Why Would I Lie About Being Black?

I was about 90% done with the next instalment in my series, this time about why I’m not surprised black people voted for Trump (I'll be posting the finished piece in the next few days, probably Monday), when a conversation on Twitter derailed me.

I’ve decided to post it here as an amuse-bouche to that piece, because it captures an aspect of Trump’s “black” support that I hadn’t even considered in the article.

Honestly, I hadn’t really encountered it.

As with a lot of Trump’s support, part of the problem here is that some people are always going to be in my blind spot. I read the news, I watch podcasts, I talk to people, I do my due diligence on “Black Twitter” but there are some perspectives I just don’t meet unless I’m stupid enough to engage with comments under racist accounts on Twitter, which I’m usually not.

But a few days ago, against my better judgment, I replied to a guy called “The Angry Tadpole” who admitted he’d been radicalised by an account that posts almost nothing but videos of black people committing crimes and causing mayhem.

And the tiny glimmer of self-awareness he showed, the recognition that this was a process of radicalisation, made me wonder if I could make him consider why this account just so happened to post nothing but videos of black people committing crimes and causing mayhem.

Sadly, it seems Angry Tadpole was too angry to reply. But Meikski wasn’t. And…well, I’ll just let you read it.

(As usual with Twitter conversations, I’ve had to do some light editing to maintain flow across multiple side threads.)

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The Angry Tadpole:

When someone asks me if X radicalized me I'll be forced to explain that being able to see their behavior HAS radicalized me in some ways.

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Steve QJ:

I wish every person who used social media was forced to prove the understand availability bias first.

Seriously, who is the "their" in this sentence? The ~41 million people you're judging based on a few dozen videos posted by explicitly racist accounts?

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Meikski:

or maybe it’s the fact that 14% of the population commits 61% of violent crime? it’s people like you that inadvertently radicalize others more than they already would be by trying to deny it’s a problem

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Steve QJ:

Yes, sadly I probably do radicalise stupid...sorry, "LoW iQ" people when I ask them to use their brains but they don't know how to go any deeper than trotting out a single, context-free statistic.

For example, do you know what percentage of violent crime poor people commit? Or, even better, do you know what percentage of African Americans that 61% represents?

It's okay, I'll help you out with that last one, it's a whopping 0.008%. Totally “radicalising” to ask people not to demonise the other 99.992% for their behaviour.

[I added a link here to an article I’d written about black crime statistics, explaining how I arrived at that 0.008% figure]

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Meikski:

that number is so wrong i don’t even need to look it up to know it’s wrong, please link me to proof of that. I am quite literally an african american man, why would I demonize MY people for no reason if according to you only 1 in 5 million is doing a crime.

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I wasn’t surprised that Meikski thought my figures were wrong. Sadly, almost nobody is encouraged to think about racial groups this way.

But I was surprised by the claim that he was African American. I’ve had several conversations with people who claimed to be black because they thought it would give their racism some extra legitimacy, but who later proved, shockingly enough, to be lying.

I decided to withhold judgement.

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Steve QJ:

Okay, let's do this quickly. The latest stats I had available at the time were from 2019. That year, 4078 African Americans were arrested for murder. Yes, sure, there will be murders committed where there was no arrest, but there will also be arrests where the criminal was innocent.

But let's stack the odds further against our black brethren. Let's say that each of those 4078 murders was a different black person. No repeat offenders, as there almost certainly would be. So that's 4078 criminals. What was the African American population in the United States in 2029, you ask? Around 46 million. And what's 4078/46,000,000? That's right, 0.008%.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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Meikski:

You do realize I not a single time mentioned murder specifically right? I said specifically violent crime. Robbery, aggravated assault, rape etc all forms of violence in some way whether legal or spiritual. yet you try to ignore all of those big numbers in favor for the small one

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Steve QJ:

Sure, do the same maths for any crime you want. The results are all less than 1%. Add the total of all violent and non/violent crimes together and you get ~2%.

But the 13/50 meme (or whatever it is today) is about violent crime, so I chose an oft-cited violent crime.

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Meikski:

that 13/50 meme isn’t a meme, that’s the problem

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Steve QJ:

It's a meme because it ignores all context to portray black people in the worst possible light.

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Meikski:

tell me what context could make that stat any less disgusting than what it is, you don’t see koreans in the same poverty bracket committing crimes like that, so is it really just an economic issue?

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Steve QJ:

The context that though it's true African Americans are over represented in crime statistics, and this is a problem worth discussing seriously, it is ridiculous to demonise millions of people for the actions of WAAAAAY less than 1% of them.