Originally Posted by Scissors
You're in luck, as I'm in the midst of conducting a meta-analysis on this very topic as part of an effort to teach myself R. The causes are varied and complex, but do not in any way lead to the conclusion that being black makes one commit more serious crimes, or be more likely to commit them. And, no, Blacks in the U.S. are not responsible for 95+% of "serious" crimes (a vague term to begin with).
The "Black = violent criminal" myth, like the "female wage gap" and "firearms = homicides" myths, stems largely from a gross inability for the majority of the population to understand math, much less basic to advanced statistical concepts.
The "13=52" rallying cry of racists is a raw reference to two data points--the percent of the population made up of Blacks and the percent of homicides committed by Blacks. (And if you think "13%=52%" is bad, wait until you learn that "0.24% = 5.8%". That's the percent of the population made up of Cops vs the percent of homicides committed by Cops.) But this ignores the great many causal factors that lead to this result. Let's start at the beginning…
We know that poverty is "sticky" in that people who are born into poverty are likely to still be impoverished when they have children. Violent and property crimes, due to a variety of economic factors, are more likely to be committed by those who are poor or impoverished. While Europe gets to be all self-righteous about their lower homicide and poverty rates, they also callously tossed aside their slave colonies as separate nations, and now get to conveniently exclude them from their national statistics. The U.S., on the other hand, had largely retained our enslaved population within our borders following the Civil War. And though we rightfully banned slavery, things didn't magically become easy for Blacks overnight. Many decades of racism, anti-Black legislation, and other factors ensured that poverty and myths about them would remain in place for the vast majority of their population for a very long time. There were exceptions, but outliers don't disprove trends.
Fast forward to more modern times and, while much progress has been made, it's only been a few generations and there are still other factors in play. As someone else correctly pointed out, the likelihood that one will commit homicide is strongly correlated with being raised by a single mother. Economics plays a role here as well, but also:
- Blacks are typically given longer prison sentences for equal crimes
- Blacks are more likely to be falsely imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit
- They suffer from higher conviction rates for equal crimes
- The simple fact that city populations are proportionately more Black than rural populations. Cities naturally have higher violent crime rates due to a higher density of stressors and contacts, yielding more opportunities for things to go wrong between individuals, that are also more likely to go wrong.
These factors above, combined with others, results in many Black children being raised without fathers. That lack of income source and male guidance, unsurprisingly, perpetuates cycles of poverty and violence.
There are also police-related impacts. For instance, a police officer is nearly 3,000 times more likely to kill a Black person than a Black person is to kill a police officer. Unsurprisingly, this leads to the Black community being less likely to want to call the Police, who are by far the most violent group in America. We also have a tendency for a large part of the White population to view citizens as subservient to the Government, and that the life of a police officer (who is human) is more valuable than the life of the Black person that officer kills (who is also human)--this feeds back into the false belief that Blacks deserve to be treated poorly.
We also have the bi-partisan War on Drugs, a colossal failure and waste of money. The primarily-White purchasers are given light sentences and offers of treatment, whereas the primarily-Black and -Hispanic sellers and transporters of the product are given harsh sentences and often killed, despite both groups being equally responsible for the drug trade. Simple legalization without draconian taxation would eliminate most of this issue.
Finally, there's a tendency for racists to pretend that defensive firearm usage is only something that White people do. Every Black shooting, in their mind, is yet another example of "Black violence" whereas a White person shooting someone to death to defend himself is "exercising his Constitutional rights".
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