How Criminality Became a Black Thing

[Rhea]

No. White culture has a strong hand in this. A leading hand, IMHO. One that we can fix if we can only admit it.

So "white culture" creates black crime, but "black culture" is innocent of it?

[...]

Before anyone has a right to say "black culture causes crime" they need to first either eliminate the white culture contribution and see what difference is actually left, or they need to speak to the white culture contribution and address both in the same breath.

What you are doing is focusing solely on "white culture" while a priori calling any contribution by "black culture" a myth.

Derec, I am not going to respond to this post. You make the obvious false conclusion that I said 'all' or 'solely' or 'innocent of' and the very quote above what you concluded shows your conclusion was wrong. I do not have the language to converse with a filter like that.

I said white culture has a "strong hand in it" how you can take that to mean "has the only hand in it" is quite beyond me. So - no response is available to your post.

 

[Derec]

Derec, I am not going to respond to this post. You make the obvious false conclusion that I said 'all' or 'solely' or 'innocent of' and the very quote above what you concluded shows your conclusion was wrong. I do not have the language to converse with a filter like that.

You did call it a "myth" though.

 

[Rhea]

Derec, I am not going to respond to this post. You make the obvious false conclusion that I said 'all' or 'solely' or 'innocent of' and the very quote above what you concluded shows your conclusion was wrong. I do not have the language to converse with a filter like that.

You did call it a "myth" though.

Control-F seems to indicate those are your words. If it was a previous page, please link. Oh, wait, there is no previous page. The word "myth" occurs on this page 3 times. All typed by you.

Also, FYI:


For Want of a Nail

This proverb has come down in many variations over the centuries (see historical references below). It describes a situation in which a failure to anticipate or correct some initially small dysfunction leads by successively more critical stages to an egregious outcome. The rhyme thereby relates a conjectural example of the "butterfly effect," an effect studied in chaos theory, involving sensitive dependence on small differences in initial conditions.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Given that when he was 4 he took some crack with him to school I would say first and foremost family.

And how did his family get the way they are and what keeps them that way? It isn't as simple as "black people bad". It is a complicated mesh of both black people and white people and all other Americans and how they view and treat black people, and how people respond to that treatment.

As far as culture portraying black men as criminals, that is usually culture made by blacks for blacks. Gangsta rap, movies starring gangsta rappers, Medea goes to jail [] etc. In "mainstream" culture (for example crime shows) I would say blacks are portrayed less frequently as criminals than in the real life.

It is often made by black people, yes. That seems to stem from the counter-culture I noted above. People who feel hopeless within the system turn against the system, and people play the role they are told they embody. Yes, black people are just as to blame as white people or any other people in America for the "black culture" you complain of. But it isn't "black culture". It is so interweaved and tied to "white culture" that it really doesn't exist in isolation. It is American culture you need to deal with. Pretending this is only caused by black people (as you seem to be doing) or to pretend it is only caused by white people (as Athena often seems to do) will get you nowhere.

But again you have to explain why blacks commit homicide at a rate 5 times as high as whites.

I think we have. The only missing part that you may want to attach to the explanations given above is a genetic component. Always a touchy subject that, though an interesting one. I don't see any truly compelling evidence for it. I think comparing your country to others may show you that this is far more about your American culture than anything genetic. Black people where there is less race tension are not as disproportionately criminal.

 

[untermensche]

Many people are poor but do not engage in crime. Thus crime does not necessarily come with poverty.

True. Most crime is white collar crime, but most of it goes unpunished. The home mortgage crisis was the result of millions of crimes. None of which were prosecuted.

Poverty is the cause of a lot of street crime. Crime that is prosecuted vigorously.

And blacks are disproportionately poor.

Black life in the US has been criminalized in one way or another ever since the Civil War ended. Today it is done through reduced education and opportunity and the drug war.

The white culture in the US has a mental sickness. It has persecuted and tortured blacks for centuries based only on the color of their skin. Which of course does not mean that all whites participate.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I guess you are trying to say that whites commit violent crimes against blacks more often than vice versa.

Well that and white people are more likely to commit violent crimes against each other than they are against white people.

I know that is not the impression one gets from watching the news

You should probably stop watching the news.

1) Black people AS A GROUP tend to live in areas where violent crimes are more common for all residents OF those neighborhoods (also known as "the ghetto")

Choice to engage in violent crime is still the individual's responsibility.

So what? More individuals are driven to MAKE that choice due to a combination of poverty and ignorance, two things which are abundant in poor neighborhoods.

Have you considered the possibility that black people are over-represented in crime statistics BECAUSE they are over-represented in the ghetto?

These would include assault and battery, breaking in entering, vandalism and/or destruction of property, domestic violence and disorderly conduct.
All of which falls under the general category of "being loud and obnoxious and dangerously irresponsible." Behaviors which are not particularly uncommon in the ghetto.

Those are all jailable offenses.

Not in and of themselves, no. Most of them usually lead to probation or community service unless the crime is extraordinarily grievous (e.g. domestic violence involving a child).

And everything you listed except "disorderly conduct" does not fall under "being loud and obnoxious".

Of course not. They're just the basic charges that RESULT from "being loud and obnoxious," particularly in public. For example: two drunken idiots at a loud house party get into a fist fight and one of them gets slammed into a neighbor's car. That's assault and battery and disorderly conduct for both of the fighters, destruction of property for one, vandalism for the other, and possibly add a charge of domestic battery if they are relatives and/or happen to live in the same household.

Informing oneself about history !=watching a 90 min surely to be biased video that Athena linked to.

I suppose you are already familiar with the history of vagrancy laws and institutional peonage and their relevance to the socioeconomic evolution of the black community?

If not, you should probably watch the video.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I have a very specific question that I am no longer sure what the answer is. It's hard to ask, so I'll lead with a story about a childhood thought regarding cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol. I once upon a time held the view (in early grade school) that we can easily control our behavior. Thus, I thought anyone could easily quit those things just by not taking their hands and putting the things to their mouth. The part that I had wrong was thinking it's easy. Clearly, it's not easy, mostly because those things are addictions, a snippet of all behaviors that can be controlled but not necessarily easily so.

Although I hear about the propensities for certain members of our society to be more likely to commit crime, I still have a tendency to minimize and somewhat dismiss the purported reasons WHY they commit crimes, primarily because they are not addictions. The mistake I made as a kid was minimizing the stronghold the addictive chemicals had over people, and I'm wondering if I'm making a mistake in minimizing whatever stronghold underlies the kinds of criminal behavior in question now.

Most of you would likely say yes, as evidenced by discussing the history and current explanations of how things have unfolded to how things are now. I have a tendency to shrug off the non-addicive reasons (regardless of how pervasive those things have manifested) and hold steadfast to the notion that despite the historic and current circumstances, people can still control their behavior, but I am open to hearing if the ease in which it can be done is as severely overestimated as was the greatness of the mistake I made as a child.

I don't think "addiction" is the right word in this case. Rather, they haven't learned any other way of dealing with society.

Don't commit crime, obey the law, and substantially fewer heartaches will manifest. Not easy? People have a tendency to turn away from the seemingly less important issues when faced with a greater issue--rightly so. For instance, as an example, if a white cop unjustifiably shoots a fleeing black person, a typical comment made is that he wouldn't have been shot had he not run. Of course, such a comment is almost invariably irrelevant, as the central core issue has more to do with the unjustifible act of the officer, and as such, a sensible rebuttal to what is relevant at the time is that he wouldn't have been shot had the officer never acted unjustifiably.

But rarely are the shootings shown to be unjustified. Rather, the black community claims all police shootings of blacks are unjustified no matter what the facts.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think it may be a phenomenon similar to learned helplessness. Blacks were enslaved in your country, and are still today stereotyped as criminals and thugs and gangsters. Many live in poverty. That needs to change. Keep telling a kid he's a thug, and he'll very likely become one. Expectations often become reality. And poverty only speeds that along.

Except the criminal problems came mostly after the end of the discrimination.

It has created a culture of learned helplessness that will persist no matter how fair things are made, even when affirmative action stuff ("reverse " discrimination) is put into place. I think your society through both media and public attitude programs that black means downtrodden (even in those who are not), and many don't see hope of rising out of this, and that turns into an anti-social counter-culture in many black youths, celebrating taking down whitey and leading to just as dangerous a racism in the other direction, celebrating of gangsta lifestyle, etc. That's what I see from the outside looking in. And the more you all (and by you all I mean Americans, not black or white ones) focus on race as relevant and important, the longer it will take you to overcome the racism in both directions.

Definitely agree.

Denying it can run both directions hampers you as well. When people like Athena here get up on their high horse about how white people are racist and black people can't be, that does more harm than good. When "Black Lives Matter" people mouth off at people who say "All lives matter" that also does you more harm than good. So long as you focus on your differences and your tribes of black and white, instead of on how you are all people, all fallible and susceptible to tribalism and racism, and all with the same needs and hopes, etc, you won't fix this. You need to draw on people's sense of empathy and similarity, not on their tribalism and differences.

I have long said the leaders of such movements should get honorary KKK membership.

Integration is key. I oppose affirmative action type stuff because I think it does more harm than good (it endorses racism), but the integration aspect of it is a positive. There must be other ways you can encourage integration. If the black guy and white guy are playing sports on the same team, or working on the same project, or going to the same church, etc, they are far less likely to continue racist sentiments, and that is the first step towards ending racism.

And we won't see integration so long as we have a bunch of people trying to stir up racial hatred.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When a 15 year old carjacks somebody at gunpoint it is hard for me to see how "white culture" is responsible for that.

Start by seeing American culture instead of white or black culture. That 15 year old probably grew up with the image from American culture, media, friends, enemies, school, etc that black males are criminals. He probably grew up in a neighbourhood and with friends and neighbours that encouraged him to identify with his street or his group/gang/etc and to lack connection or empathy for those not in his group. So he decided to play his role. How is that "white" culture or "black" culture? That is both mixed together. It is American culture, if culture had any factor here at all. Could be he was just a bad apple regardless of race.

He didn't try to make it racial, you did.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So "white culture" creates black crime, but "black culture" is innocent of it?

[...]

Before anyone has a right to say "black culture causes crime" they need to first either eliminate the white culture contribution and see what difference is actually left, or they need to speak to the white culture contribution and address both in the same breath.

What you are doing is focusing solely on "white culture" while a priori calling any contribution by "black culture" a myth.

Derec, I am not going to respond to this post. You make the obvious false conclusion that I said 'all' or 'solely' or 'innocent of' and the very quote above what you concluded shows your conclusion was wrong. I do not have the language to converse with a filter like that.

I said white culture has a "strong hand in it" how you can take that to mean "has the only hand in it" is quite beyond me. So - no response is available to your post.

I'm afraid it looks like you're trying to blame whites for things blacks have done. Some of us don't buy that. If your side is right you're actually saying blacks are inferior people that aren't responsible for their actions. Is that what you want?!?!

 

[Axulus]

Many people are poor but do not engage in crime. Thus crime does not necessarily come with poverty.

True. Most crime is white collar crime, but most of it goes unpunished. The home mortgage crisis was the result of millions of crimes. None of which were prosecuted.

Poverty is the cause of a lot of street crime. Crime that is prosecuted vigorously.

And blacks are disproportionately poor.

Black life in the US has been criminalized in one way or another ever since the Civil War ended. Today it is done through reduced education and opportunity and the drug war.

The white culture in the US has a mental sickness. It has persecuted and tortured blacks for centuries based only on the color of their skin. Which of course does not mean that all whites participate.

Then why has education never before been better for blacks, with record percentages graduating and entering college than ever before in the history of the united states?

The crimes being committed are also trending towards lows not seen since the 60's.

Prison populations are FINALLY dropping as well (although we have much further to go)

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

American culture has cultivated an image of the black man as criminal and violent for decades, perhaps a century. You are not going to undo that overnight, and it is going to continue to evoke continued problems even once things are made fair. It will especially persist if you do nothing to undo it.

 

[Trausti]

Before political correctness made noticing a thought crime:

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7DhFhzkjcA[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Horatio Parker]

Do you have a tl;dw summary of the video? After all, it's almost an hour and a half.

Former slave owners used corrupt justice and prison system to continue slavery until 1940s. And federal government did not do much to stop it.
Pretty depressing documentary.

Yes.

 

[Rhea]

So "white culture" creates black crime, but "black culture" is innocent of it?

[...]

Before anyone has a right to say "black culture causes crime" they need to first either eliminate the white culture contribution and see what difference is actually left, or they need to speak to the white culture contribution and address both in the same breath.

What you are doing is focusing solely on "white culture" while a priori calling any contribution by "black culture" a myth.

Derec, I am not going to respond to this post. You make the obvious false conclusion that I said 'all' or 'solely' or 'innocent of' and the very quote above what you concluded shows your conclusion was wrong. I do not have the language to converse with a filter like that.

I said white culture has a "strong hand in it" how you can take that to mean "has the only hand in it" is quite beyond me. So - no response is available to your post.

I'm afraid it looks like you're trying to blame whites for things blacks have done. Some of us don't buy that. If your side is right you're actually saying blacks are inferior people that aren't responsible for their actions. Is that what you want?!?!

Don't be afraid. Be aware. Yes, white culture _is_ to blame in part for the poverty and trauma that black americans have faced. IN very large part. I know you ignore it. I know you think Jim Crow and lynchings would have no effect on the psyche of the people whose family members died, were jailed, were beaten, were kept from voting. I realize you think they just magically wake up the next day and all the feelings are gone and it's just rainbows and fucking unicorns for them in America.

Just like soldiers who suffer PTSD from war would just wake up and be all better when they come home and have absolutely NO trouble with the law or getting jobs or anything, and you don't support giving those soldiers any medical benefits because they need to just man-up and have a work ethic, right? They have choices, right? Just, get better, soldier!

'Cause I know that "some of you don't buy" this idea that actions onto other people have consequences back to society.

I am NOT saying that people who are black are "inferior people" any more than I am saying soldiers who have suffered in combat are "inferior people". They aren't. They benefit from support to overcome shit that life has thrown at them, shit that you and I cannot imagine, to contribute to their potential and to grow to their potential. Shit that, in the case of many millions of black Americans, has been thrown by white America.

Not every black person, not every soldier (or rape victim, or person bankrupted by medical bills or person who saw a loved one killed or had a provider taken away on cuffs for no real reason...) But the problem is there and it's real and yes it is very much at the feet of the culture that allows or even encourages those acts.

I know you "don't buy that." It must feel just way too comfy wrapped up in the cocoon of your ivory tower to have any concept of the daily life of a person who is black in America.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Don't be afraid. Be aware. Yes, white culture _is_ to blame in part for the poverty and trauma that black americans have faced. IN very large part. I know you ignore it.

It isn't "white culture" any more than gang thug life or being violent is "black culture".

 

[untermensche]

True. Most crime is white collar crime, but most of it goes unpunished. The home mortgage crisis was the result of millions of crimes. None of which were prosecuted.

Poverty is the cause of a lot of street crime. Crime that is prosecuted vigorously.

And blacks are disproportionately poor.

Black life in the US has been criminalized in one way or another ever since the Civil War ended. Today it is done through reduced education and opportunity and the drug war.

The white culture in the US has a mental sickness. It has persecuted and tortured blacks for centuries based only on the color of their skin. Which of course does not mean that all whites participate.

Then why has education never before been better for blacks, with record percentages graduating and entering college than ever before in the history of the united states?

The crimes being committed are also trending towards lows not seen since the 60's.

Prison populations are FINALLY dropping as well (although we have much further to go)

What is the percentage of blacks graduating college compared to whites? What has it been?

This is not because blacks are in any way inferior.

It is because they and their descendants have been oppressed as a group.

Which again is not to say every black person is oppressed or every white person is an oppressor, but if all your recent ancestors without break were oppressed you will bear the result of that oppression.

 

[bleubird]

There are a lot more whites than blacks in this country and thus you have to look at per capita rates, not raw numbers.

and blacks AS A GROUP are more likely to be involved in (not always perpetrators of) violent crimes.

I guess you are trying to say that whites commit violent crimes against blacks more often than vice versa. But at least when when it comes to homicides, black on white homicides are more twice as likely as the reverse, according to FBI. I know that is not the impression one gets from watching the news, where race is emphasized with white-on-black crime but downplayed with black-on-white crime and even less from BLM activists who spew nonsense about there being "open season" or even "genocide" on blacks and how they are afraid of walking down the street because they are afraid of whites and/or police when vast majority of homicides with black victims happen at the hand of black civilians.

Those two distinctions are important because

you like playing fast and loose with statistics like ignoring overall population numbers. Same nonsense has been frequently attempted with food stamp recipients as well, comparing raw numbers only and coming to invalid - but politically correct - conclusions.

1) Black people AS A GROUP tend to live in areas where violent crimes are more common for all residents OF those neighborhoods (also known as "the ghetto")

Choice to engage in violent crime is still the individual's responsibility. Plenty of 16 year olds living in poverty do not choose rob people at gunpoint.

2) Police reporting does not always distinguish between the perpetrator and the victim of a violent crime, as in the case of, say, a fist fight or a road range incident where BOTH subjects may be charged with assault.

And what effect do you think that has on crime breakdown by race?

It's also worth pointing out -- again -- that black people are not being INCARCERATED at high rates for violent crimes, which implies that most of the "violent crimes" black people are charged with are not jailable offenses.

I do not understand what you mean here.

These would include assault and battery, breaking in entering, vandalism and/or destruction of property, domestic violence and disorderly conduct.
All of which falls under the general category of "being loud and obnoxious and dangerously irresponsible." Behaviors which are not particularly uncommon in the ghetto.

Those are all jailable offenses. Whether or not they are "not uncommon in the ghetto". And everything you listed except "disorderly conduct" does not fall under "being loud and obnoxious".

- - - Updated - - -

Derec will never make the effort to inform himself of the history of this nation.

Informing oneself about history !=watching a 90 min surely to be biased video that Athena linked to.

The root of the word ignorant is ignore.
So keep on being....

 

[laughing dog]

Don't be afraid. Be aware. Yes, white culture _is_ to blame in part for the poverty and trauma that black americans have faced. IN very large part. I know you ignore it.

It isn't "white culture" any more than gang thug life or being violent is "black culture".

White people dominated the political and social spheres of this country for centuries. So, it is USA white culture.

 

[ronburgundy]

The irony of the OP video is that the implications and effects of the events it details are ignored but both white supremacists and anti-racism activists.
Many generations of race-based mistreatment in the past is a distal and indirect cause of current criminal behavior that is mediated by the more proximal factors which include both SES and familial and cultural beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions inherently shaped by that history and which enable criminal behaviors.
White supremacists want to ignore this because history is still environment and and that undermines their efforts to make genetic causal attributions. Leftist activists, including many BLMers, want to ignore this implication because history is already over and cannot be changed, only the proximal causes can be changed and this explanation acknowledges that many of those reside in the the minds of black people themselves. When the political goal is not to fix the problem of crime disparities, but to attack racism, then any explanation that doesn't presume racism as the most immediate and thus "fixable" cause is ignored or actively denied.
We see this all the time, including on this board, every time statistical differences in traffic stops, searches, or arrests are used as evidence of racism on the part of the officers involved in those interactions. That invalid inference presumes no actual difference in behaviors that would warrant stops, searches, or arrests. When this objection is raised, the response is usually "So, you are saying that black people are inherently more criminal?". That response shows myopic denial of the impact of historical events on current conditions and psychology that produces the unlawful behaviors.

This absurd denial also underlies efforts to deny that black American differ on average in relevant ways regarding their beliefs, attitudes, and reactions to situations that would impact unlawful behaviors. It is at the heart of the whole strawman "anything but racism" meme, in which any effort to identify actual proximal causes other than direct racism of the people involved, even when the distal causes of past racism are explicitly acknowledged, is met with derision and false claims that the speaker is denial the existence of racism rather than just engaging in rational thought and considering the plausibility of various complex causal models of human behavior.
We see a manifestation of this here and in other threads where any mention of SES rather than racism as the proximal causal factor is attacked as though it is a denial of racism, rather than recognizing the various pathways by which racism can have an impact, which is critical for the efficacy for any efforts to change the outcome.