The Myth of Black Criminality

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25 Sep 2017, 3:08 pm

Looking for a response to the barrage of racially charged assertions about the US, many of which lack historical perspective, I found a lot of articles by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The video is short, and the articles are mid-sized.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... on/403246/

I found this first one most illuminating, as it tells the complicated story of how some of these ideas gained traction through a pretty twisted plot line in the first section. It also has this concise nugget of cogent statistical analysis.

Quote:

The rise and fall in crime in the late 20th century was an international phenomenon. Crime rates rose and fell in the United States and Canada at roughly the same clip—but in Canada, imprisonment rates held steady. “If greatly increased severity of punishment and higher imprisonment rates caused American crime rates to fall after 1990,” the researchers Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington have written, then “what caused the Canadian rates to fall?” The riddle is not particular to North America. In the latter half of the 20th century, crime rose and then fell in Nordic countries as well. During the period of rising crime, incarceration rates held steady in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—but declined in Finland. “If punishment affects crime, Finland’s crime rate should have shot up,” Tonry and Farrington write, but it did not. After studying California’s tough “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law—which mandated at least a 25-year sentence for a third “strikeable offense,” such as murder or robbery—researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Sydney, in Australia, determined in 2001 that the law had reduced the rate of felony crime by no more than 2 percent. Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the leading academic experts on American incarceration, looked at the growth in state prisons in recent years and concluded that a 66 percent increase in the state prison population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/ar ... rty/64854/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... es/359841/

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jrjones9933
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25 Sep 2017, 4:15 pm

Calling out racism can't be allowed to end debate. Some elements on both left and right want to end debate, but they don't get to cross that line in the US.

The latest twist seems to be: You've made that argument so many times that it can't possibly be true. Invalid. Also, it allows them an easy misconstruction: Everything is about racism :roll:

When I call out racism, I don't suddenly become blind to all the other perspectives that I have. If I point out the influence of that in one social dynamic, and you point out the influence of poverty, and another person points out the influence of organized crime, we don't have to disagree. We may need to have multiple parallel discussions in order to avoid confusion, but a lot of derailing on the internet gets done by diverting attention and people will keep trying.

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LoveNotHate
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25 Sep 2017, 5:08 pm

No one cares.

No one wants to hear a "oh poor me" mentality.

You're in a first world country, with jobs everywhere, and you can't make yourself productive?

There's no sympathy.

There are millions of masters-degree Chinese and Indians hungry for work.

There are millions of "cheap" Mexican laborers.

These "third world" workers will gladly take your spot.

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25 Sep 2017, 5:15 pm

LoveNotHate wrote:

Are you saying that you have plenty of people to abuse, so the black community should take it and shut up? No grasp of history.

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25 Sep 2017, 6:15 pm

jrjones9933 wrote:

LoveNotHate wrote:

Are you saying that you have plenty of people to abuse, so the black community should take it and shut up? No grasp of history.

Your video is about excuses for criminal behavior.

I'm saying, no one cares about excuses.

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25 Sep 2017, 8:55 pm

I say just fix up these community's. Make it where they don't have to turn to crime. I know that is easier said than done though.

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25 Sep 2017, 9:24 pm

BettaPonic wrote:

I say just fix up these community's. Make it where they don't have to turn to crime. I know that is easier said than done though.

Looking at all communities, you can see that lots of other factors impact crime, rendering ethnicity meaningless in that discussion. Community policing deserves more research. We know broken windows policing just created resentment.

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BettaPonic
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25 Sep 2017, 9:28 pm

jrjones9933 wrote:

BettaPonic wrote:

I say just fix up these community's. Make it where they don't have to turn to crime. I know that is easier said than done though.

I think fixing education is a great step. I don't know why but some ethnicities seem to be more likely to be stuck in that situation. I don't think their echnicity causes it though.

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26 Sep 2017, 10:58 am

BettaPonic wrote:

jrjones9933 wrote:

BettaPonic wrote:

I say just fix up these community's. Make it where they don't have to turn to crime. I know that is easier said than done though.

I think fixing education is a great step. I don't know why but some ethnicities seem to be more likely to be stuck in that situation. I don't think their echnicity causes it though.

The second linked article in the OP addresses this question. It's short, and I couldn't figure out a way to excerpt it. Coates tells a story of when the survival skills he learned as a kid almost ruined his adult life, and makes the point that kids of all ethnicities who have that upbringing face the same challenges in code switching.

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26 Sep 2017, 11:19 am

Poverty and hopelessness breed crime,it has nothing to do with skin color.

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26 Sep 2017, 12:40 pm

^
Which is why (if at all possible) it's best for those in poverty to do whatever it takes to bootstrap themselves out of poverty like millions of others have. If they can't achieve that for themselves on this go-around then at least give thier kids or other yoots a boost so that they might.

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jrjones9933
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26 Sep 2017, 1:11 pm

People will do that. The problem that has persisted since slavery, and through Jim Crow, and redlining, and discrimination by agricultural extension offices, ad nauseam, is the problem of having no reasonable hope for your kids doing better than you. People will put up with a lot of having nothing, if they can sincerely believe that their kids will have something.

You can see a parallel in the Rust Belt, among white people. They have recently learned how it's felt to be black in a lot of different places in the US: deteriorating, underfunded schools, reduced job prospects for someone without a college degree, and all the problems which Trump purports to be able to solve for them.

However, when he fails to acknowledge those same issues when they affect urban people or people of color, it doesn't seem like he really has a grasp of those pertinent issues. Likewise, some of his supporters.

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26 Sep 2017, 1:17 pm

Misslizard wrote:

Poverty and hopelessness breed crime,it has nothing to do with skin color.

People have been using skin color being the cause of crime as an excuse for a long time. And I don't think it is going to stop anytime soon.

-LegoMaster2149 (Written on September 26, 2017)

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26 Sep 2017, 1:30 pm

BettaPonic wrote:

I say just fix up these community's. Make it where they don't have to turn to crime. I know that is easier said than done though.

if bad communities and hopelessness cause crime, then bad culture does as well.

it's a toxic cycle that's created when individuals are shamed for being more successful or educated than their peers (?) because they're "not acting like they should". it's possible one of the few things keeping some groups from changing in a positive way is their own adherence to traditions now antiquated.

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26 Sep 2017, 1:47 pm

Kiprobalhato wrote:

BettaPonic wrote:

I say just fix up these community's. Make it where they don't have to turn to crime. I know that is easier said than done though.

I refer you to the second linked article. People need to adhere to some traditions in some places, and other traditions in others. The various cultures one person embodies may conflict.

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26 Sep 2017, 2:28 pm

LoveNotHate wrote:

You do know people just can't walk into a place of business and start working a job that in turn produces a paycheck, don't you? Business owners - who very often may have the human failing of racism - have to hire someone to work for them first. A black American can want to work as hard as he or she possibly can, but it means nothing if the only response time and again is rejection. That, and businesses in black communities very often have moved out, leaving zero opportunities for employment.

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