Well being poor doesn’t cause you to commit crime. Nor does being black, or mentally ill. What leads you to commit crime is bad values. The question is why, where did you get those bad values and why didn’t you get good ones instead? I don’t know what aspects of black culture lead to their kids growing up with bad values at higher rat…
Well being poor doesn’t cause you to commit crime. Nor does being black, or mentally ill. What leads you to commit crime is bad values. The question is why, where did you get those bad values and why didn’t you get good ones instead? I don’t know what aspects of black culture lead to their kids growing up with bad values at higher rates than other demographics. But clearly something there is at work. Melanin is a non-issue but the culture 100% is, and blacks definitely have their own unique culture.
I suppose it would be interesting to compare black kids raised in the inner city vs black kids raised in the suburbs or other places, or by white adoptive parents, etc. IDK how you pin it down. But my point was I definitely don’t think our society is interested in having that conversation. There are too many charlatans out there blaming it all on racism to make a buck.
"Well being poor doesn’t cause you to commit crime. Nor does being black, or mentally ill. What leads you to commit crime is bad values"
I mean, what do I even say to this? If you were starving, or had no education, or lost everything you had, or never had anything in the first place, you'd just die quietly by the side of the road because of your "good values"? If you were bi-polar or schizophrenic you'd never have any episodes because of your "good values?"
Has your life been so idyllic and sheltered that you can't imagine any circumstances where your values would come second to your survival? Or where your values came second to a mental health condition? I assume all the poor people in the world just didn't work hard enough too? And that all the rich people got there through good old-fashioned elbow-grease? That life is a pure meritocracy and the people with good values always end up wining in life? I can't believe anybody, including you, truly thinks like this.
But it's the line about the issue being "100% black culture" that reveals the real problem. I just got through pointing out that only an absolute maximum of 0.008% of African Americans are responsible for 100% of murders attributed to "the black community". Yet this is a problem with "black culture" in your mind.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear, you want to believe that the only issue affecting black Americans today is "black culture". And it seems you'll cling to this no matter what evidence is presented to you that highlights how simplistic that is.
Again, yes there are people out there who aren't willing to have the conversation about the various sociological and cultural issues that affect black people from within their communities. I agree. They want to blame racism for everything. But on the other side, there are people who aren't willing to have any *other* conversation. And who simply won't acknowledge that racism, past and/or present, is responsible for anything. You're both as wrong as each other.
"I suppose it would be interesting to compare black kids raised in the inner city vs black kids raised in the suburbs or other places, or by white adoptive parents, etc."
I can only wonder how difficult it would be to find such comparisons on the internet.
I have no doubt that it would show a far stronger correlation between poverty and crime than between race and crime.
I wonder how much having white adoptive parents would suppress those criminal instincts (that was sarcasm).
I'm an educated man, Dave, and a student of scientific method. But we aren't talking about sunspots and the price of wheat here. The causal relationship behind the correlation between poverty and crime is not at all mysterious. It includes such indisputables as despair and hunger.
I went to a vocational high school with kids from the projects. Poor or impoverished I can't say. They were there to get a marketable skill. Some ended up defeating themselves with "why you tryn' to be white studyin'" others succeeded. Attitude and desire, they all came from the same shithole.
I was from a bottom of the middle class/poor, up to you what you want to call it, neighborhood. There was another way out, the military. That is something some were willing to do, and others weren't. You might be lucky and get a skill but there was GI Bill educational benefits if you did or didn't. There was a price. One guy from my neighborhood was killed in Vietnam and one who didn't enlist or get drafted was killed in street violence. Two came back amputees, three who stayed behind went to prison. Some of us got out, some didn't.
You could stay local to family, or you could move away. There's a price and I paid it, being separated from my extended family for most of my life.
I understand the old saying, "Wherever you go, there you are" but some who want to make a better life for themselves do by doing whatever it takes to escape their toxic environment.
Poverty? I walk past it every morning on my morning walk. Homeless encampments. People with no roof over their heads and all their stuff in a stolen grocery store cart or baby buggy. I politely greet them and most of them return the greeting. But the Neighborhood ap has daily reports of burglary and children's bicycles being stolen, assault, strong arm robbery, etc. Is that criminality associated with that poverty? Of course it is. But as best as can be determined they are mostly homeless because of drug addiction. I understand that some people are more prone to addiction than others. Without getting too personal, I'll just say that I know the tragedy of drug addiction all too well. Other than killing all drug dealers where they are found without a trial, that problem isn't going away.
My point is that I understand the association of poverty and crime quite well, maybe more than you on a personal level, I don't know, but it is not an unbreakable shackle. I'm in no way saying that it is always easy or equally accessible to all. But if you don't try and sometimes make hard choices, that is an unbreakable shackle.
Race? It's often easier to be a white man in America. That's always been common knowledge although largely not given thought to until the 60s. But I know black people who have been more successful in life than me. They worked for it and made good choices.
Life is hard, but it is harder if you choose to hold onto an excuse for your failure instead of doing the work to succeed.
I'm not sure if you're arguing with me or not but I certainly don't believe that poverty is a highway to a life of crime with no exit ramps. People react to identical circumstances in completely different ways.
A few hundred feet from my house here there are people living under roofs of corrugated steel and walls of sticks. They don't even have doors. Poverty at this level is unimaginable to me.
When I mentioned this conversation to my wife, her comment was that her childhood had no doors. Unsurprising since she also had no shoes.
She told me something that I didn't know. The home that her sister lived in when I first met her and that her father lived in when I last saw him were on government land. They were allowed to build a house and pass it on to their heirs, but they could not sell it. Termites ended up collapsing her sister's house and she moved away. None of her children wanted it. When her father died, her sister didn't want to live there because she is afraid of ghosts. We would have built her a better home on that land than the thatched hut her father lived in, but it went back to the government.
I actually think that family plots that will never go to developers is a good way to let the poor own a home.
My mother had a home under the 235 Program (most people thought that you had to be black for that, but you just had to be low-income to qualify). One of the things that I noticed, both in her neighborhood and in the black 235 neighborhoods that I saw when I lived in Georgia was that they were well kept compared to low-income rental neighborhoods. I think that it was about pride in ownership.
Now that home ownership is becoming less possible for many, the vultures are buying up homes, fixing them up a bit and renting them out. The rent is higher than any house payment I ever had so they have two family renters trying to avoid living in apartment complexes. It does not bode well for society.
When my wife first came to America, we visited my mom in Saint Louis and drove past the projects. She couldn't comprehend an apparently new building with broken windows, curtains hanging out and trash everywhere. Stick a bunch of poor people in a high rise, sprinkle in some criminals and drug dealers and you destroy all hope of pride. Inspiration for James Brown's "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."
In several of the countries that I've been in in Asia, there were high rise apartment buildings, where people bought their apartments. They too were better places. I lived in several four family flats (rentals) as a child, a step up from bedbug row, but not by much. While I'm not a big fan of many government programs designed to fight poverty that don't work, I would like to see something that gives more people their own home. I think that that really does help.
Not arguing, Chris, just clarifying since my previous comment may have been misunderstood. I think that we are in basic agreement.
During the war there was a huge refugee area near Danang like that. Americans called it Dog Patch. Since places like that have some semblance of permanence (for better or worse) they can construct those shanties. Years ago, in Japan, I saw a trash and litter free homeless encampment under an overhead that consisted colorfully decorated cardboard. I was told that they were allowed to stay because they created no public nuisance.
After typing this I'll go out for my morning walk around the park where there are homeless encampments. Impermanence since they periodically get dispersed by the police. No doors, no walls, no roof. To their credit they use the public restrooms rather than crap on the sidewalks like in San Fransisco. They often discard clothing when it gets filthy. We gave a big bag of my wife's old clothes to a young homeless woman about a month ago. While I consider the crime, they bring to the neighborhood to be a nuisance we've managed to hold onto some compassion.
Meanwhile in Vietnam people will drop their styrofoam garbage on the ground with a trash bin literally within arm's reach. A housekeeper walks out of the house with a dustpan of litter, mostly plastic, walks (smiling) past the same bin and across the street ... and dumps it in the grass.
Once I made a pole with a nail sticking out the end and walked around near my house picking up the trash and tossing it in a bag. The neighbors were probably thinking "stupid foreigner" (người nước ngoài ngu) but the shame must've cut through because after a week or two they all got a lot more conscientious about keeping the 'hood clean.
I agree the bottomline factor explaining the crime statistics is that boys who grow up in homes without fathers are at a significantly higher risk of falling into criminal behavior. Obviously skin color (ie. being black) does not correlate with fatherlessness in any intrinsic cause-and-effect relationship, but I'd say fatherlessness is a bigger problem in urban black communities than in suburban black families, and this shows up both in much higher poverty and violent crime rates in urban black communities. One confirmation of this, per Thomas Sowell's research I believe, is that prior to the 1960s, when the two-parent black family was traditional and largely intact, American cities did not have a notable problem with criminal violence among black youth despite the poverty of the black community across the board. The expansion of the welfare state, which penalized marriage at essentially the same moment the "free love" movement gained momentum in society, changed all that. Out of wedlock births skyrocketed generally, and most negatively impacted our black population due to the income/wealth disparities which were the legacy of discriminatory practices. So I agree that we absolutely need to focus on fatherlessness if we're serious about tackling the problem of urban violence. But as the institutional push in society right now is to continue dismantling the nuclear family, (even BLM seeks to "disrupt" it), that seems sadly highly unlikely.
I live in an area with a high number of homeless people. Within that population there are victims of financial circumstance but more often they are drug addicted and/or mentally ill. There is a disproportionate amount of crime associated with their presence - burglary, strong arm robbery and assault. So much so that there is a growing lack of compassion for them and their plight. They are mostly white people. See a parallel?
Well being poor doesn’t cause you to commit crime. Nor does being black, or mentally ill. What leads you to commit crime is bad values. The question is why, where did you get those bad values and why didn’t you get good ones instead? I don’t know what aspects of black culture lead to their kids growing up with bad values at higher rates than other demographics. But clearly something there is at work. Melanin is a non-issue but the culture 100% is, and blacks definitely have their own unique culture.
I suppose it would be interesting to compare black kids raised in the inner city vs black kids raised in the suburbs or other places, or by white adoptive parents, etc. IDK how you pin it down. But my point was I definitely don’t think our society is interested in having that conversation. There are too many charlatans out there blaming it all on racism to make a buck.
"Well being poor doesn’t cause you to commit crime. Nor does being black, or mentally ill. What leads you to commit crime is bad values"
I mean, what do I even say to this? If you were starving, or had no education, or lost everything you had, or never had anything in the first place, you'd just die quietly by the side of the road because of your "good values"? If you were bi-polar or schizophrenic you'd never have any episodes because of your "good values?"
Has your life been so idyllic and sheltered that you can't imagine any circumstances where your values would come second to your survival? Or where your values came second to a mental health condition? I assume all the poor people in the world just didn't work hard enough too? And that all the rich people got there through good old-fashioned elbow-grease? That life is a pure meritocracy and the people with good values always end up wining in life? I can't believe anybody, including you, truly thinks like this.
But it's the line about the issue being "100% black culture" that reveals the real problem. I just got through pointing out that only an absolute maximum of 0.008% of African Americans are responsible for 100% of murders attributed to "the black community". Yet this is a problem with "black culture" in your mind.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear, you want to believe that the only issue affecting black Americans today is "black culture". And it seems you'll cling to this no matter what evidence is presented to you that highlights how simplistic that is.
Again, yes there are people out there who aren't willing to have the conversation about the various sociological and cultural issues that affect black people from within their communities. I agree. They want to blame racism for everything. But on the other side, there are people who aren't willing to have any *other* conversation. And who simply won't acknowledge that racism, past and/or present, is responsible for anything. You're both as wrong as each other.
"I suppose it would be interesting to compare black kids raised in the inner city vs black kids raised in the suburbs or other places, or by white adoptive parents, etc."
I can only wonder how difficult it would be to find such comparisons on the internet.
I have no doubt that it would show a far stronger correlation between poverty and crime than between race and crime.
I wonder how much having white adoptive parents would suppress those criminal instincts (that was sarcasm).
Connection, but correlation may or may not indicate causation. I'm not denying the connection, I shouldn't feel a need to say that.
I'm an educated man, Dave, and a student of scientific method. But we aren't talking about sunspots and the price of wheat here. The causal relationship behind the correlation between poverty and crime is not at all mysterious. It includes such indisputables as despair and hunger.
I'm going to end up writing more than I care to.
I went to a vocational high school with kids from the projects. Poor or impoverished I can't say. They were there to get a marketable skill. Some ended up defeating themselves with "why you tryn' to be white studyin'" others succeeded. Attitude and desire, they all came from the same shithole.
I was from a bottom of the middle class/poor, up to you what you want to call it, neighborhood. There was another way out, the military. That is something some were willing to do, and others weren't. You might be lucky and get a skill but there was GI Bill educational benefits if you did or didn't. There was a price. One guy from my neighborhood was killed in Vietnam and one who didn't enlist or get drafted was killed in street violence. Two came back amputees, three who stayed behind went to prison. Some of us got out, some didn't.
You could stay local to family, or you could move away. There's a price and I paid it, being separated from my extended family for most of my life.
I understand the old saying, "Wherever you go, there you are" but some who want to make a better life for themselves do by doing whatever it takes to escape their toxic environment.
Poverty? I walk past it every morning on my morning walk. Homeless encampments. People with no roof over their heads and all their stuff in a stolen grocery store cart or baby buggy. I politely greet them and most of them return the greeting. But the Neighborhood ap has daily reports of burglary and children's bicycles being stolen, assault, strong arm robbery, etc. Is that criminality associated with that poverty? Of course it is. But as best as can be determined they are mostly homeless because of drug addiction. I understand that some people are more prone to addiction than others. Without getting too personal, I'll just say that I know the tragedy of drug addiction all too well. Other than killing all drug dealers where they are found without a trial, that problem isn't going away.
My point is that I understand the association of poverty and crime quite well, maybe more than you on a personal level, I don't know, but it is not an unbreakable shackle. I'm in no way saying that it is always easy or equally accessible to all. But if you don't try and sometimes make hard choices, that is an unbreakable shackle.
Race? It's often easier to be a white man in America. That's always been common knowledge although largely not given thought to until the 60s. But I know black people who have been more successful in life than me. They worked for it and made good choices.
Life is hard, but it is harder if you choose to hold onto an excuse for your failure instead of doing the work to succeed.
I'm not sure if you're arguing with me or not but I certainly don't believe that poverty is a highway to a life of crime with no exit ramps. People react to identical circumstances in completely different ways.
A few hundred feet from my house here there are people living under roofs of corrugated steel and walls of sticks. They don't even have doors. Poverty at this level is unimaginable to me.
When I mentioned this conversation to my wife, her comment was that her childhood had no doors. Unsurprising since she also had no shoes.
She told me something that I didn't know. The home that her sister lived in when I first met her and that her father lived in when I last saw him were on government land. They were allowed to build a house and pass it on to their heirs, but they could not sell it. Termites ended up collapsing her sister's house and she moved away. None of her children wanted it. When her father died, her sister didn't want to live there because she is afraid of ghosts. We would have built her a better home on that land than the thatched hut her father lived in, but it went back to the government.
I actually think that family plots that will never go to developers is a good way to let the poor own a home.
My mother had a home under the 235 Program (most people thought that you had to be black for that, but you just had to be low-income to qualify). One of the things that I noticed, both in her neighborhood and in the black 235 neighborhoods that I saw when I lived in Georgia was that they were well kept compared to low-income rental neighborhoods. I think that it was about pride in ownership.
Now that home ownership is becoming less possible for many, the vultures are buying up homes, fixing them up a bit and renting them out. The rent is higher than any house payment I ever had so they have two family renters trying to avoid living in apartment complexes. It does not bode well for society.
When my wife first came to America, we visited my mom in Saint Louis and drove past the projects. She couldn't comprehend an apparently new building with broken windows, curtains hanging out and trash everywhere. Stick a bunch of poor people in a high rise, sprinkle in some criminals and drug dealers and you destroy all hope of pride. Inspiration for James Brown's "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."
In several of the countries that I've been in in Asia, there were high rise apartment buildings, where people bought their apartments. They too were better places. I lived in several four family flats (rentals) as a child, a step up from bedbug row, but not by much. While I'm not a big fan of many government programs designed to fight poverty that don't work, I would like to see something that gives more people their own home. I think that that really does help.
Not arguing, Chris, just clarifying since my previous comment may have been misunderstood. I think that we are in basic agreement.
During the war there was a huge refugee area near Danang like that. Americans called it Dog Patch. Since places like that have some semblance of permanence (for better or worse) they can construct those shanties. Years ago, in Japan, I saw a trash and litter free homeless encampment under an overhead that consisted colorfully decorated cardboard. I was told that they were allowed to stay because they created no public nuisance.
After typing this I'll go out for my morning walk around the park where there are homeless encampments. Impermanence since they periodically get dispersed by the police. No doors, no walls, no roof. To their credit they use the public restrooms rather than crap on the sidewalks like in San Fransisco. They often discard clothing when it gets filthy. We gave a big bag of my wife's old clothes to a young homeless woman about a month ago. While I consider the crime, they bring to the neighborhood to be a nuisance we've managed to hold onto some compassion.
Meanwhile in Vietnam people will drop their styrofoam garbage on the ground with a trash bin literally within arm's reach. A housekeeper walks out of the house with a dustpan of litter, mostly plastic, walks (smiling) past the same bin and across the street ... and dumps it in the grass.
This country really needs a Lady Bird Johnson.
Sadly, the problem has become all too universal.
Once I made a pole with a nail sticking out the end and walked around near my house picking up the trash and tossing it in a bag. The neighbors were probably thinking "stupid foreigner" (người nước ngoài ngu) but the shame must've cut through because after a week or two they all got a lot more conscientious about keeping the 'hood clean.
I agree the bottomline factor explaining the crime statistics is that boys who grow up in homes without fathers are at a significantly higher risk of falling into criminal behavior. Obviously skin color (ie. being black) does not correlate with fatherlessness in any intrinsic cause-and-effect relationship, but I'd say fatherlessness is a bigger problem in urban black communities than in suburban black families, and this shows up both in much higher poverty and violent crime rates in urban black communities. One confirmation of this, per Thomas Sowell's research I believe, is that prior to the 1960s, when the two-parent black family was traditional and largely intact, American cities did not have a notable problem with criminal violence among black youth despite the poverty of the black community across the board. The expansion of the welfare state, which penalized marriage at essentially the same moment the "free love" movement gained momentum in society, changed all that. Out of wedlock births skyrocketed generally, and most negatively impacted our black population due to the income/wealth disparities which were the legacy of discriminatory practices. So I agree that we absolutely need to focus on fatherlessness if we're serious about tackling the problem of urban violence. But as the institutional push in society right now is to continue dismantling the nuclear family, (even BLM seeks to "disrupt" it), that seems sadly highly unlikely.
I live in an area with a high number of homeless people. Within that population there are victims of financial circumstance but more often they are drug addicted and/or mentally ill. There is a disproportionate amount of crime associated with their presence - burglary, strong arm robbery and assault. So much so that there is a growing lack of compassion for them and their plight. They are mostly white people. See a parallel?