Racial Behavior

[Rhea]

Please be gentle with me, here. I'm exploring a question that occurs to me. I'm not trying to assert a thesis and make everyone admit I am right. I'm asking. Please answer productively. If you want to call me a racist, it's probably true given how I've been raised, so that's not useful dialogue. Instead, please understand that this question is a genuine question and if it turns out to be racist (as in purely useless racism) than let me know what's wrong with it so I can discard it. Because I don't intend this to actually suppose "race" is the "driver" of this, but rather the recipient, and hence worth addressing.

Anyway, that said...


It is said in studies that one of the strongest risk indicators for abusers (of many kinds) is childhood abuse. That people who grow up in terrible environments are likely to repeat the thing that was normalized to them. Not everyone of course, because this is not genetic (hence my claim that this is not actually about race, yet race becomes a proxy) and some people who grow up in abuse are able to get whatever help is necessary to break the cycle. That could be family support elsewhere, it could be decent schooling that provides some counseling or escape. It could be certain circumstances that normalize some _other_ behavior, such as a normal uncle's house as refuge, a dedicated teacher, a job with a fostering boss, or even a place and time that allows safe internal contemplation for balance, etc. But for a large portion of people who commit abuse and violence and inappropriate response, they grew up in normalized abuse.

It is given that most of the people in America who are black have some group history of receiving abuse.

Those who were brought to America as slaves of course received constant daily degradation, some with brutal physical abuse. Others with brutal emotional abuse such as the taking of children and selling them away. This exists a mere 3-8 generations back depending on how old one currently is. My own grandfather was born in the 1800s and he was in my house as I was growing up, so the direct link between the behaviors he grew up with from parents who were alive during slavery were told with only a single remove to me as I grew up. In many families, this grandparent influence is strong, thus shrinking the distance of history. Other families have shorter generations and hence my number of 3-8. These abused people had children and reared them. And isn't it expected that an environment tainted by abuse will exist in that next generation's childhood?

Even closer is the also real abuse of the Jim Crow era, the segregation of the military, schools, jobs opportunities that occurred throughout the first part of the 20th century. These things are current for many people alive, and are therefore present in the racial collective as both personal experience and the direct experience of caregivers. Lynchings, systemic racial robberies, social and police abuse.

And the current abuse is still real for certain segments of that American black population. Many people who are black in America have experienced it, but definitely some more than others; typically urban populations have more constant and more violent experiences at the hands of police, even when they have done nothing at all wrong.

===

Now we ask, WHY do some people see a "racial behavior" that they claim is "inferior"? Is this not precisely the same question as WHY do we see common behaviors of people who were abused as children? Not universal, obviously, but strongly correlated?

Rather than account for differences in socio-economic status, what would we find if we "accounted for" differences in experience of abusive practices?

And then shouldn't we ask, WHY do we blame the victims of abuse for not knowing how and when to seek the help necessary to break the cycle?

Why are we asking, "where are their parents" (e.g. Baltimore Riots) when the parents are also victims of the same cycle? How are those parents going to magically change history? If we really want to solve the problem, that is; both help victims heal and also help society avoid fallout from unhealed victims of abuse who become perpetrators, if we really want to solve that, shouldn't we be taking a different tack than shaking our fingers at some construct we carelessly call racially bad parenting? Why do we expect that people who are abused will universally not be harmed by it and never pass on that environment to their children, even subconsciously?

Don't we instead need to stop normalizing violence in these groups? Provide safe places to re-normalize non-violence, safety, education?

Whatever the steps are to help abused children heal from their trauma and reduce the odds of them retaining those behaviors as normal, whatever those steps are, have they ever been offered for healing of the black American experience?

 

[Rhea]

And oddly, many of those saying "where are the parents?" are celebrating this video of a mother using violence against her son to stop him from using violence!

 

[Bronzeage]

I think the neglected factor in this problem is that economic strata is as much a correlation as race. I don't have any studies at hand to present, but my observation are if one examines the family life of poor working class whites, one will find very much the same levels of domestic abuse, child abuse, the same likelihood of being a crime victim(for every criminal, there is a victim), etc. If intergenerational violence seems to be more prevalent in black families, the more likely culprit is a culture of poverty.

Of course, this is a very old idea.

 

[Rhea]

I think the neglected factor in this problem is that economic strata is as much a correlation as race. I don't have any studies at hand to present, but my observation are if one examines the family life of poor working class whites, one will find very much the same levels of domestic abuse, child abuse, the same likelihood of being a crime victim(for every criminal, there is a victim), etc. If intergenerational violence seems to be more prevalent in black families, the more likely culprit is a culture of poverty.

Of course, this is a very old idea.

Are you saying that abused rich kids have lower odds of becoming abusers? I thought it was fairly constant?

 

[Kharakov]

Whatever the steps are to help abused children heal from their trauma and reduce the odds of them retaining those behaviors as normal, whatever those steps are, have they ever been offered for healing of the black American experience?

If you're referring to the riots, instead of peaceful protests, there are assholes in every group who happen to be ~16-32 years of age. When you've got what's perceived as an excuse to do stuff and get some street cred, it's going to happen.

I've seen riots first hand, and not all of the riots attached themselves parasitically to social movements, some were just people being assholes.

 

[Bronzeage]

I think the neglected factor in this problem is that economic strata is as much a correlation as race. I don't have any studies at hand to present, but my observation are if one examines the family life of poor working class whites, one will find very much the same levels of domestic abuse, child abuse, the same likelihood of being a crime victim(for every criminal, there is a victim), etc. If intergenerational violence seems to be more prevalent in black families, the more likely culprit is a culture of poverty.

Of course, this is a very old idea.

Are you saying that abused rich kids have lower odds of becoming abusers? I thought it was fairly constant?

No, I am saying rich kids are less likely to be physically abused. They are also less likely to be black. Scott Fitzgerald was right about that part.

If one looks at the rate of home violence in a racial group, without considering economic factors, the statistics will be skewed toward the largest economic strata of that group.

Consider a different grouping than race. Imagine two counties in the same state. County A is 75% working class poor and County B is 75% upper middle class.

Would anyone be surprised to find a higher rate of domestic violence in County A? The emotional vacuum found in the families of County B does not show up in the statistics. The racial make up of the counties is irrelevant.

 

[Rhea]

Whatever the steps are to help abused children heal from their trauma and reduce the odds of them retaining those behaviors as normal, whatever those steps are, have they ever been offered for healing of the black American experience?

If you're referring to the riots, instead of peaceful protests, there are assholes in every group who happen to be ~16-32 years of age. When you've got what's perceived as an excuse to do stuff and get some street cred, it's going to happen.

I've seen riots first hand, and not all of the riots attached themselves parasitically to social movements, some were just people being assholes.

Well the riots sparked my post because many people commenting are saying "better parenting!", but the thought of generational violence has been percolating in my head for some time. And Bron's correct, the idea is not new especially the link to socioeconomic status and all of those studies have been part of that stew.

I was particularly exploring the idea that the "racial link" is not strictly the poverty neighborhoods that are more often filled with people who are black, but rather that there is a physical abuse factor that is pretty well known that children raised in violence will more likely act violent AND THAT much of the violence that children who are black have received over various generations in America is either from a system that is white or at the hands of someone whose own childhood was steeped in violence from the hands of a system that is white.

So I'm exploring the idea that the alleged higher rate of violence in americans who are black is interesting to consider in the context of the well known correlation of victimhood begetting perpetrators.

 

[fromderinside]

Impoverished are the Canaries in our social structure. Right now they tend to be blacks. In the past they're revolts, LA, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, Miami, etc. failed to galvanize people to get our nation back on a middle class preferring track. Maybe this time .... politics deciding ethics and morality ... again.

 

[Perspicuo]

Generally, the original British settlers to what later became the US, were "unskilled" workers, basically farmers, some of which got to N.A. by means of indentured slavery. Later, the immigrants from northern Europe were skilled workers whose only vicitmization was unemployment.

That explains certain things, as most Northern Europeans went to Yankeeland and formed part of the core middle class (thoroughly meltingpot-ed) while Dixie remained mostly insular farmers and highlanders.

Impoverished are the Canaries in our social structure. Right now they tend to be blacks. In the past they're revolts, LA, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, Miami, etc. failed to galvanize people to get our nation back on a middle class preferring track. Maybe this time .... politics deciding ethics and morality ... again.

It used to be whites versus whites, but racism filtered out blacks from upward mobility (the so-called "American" dream).

 

[ApostateAbe]

Very good thoughts, Rhea. You say, "Not everyone of course, because this is not genetic..." However, it is a fallacy to assume that the existence of a genetic component to violence would mean that EVERYONE with the genes would be violent. The truth is intermediate. If there are genes for violence, then having them merely makes you MORE LIKELY to be violent. And, in fact, it turns out that there are genes for variations in violence (many of them, not just one).

The plausibility of the genetic cause of racial differences in violence is an elephant in the room, a taboo that dare not be mentioned in civil company, in favor of explanations that are more difficult on the face. The elephant in the room has our implicit attention, but the house cat in the room gets our explicit words. Can the patterns of abuse and violence in the American black community really be fully attributed to a cultural tradition that started with slavery? If so, then what sustains this tradition? Cultures evolve. Why is this one so persistent?

There is a further reason why the elephant has plausibility. You don't have to believe it. But, you can understand why it is plausible, with this proven premise: variations in violent behavior among people really are half genetic. How do we know? Identical twins reared in different households have a correlation of 0.5. If one twin is criminally violent, then the other twin is more likely to be criminally violent. To give you a rough idea, the scatter plot looks something like this, with each twin pair being Twin A and Twin B. The violent behavior of each Twin A is the horizontal axis, and the violent behavior of each Twin B is the vertical axis.

(generated using http://www.alcula.com/calculators/statistics/scatter-plot/)

For an example of a study that gives such a heritability estimate, see Cadoret et al's "Twin Imitation for Antisocial Behavior: Implications for Genetic and Family Environment Research," 1995.

This does NOT prove that differences in violent behavior between races is due to genetics. However, such data makes such thinking plausible. It is what makes the awkward elephant an elephant, not just a house cat.

 

[ApostateAbe]

On a related note, this heritability data very much helps to explain why "...one of the strongest risk indicators for abusers (of many kinds) is childhood abuse." Violent people not only inherited the violent learned behavior from their parents but also the violent genes, and in fact the violent genes have greater relevance. The "blank slate" perspective (that genetic variations in human psychology do not exist) is very common but vastly conflicting with the evidence.

 

[ronburgundy]

Plausible theory. It certainly makes some theoretical sense that if a sub-culture is physically abused over generations, then the use of physical punishment between members of that sub-culture would become more prevalent and that such an impact would last for many generations.

Also, a culture of authoritarianism also physical abuse, and the black community generally embraces more authoritarian styles of parenting, governance, theology, etc.. They are closer to right-wing conservative whites in these regards. IOW, hitting kids is part of a larger orientation that cannot be modified with simple parenting classes.

OTOH, Bronzeage is right that physical punishment is highly tied to SES, and it is not clear that SES wouldn't be enough to account for nearly all the difference in rates of physical punishment between blacks and whites. Although it is plausible that SES predicts such forms of parenting more strongly among whites than it does among blacks. This would indicate that something independent of immediate SES factors is impacting these tendencies among blacks but not among whites, and that something could be the cultural history of being abused by a dominant culture.

Your OP speaks about "blame", but that is a complex issue that cuts both ways. Identifying culturally internalized harmful and destructive behaviors stemming from historical experiences lessens the blame on the decedents of that historical victimization. However, it also lessens the blame on current society and current members of the dominant ethnic group. Your theory only makes sense if it also makes sense that this tendency toward violence also manifests as violence toward other people in general, not just one's kids. IOW, it argues that African-Americans are in fact generally more prone to criminal violence, not from biology, but from a sub-culture grounded in history. Current society is also less to blame for it, and current society must still deal with that violence and enforce its laws, which will inherently land more blacks in jail and in violent confrontation with cops, and not because the cops are being racist.

Any acceptance of your thesis requires equal consideration for such causal factors underlying other current outcome disparities, which means that the simple numerical disparities do not provide any evidence themselves of current racist mistreatment, but rather are merely the thing to be explained which could quite plausibly be due to fair reactions to differences in behavior that have their roots in historical differences in treatment by long ago dead people and no longer enacted policies. This is problematic for activists seeking to point to modern racism, since mere outcome disparities are usually their main and often only form of evidence for particular claims of racism.

As to the "better parenting" statement you are partly reacting to, this account doesn't wholly avoid that charge. The proximal cause in your account is in fact parenting and other forms of interpersonal violence engaged in by blacks that transfer those tendencies to the next generation. The past and its distal causal influence cannot be undone. Only the future instances of the proximal causes (i.e., parenting) can be modified to hasten the dissipation of the current effects of that history. We can acknowledge the external distal causes and thus the need for external resources as critical to the remedy, but ultimately it is in fact parenting and other aspects of the sub-culture that must be changed for the outcomes to change. Also, change to those actions is implausible unless they are viewed as morally wrong and shameful within the culture and no matter how that is framed it will smell and feel like blame and accountability for those engaged in those actions, no matter the distal cause. After all, there is no free will. Thus, every person who acts unethically could ultimately point to distal causes that made them more likely than others to do it. If recognizing distal causality for behavioral differences eliminates blame, then we have no basis for ethics or social enforcement of them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think the neglected factor in this problem is that economic strata is as much a correlation as race. I don't have any studies at hand to present, but my observation are if one examines the family life of poor working class whites, one will find very much the same levels of domestic abuse, child abuse, the same likelihood of being a crime victim(for every criminal, there is a victim), etc. If intergenerational violence seems to be more prevalent in black families, the more likely culprit is a culture of poverty.

Of course, this is a very old idea.

Second this. Almost always when you apply proper controls for socioeconomic status you find race drops out of the picture as a factor.

- - - Updated - - -

Very good thoughts, Rhea. You say, "Not everyone of course, because this is not genetic..." However, it is a fallacy to assume that the existence of a genetic component to violence would mean that EVERYONE with the genes would be violent. The truth is intermediate. If there are genes for violence, then having them merely makes you MORE LIKELY to be violent. And, in fact, it turns out that there are genes for variations in violence (many of them, not just one).

The plausibility of the genetic cause of racial differences in violence is an elephant in the room, a taboo that dare not be mentioned in civil company, in favor of explanations that are more difficult on the face. The elephant in the room has our implicit attention, but the house cat in the room gets our explicit words. Can the patterns of abuse and violence in the American black community really be fully attributed to a cultural tradition that started with slavery? If so, then what sustains this tradition? Cultures evolve. Why is this one so persistent?

There is a further reason why the elephant has plausibility. You don't have to believe it. But, you can understand why it is plausible, with this proven premise: variations in violent behavior among people really are half genetic. How do we know? Identical twins reared in different households have a correlation of 0.5. If one twin is criminally violent, then the other twin is more likely to be criminally violent. To give you a rough idea, the scatter plot looks something like this, with each twin pair being Twin A and Twin B. The violent behavior of each Twin A is the horizontal axis, and the violent behavior of each Twin B is the vertical axis.

(generated using http://www.alcula.com/calculators/statistics/scatter-plot/)

For an example of a study that gives such a heritability estimate, see Cadoret et al's "Twin Imitation for Antisocial Behavior: Implications for Genetic and Family Environment Research," 1995.

This does NOT prove that differences in violent behavior between races is due to genetics. However, such data makes such thinking plausible. It is what makes the awkward elephant an elephant, not just a house cat.

There's nothing to suggest the bad genes are more common in any particular race.

 

[ApostateAbe]

There's nothing to suggest the bad genes are more common in any particular race.

Nothing? There's something. It isn't enough to mean absolute certainty, but it is something, enough to create plausibility, a respectable plausibility if not for the taboo. That something is a combination of points: the confirmed within-group heritability of violent behavior, the confirmed significant racial variations of frequencies all other genotypes known to vary within races, and the confirmed racial differences in violent behavior. The hypothesis will be either certainly confirmed or certainly disproved with the mapping of the genes for violent behavior among races, and I think we need to be prepared for the confirmation. The disproof would actually be exceptionally unlikely. We care for equality, but nature cares not.

 

[Bronzeage]

There's nothing to suggest the bad genes are more common in any particular race.

Nothing? There's something. It isn't enough to mean absolute certainty, but it is something, enough to create plausibility, a respectable plausibility if not for the taboo. That something is a combination of points: the confirmed within-group heritability of violent behavior, the confirmed significant racial variations of frequencies all other genotypes known to vary within races, and the confirmed racial differences in violent behavior. The hypothesis will be either certainly confirmed or certainly disproved with the mapping of the genes for violent behavior among races, and I think we need to be prepared for the confirmation. The disproof would actually be exceptionally unlikely. We care for equality, but nature cares not.

Damnit, Abe!

 

[Perspicuo]

Very good thoughts, Rhea. You say, "Not everyone of course, because this is not genetic..." However, it is a fallacy to assume that the existence of a genetic component to violence would mean that EVERYONE with the genes would be violent. The truth is intermediate. If there are genes for violence, then having them merely makes you MORE LIKELY to be violent. And, in fact, it turns out that there are genes for variations in violence (many of them, not just one).

The plausibility of the genetic cause of racial differences in violence is an elephant in the room, a taboo that dare not be mentioned in civil company, in favor of explanations that are more difficult on the face. The elephant in the room has our implicit attention, but the house cat in the room gets our explicit words. Can the patterns of abuse and violence in the American black community really be fully attributed to a cultural tradition that started with slavery? If so, then what sustains this tradition? Cultures evolve. Why is this one so persistent?

There is a further reason why the elephant has plausibility. You don't have to believe it. But, you can understand why it is plausible, with this proven premise: variations in violent behavior among people really are half genetic. How do we know? Identical twins reared in different households have a correlation of 0.5. If one twin is criminally violent, then the other twin is more likely to be criminally violent. To give you a rough idea, the scatter plot looks something like this, with each twin pair being Twin A and Twin B. The violent behavior of each Twin A is the horizontal axis, and the violent behavior of each Twin B is the vertical axis.

(generated using http://www.alcula.com/calculators/statistics/scatter-plot/)

For an example of a study that gives such a heritability estimate, see Cadoret et al's "Twin Imitation for Antisocial Behavior: Implications for Genetic and Family Environment Research," 1995.

This does NOT prove that differences in violent behavior between races is due to genetics. However, such data makes such thinking plausible. It is what makes the awkward elephant an elephant, not just a house cat.

Perfectly explained by skin color and other "racial" features being the cues for discrimination. Same horse, same carriage, but in inverse order, so it's still an awkward animal, most certainly a house cat being passed for an odd elephant that licks its ass after eating tuna with trunk and car-sized abdomen notoriously not getting in the way between the prickly tongue and anus.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Perfectly explained by skin color and other "racial" features being the cues for discrimination. Same horse, same carriage, but in inverse order, so it's still an awkward animal, most certainly a house cat being passed for an odd elephant that licks its ass after eating tuna with trunk and car-sized abdomen notoriously not getting in the way between the prickly tongue and anus.

The heritability studies examine identical twins (and other family pairings) WITHIN a race. Identical twins have the same skin color when born, so skin color or other "racial" features being the cues for discrimination would not seem to be relevant to explaining the within-race heritability of violent behavior. There is room for that as an explanation for why some races are more violent than others, but not as much room as we would like.

 

[ronburgundy]

The heritability studies examine identical twins (and other family pairings) WITHIN a race.

EXACTLY!! That is why those twin studies provide zero evidence related to a genetic contribution to between race differences. Which means there is no evidence of a genetic contribution to racial differences. Sure, it's "possible", which in science means nothing. In contrast, the OP presents an account that have massive evidence to support it to the point that it is not just plausible, but probable such that it would be surprising if those historical factors were not a contributor and would call into question highly validated theories of violent behavior more generally.
There is massive evidence that both being the target of and a witness to abuse and violence has a causal impact on one's own threshold for violence. There is also evidence beyond any doubt that American blacks suffered constant abuse and violence at the hands of whites for many generations and up until recently, and on a scale that no other ethnic sub-group in the US compares to (not even Native Americans who were mostly just slaughtered rather than abused). These two well established facts by themselves strongly predict that the abused history of the black community have made members of that community more likely on average to employ physical violence in their interactions, independent of the many other factors (whether genetic or environmental) that impact the variability in violence among individuals .

Taking the OP's theory seriously gives us plenty of implications to consider and plenty of the taboos you are fond of, without bringing purely speculative non-evidence supported possibilities that genetics create different violent tendencies between races. See my prior post on those controversial implications. In short, if the OP is correct, then those historical abuses predict that blacks should be more aggressive and thus more criminal on average leading to more incarceration and more violent conflicts with police that might end in their death. IOW, the observed outcome disparities are predicted and accounted for, even if current cops and the legal system are in no way racist or differential in their treatment of blacks. This means that no aggregate disparities in those outcomes can be viewed as evidence of racism or unfairness by current cops.

 

[ApostateAbe]

The heritability studies examine identical twins (and other family pairings) WITHIN a race.

EXACTLY!! That is why those twin studies provide zero evidence related to a genetic contribution to between race differences. Which means there is no evidence of a genetic contribution to racial differences. Sure, it's "possible", which in science means nothing. In contrast, the OP presents an account that have massive evidence to support it to the point that it is not just plausible, but probable such that it would be surprising if those historical factors were not a contributor and would call into question highly validated theories of violent behavior more generally.
There is massive evidence that both being the target of and a witness to abuse and violence has a causal impact on one's own threshold for violence. There is also evidence beyond any doubt that American blacks suffered constant abuse and violence at the hands of whites for many generations and up until recently, and on a scale that no other ethnic sub-group in the US compares to (not even Native Americans who were mostly just slaughtered rather than abused). These two well established facts by themselves strongly predict that the abused history of the black community have made members of that community more likely on average to employ physical violence in their interactions, independent of the many other factors (whether genetic or environmental) that impact the variability in violence among individuals .

Taking the OP's theory seriously gives us plenty of implications to consider and plenty of the taboos you are fond of, without bringing purely speculative non-evidence supported possibilities that genetics create different violent tendencies between races. See my prior post on those controversial implications. In short, if the OP is correct, then those historical abuses predict that blacks should be more aggressive and thus more criminal on average leading to more incarceration and more violent conflicts with police that might end in their death. IOW, the observed outcome disparities are predicted and accounted for, even if current cops and the legal system are in no way racist or differential in their treatment of blacks. This means that no aggregate disparities in those outcomes can be viewed as evidence of racism or unfairness by current cops.

ronburghundy, I think our ideological biases tend to excessively affect our judgments about what counts as "zero evidence" and what counts as "massive evidence." In this debate, all evidence contributes an intermediate amount of probability toward or away from one position or the other. You think that the within-group heritability of violence counts for "zero evidence" that there would be between-group heritability of violent behavior. But, suppose we we were to find an exactly zero value of within-group heritability of violence. You are likely to claim that this effectively disproves the hypothesis of between-group heritability of violence, and you would be correct! But, you cannot have both at the same time. Suppose, on the other side of the coin, that within-group violent behavior is 100% heritable. It would leave absolutely no room for the position that between-group violent behavior is merely environmental. The reality as it stands is intermediate. The within-group heritability of violence is 50%. The higher that value is, the higher the probability that the between-group differences are likewise mostly heritable. This is actually a mathematically true statement. When you go from 99% within-group heritability to 100% within-group heritability, the evidence provided for between-group heritability does not suddenly jump from 0% to 100%. Since there is 50% within-group heritability of violent behavior, then the hypothesis of between-group heritability must be confronted as though the evidence counts for something, because it really does, not dismissed as though it counts for absolutely nothing.

 

[Jokodo]

ApostateAbe, in a slightly different society, you could prove the validity of horoscopes with the very same logic you're using here to argue for a racial component to behaviour.