As much as I love Christmas, the New Year has always been my favourite holiday. It’s a time to rest, to make plans, but it’s also an opportunity to take stock and reset. After a year of arguing with people online, I hadn’t realised how much I needed that reset. Spend enough time getting into fights, and it’s almost shocking when a conversation goes smoothly.
I think it likely that this tendency towards violence produced by poverty, and the reason they are present in many black families is that blacks are disproportionally poor. Thomas Sowell says Blacks picked up these cultural problems from poor whites. I think both groups suffer from these problems because of poverty. If you don't have many other opportunities, you are more like to end up becoming a criminal. I've also heard that Black people are much more likely to be arrested, and white people are much more likely to be let off with a warning. If you put those two together it might explain the difference. I'd like to see some research done on that.
Yeah, absolutely. There are studies exploring the correlation between poverty and crime and yes, there's a strong link completely independent of skin colour. There are many other reasons too, I've gone into some of them in my reply to Erica below so I won't repeat them all here. But yes, the problem is really that we're not talking honestly enough about these issues to really get to their roots.
From what I understand, violent crime correlates more strongly with class than race -- poor people of any race commit more violent crime than rich peopel. I don't have the data at my fingertips but that's my recollection and that would mean we need to be looking at poverty and economic inequality as key drivers of civilian and police violence. What do you think, Steve?
Oof, this is a big topic. I could easily write, not just an article, but a book about it. But yeah, absolutely, poverty is a big factor. Not just the lack of income in a particular family, but the lack of wealth in terms of property, assets, things that can be handed down to future generations. How many people find themselves in situations where they're starting adult life from scratch?
Then there are things like the wealth of the community, an issue that obviously particularly affects black communities after redlining and segregation. Schooling, crime rates, job opportunities. How realistic is it that the people in a particular community have paths to well-paid, fulfilling jobs? What is available in terms of extra-curricular activity?
A huge factor is peer group. I watched a documentary a little while ago about a guy, who was a pimp, whose entire family when he was a kid was involved in pimping or gang-banging or drug dealing. He was involved by the time he was 9-years-old. The same was true for everybody he knew. Once a community is win a bad enough spot, if there is no deliberate, well-funded and sustained effort to fix those problems, the kids who grow up in those environments have next to no chance of coming out unscathed.
As I've touched on in a couple of articles recently, there's the social messaging in movies and TV and music that normalises black criminality in a way that isn't true for people of any other skin colour. Imagine if there were a young white artist who made songs about school shootings or about date rape in frat houses. A couple of years ago, a black rapper made a song about killing white people in the same way black people were killed during slavery. The song was removed from YouTube, he was taken to court, and fined for the violent messaging. Rick Ross was dropped by sponsors for one line in a song where he taks about slipping something into his date's drink.
We understand that there are certain topics that are unacceptable in music. Advertisers understand that there are certain topics that they can't place their brands alongside, it's just that black people killing black people or committing crimes aren't considered to be among those topics.
And lastly, there's just good old-fashioned disenfranchisement. African Americans are constantly drip-fed a message that the system is against them. That they're never going to get a fair shot, That they have to work three times as hard to get to the same place in life. The history of oppression in America has left a deep scar in the psyche of many black people. For some this acts as a motivator. But for others it leaves them asking what the point of even trying is. Or at least, leads them to look for shortcuts that inevitably include crime in some cases. There's an underdog mentality that is drilled into many black people that is less and less a reflection of reality all the time, but is hugely disempowering.
There's more, but I think these are the main issues. All of these issues stack up significantly disproportionately against black people but would obviously increase the crime rate in any group of people they impacted. Some of them come from without the black community and some within. Far too little is being done about any of them.
Thanks for celebrating positive discourse and for stating challenging information that needs to be talked about more. You write so many of my thoughts so clearly and courageously, thanks for doing what you do!
I think it likely that this tendency towards violence produced by poverty, and the reason they are present in many black families is that blacks are disproportionally poor. Thomas Sowell says Blacks picked up these cultural problems from poor whites. I think both groups suffer from these problems because of poverty. If you don't have many other opportunities, you are more like to end up becoming a criminal. I've also heard that Black people are much more likely to be arrested, and white people are much more likely to be let off with a warning. If you put those two together it might explain the difference. I'd like to see some research done on that.
Yeah, absolutely. There are studies exploring the correlation between poverty and crime and yes, there's a strong link completely independent of skin colour. There are many other reasons too, I've gone into some of them in my reply to Erica below so I won't repeat them all here. But yes, the problem is really that we're not talking honestly enough about these issues to really get to their roots.
From what I understand, violent crime correlates more strongly with class than race -- poor people of any race commit more violent crime than rich peopel. I don't have the data at my fingertips but that's my recollection and that would mean we need to be looking at poverty and economic inequality as key drivers of civilian and police violence. What do you think, Steve?
Oof, this is a big topic. I could easily write, not just an article, but a book about it. But yeah, absolutely, poverty is a big factor. Not just the lack of income in a particular family, but the lack of wealth in terms of property, assets, things that can be handed down to future generations. How many people find themselves in situations where they're starting adult life from scratch?
Then there are things like the wealth of the community, an issue that obviously particularly affects black communities after redlining and segregation. Schooling, crime rates, job opportunities. How realistic is it that the people in a particular community have paths to well-paid, fulfilling jobs? What is available in terms of extra-curricular activity?
A huge factor is peer group. I watched a documentary a little while ago about a guy, who was a pimp, whose entire family when he was a kid was involved in pimping or gang-banging or drug dealing. He was involved by the time he was 9-years-old. The same was true for everybody he knew. Once a community is win a bad enough spot, if there is no deliberate, well-funded and sustained effort to fix those problems, the kids who grow up in those environments have next to no chance of coming out unscathed.
As I've touched on in a couple of articles recently, there's the social messaging in movies and TV and music that normalises black criminality in a way that isn't true for people of any other skin colour. Imagine if there were a young white artist who made songs about school shootings or about date rape in frat houses. A couple of years ago, a black rapper made a song about killing white people in the same way black people were killed during slavery. The song was removed from YouTube, he was taken to court, and fined for the violent messaging. Rick Ross was dropped by sponsors for one line in a song where he taks about slipping something into his date's drink.
We understand that there are certain topics that are unacceptable in music. Advertisers understand that there are certain topics that they can't place their brands alongside, it's just that black people killing black people or committing crimes aren't considered to be among those topics.
And lastly, there's just good old-fashioned disenfranchisement. African Americans are constantly drip-fed a message that the system is against them. That they're never going to get a fair shot, That they have to work three times as hard to get to the same place in life. The history of oppression in America has left a deep scar in the psyche of many black people. For some this acts as a motivator. But for others it leaves them asking what the point of even trying is. Or at least, leads them to look for shortcuts that inevitably include crime in some cases. There's an underdog mentality that is drilled into many black people that is less and less a reflection of reality all the time, but is hugely disempowering.
There's more, but I think these are the main issues. All of these issues stack up significantly disproportionately against black people but would obviously increase the crime rate in any group of people they impacted. Some of them come from without the black community and some within. Far too little is being done about any of them.
Thanks for celebrating positive discourse and for stating challenging information that needs to be talked about more. You write so many of my thoughts so clearly and courageously, thanks for doing what you do!