if you're interested - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5121004/).

Criminality is not positively correlated with black skin. It's correlated with a number of socioeconomic factors, some of which have vastly disproportionately affected black people. If you ask "Gee, why are black people overrepresented in crime statistics?" And stop thinking at, "Oh, I guess having black skin just makes people criminals," then you're not thinking at all.

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Consider the following question:

Why do young black men in the United States have such high rates of homicide, both as offenders and as victims?

This is a perfectly reasonable, fact-based question. But Amber reads it as:

Why do young BLACK men in the United States. have such high rates of homicide, both as offenders and as victims?

Now, to be clear, all of the “categories” in this question are important. “Young” is important, homicide rates peak in the 20-24 age bracket for all ethnicities. “Man” is important, men commit, at the very least, 63% of all homicides.

“The United States” is important. America is 59th out of 195 countries by homicide rate (just shy of the top 25%). And very few of the countries above it would be considered developed nations. The U.S. homicide rate is three times that of Canada, for example.

And yes, of course, “black” is important. Not because melanin and criminality are linked, but because of the historical, economic and cultural issues that see black people wildly disproportionately represented in homicide rates.

All of these categories should be carefully examined in order to answer the question. Yet discourse around crime, especially in certain circles, focuses exclusively on only one of them (this despite the fact that only ~0.008% of African Americans commit the murders attributed to the entire “black community”).

I often see people complain that they’re being characterised as racist, even though they’re just stating facts. And I’d be the first person to admit that the word “racist” is thrown around too lightly in 2022. But if looking beyond the colour of somebody’s skin is too hard, maybe there’s something to the accusation.