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“It’s important to note that black men commit nearly half of all murders in the U S , which is astounding when you take into consideration the fact that they only make up 12-13 per cent of the population.”
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ust saying a white matéis more likely to get shot by the police
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You've got the right idea here and hit the nail on the head for the most part. Something else I'd like add on if I may is the cultural differences that represent the largest disparity. The White culture icons over the past 30 years have been pretty wacky but there's a fairly substantial lack in violent culture icons. Can you think of a single White Culture Icon that represents Violence? Tv, Music, Movies...anything? Maybe Rambo...he's fairly violent but he's also portrayed as being justified while he does it...there's also no cultural celebration over Rambo's violent nature.
Now look at Black Cultural Icons. Specifically let's look at Thug culture and how dominant it's been over the past 30 years. Look at the celebration and overwhelming praise given to those who promote and glorify violent and degenerate behavior. F$#% the police, treat Women like objects, the most important thing in life is getting paid and having respect, spending extravagantly defines your character...the list goes on and on. Make sure you take advantage of drugs and using them is awesome.....
I happen to enjoy Rap and Hip-hop music...but unfortunately the staggering majority of Rap and Hip-hop music is centralized around generally bad behavior and the promotion of it. Now I don't condone blaming music for anything...that's just not how we solve problems and shucking off responsibility makes things worse. That being said...the two cultures and their staggering difference cannot be ignored.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5390075
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=4569665&page=1
"There's going to be a special place in Hell for people who spread lies through the veil of logical fallacies disguised as rational argument".
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They tend to be richer. This is not a coincidence to their lawyer-quality.
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So, to put everything together, the poverty and bad economic situation lead to more crime meaning they will commit more murders and crime.
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin So flat Earthers, man-made climate change deniers, and just science deniers.
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If rich people kill poor people, easy to get away with. Opposite, impossible to get away with.
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“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin So flat Earthers, man-made climate change deniers, and just science deniers.
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“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin So flat Earthers, man-made climate change deniers, and just science deniers.
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I care only of the truth.
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Where was the crime the biggest, in the upper classes or in the lower classes? The answer is obvious. Dirty peasants and craftsmen who could barely feed their families did not have any future to look forward to, they had nothing to lose. The criminal culture was rising from these factors. While the aristocrats spent all time having fun on parties or enjoying art galleries, the near-starving plebs were looking for ways to make their lives a little bit less miserable and hopeless and took on criminal activities, starting with simple bribes and going all the way up to waging gang wars for the sparse goods looted from slaughtered merchants and nobles.
Eventually, feudalism collapsed and gave way to a more horizontal structure, where most people had a chance to gain a lot of wealth by legitimate means. Did people immediately jump to that opportunity though? Of course not. Centuries of boiling at the bottom of the pot, looking for every possible opportunity to get a tiny bit richer or to vent one's frustration through violence, as well as the fact that collapse of feudalism didn't magically redistribute the societal wealth equally and the poor still remained poor - made sure that the problem of crime at the bottom was perpetuated.
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It is no different in the US with the black population. For the vast majority of American history, blacks were either slaves, or, at least, a heavily discriminated extremely poor group. Civil right movements in 60-s and 70-s changed the legal status quo, and by now, I would say, the societal biases have always changed significantly and racism is not as prevalent in the society any more - however, you cannot undo the centuries of conditioning in a few decades. The crime rates among the black population are so much higher not because of their race in itself, but because of where history led them to. People whose parents grew up in segregation, where crime was widespread, are not going to be able to break off that lifestyle easily. A long period of time is required for the created opportunities to erase the shameful past, and until then that past will always influence the decision-making process of the affected social groups.
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I happen to love that episode of Adam Ruins Everything. Take a guess at which political party was responsible for the creation of Redlining.
"There's going to be a special place in Hell for people who spread lies through the veil of logical fallacies disguised as rational argument".
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I have significant issues with the statistics at hand. For one thing, how do we necessarily know that every black person convicted of a crime is necessarily guilty? It is well documented that people belonging to the minority in the US have less resources. The Pew Research Center elaborates, showing that black Americans make less per hour compared to white Americans even when accounting for educational attainment (1).
In fact, the pay gap for black Americans is growing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1979, black men typically earned 80% of what a white man earned. In 2016, the gap widened to black men earning 70% of what a white man earns (2). The lack of resources has a lot to do with my skepticism regarding the outcome of so many murder cases as it leads to them relying on public defenders for representation in court. A local news station in Idaho reported on a draft study by the Idaho Public Defense Commission which found that public defenders in Idaho have only 4 hours on each felony case despite estimating a necessary 38 hours to provide effective legal counsel. Private attorneys surveyed reported a necessary 68 hours on each felony case (3). This is not a problem isolated to Idaho either, as the American Bar Assoc. created a report that highlights this issue and found that low pay, excessive reliance on plea deals due to inexperienced lawyering, and massive caseloads pervade through the entirety of the country’s public defenders. (4) With limited money available, is it any wonder why many black people are found guilty regardless of the truth? They are forced to rely on sub-par lawyers as opposed to private sector employees who demand higher pay for higher quality service. In fact, the comparison of wrongly convicted white and black defendants is quantified by the University of Michigan when they find:
“…innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people (5).”
The report goes further, exposing internal corruption within many of these murder trials due to misconduct of the police. Witness tampering, for instance, occurred in 21% of murder exonerations with white defendants but in 39% of those with black defendants (5). Of course, we know about this official misconduct, and many are released after this information comes to light. Take the case of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, 2 people who were accused of raping and killing 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. Both were intellectually disabled and confessed under pressure from police while there was no physical evidence linking them to the crime scene. It wasn’t until 2010 when it was found that a cigarette butt at the scene of the crime matched the profile of Roscoe Artis, a proven serial murderer who was executed for raping and killing an 18 year old in the same county about a month after McCollum and Brown confessed. Not only was Artis a suspect in the original case, but:
“…police had asked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations to compare the fingerprints found on beer cans at the crime to those of Artis—but they hid that request from the defense. The authorities also concealed the fact that a witness who testified at trial that McCollum and Brown had admitted to the murder, had not only previously denied knowing anything about the case, but had taken a lie detector test that confirmed his denial (5).”
This is not even accounting for implicit biases that would affect those on the jury who have a final say over someone’s guilt. The APA conducted a study which asked participants to look at phots of young black and white athletes. White participants and black participants alike believed, despite the athletes being shown to have similar builds, that black athletes were more muscular and physically imposing (6). This sort of bias is going to change the subjective perception of the defendant, resulting in convictions based on nothing more than looks. This is one of the reasons people use to justify why more white defendants are likely to be dismissed of charges because they have had their crimes adjudicated as “justifiable homicide.” This is showcased by The Marshall Project in 2017, where they find:
“In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Overall, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable. The disparity persists across different cities, different ages, different weapons and different relationships between killer and victim.”
People may not even know that they perceive black people differently. After all, the idea of prejudice is considered taboo in American society. As a result, this goes unaddressed and people are convicted on dubious charges spawning from nothing but appearances.
Ergo, we cannot necessarily guarantee that the current statistics regarding homicides committed by black people are accurate. The lack of representation coupled with disproportionate misconduct issues and implicit biases put a damper on any official statistics regarding homicide. This is not to completely disregard the statistics at hand. I am not the type of person to follow the mantra of "if I do not agree with it, then it must be fake news." Rather, I am considering whether these statistics tell the full story. It would be a shame for people to come to the completely illogical conclusion that black people are necessarily more violent and ignore other factors at play.
1. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/01/racial-gender-wage-gaps-persist-in-u-s-despite-some-progress/
2. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/beyond-bls/the-unexplainable-growing-black-white-wage-gap.htm
3. https://www.kpvi.com/news/local_news/idaho-public-defenders-get-just-hours-a-case/article_8aa51f5c-110e-11e8-bce1-230f5abe5204.html
4.https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_aid_indigent_defendants/ls_sclaid_def_bp_right_to_counsel_in_criminal_proceedings.authcheckdam.pdf
5. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf
6. http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000092.pdf
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The irony is that most of the victims are also black. Liberals complain about the miniscule number of blacks shot by police, yet completely ignore the fact that most blacks are killed by other blacks. Where's the outrage?
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I read an interesting post on Quora from a black woman who lived in Canada and visited the US on a business trip. She was shocked by how different black communities operated in the US compared to Canada, and even how people treated her. In Canada, she says, your skin color is not very important, and blacks in general act and think the same way as everyone else. However, in the US she encountered a very prejudiced attitude from people who expected her to speak "Ebonics" and were not ready to see an intelligently well-spoken business-lady, and speaking to other black people and seeing their communities, she understood why, because they were nothing like what she was used to. She could not relate to them, she did not understand their customs, and even their language seemed bizarre to her.
In a way, it is a self-perpetuating cycle in the US: people expect blacks to behave a certain way, blacks see this as discrimination and behave a certain way to respond to this discrimination, which confirms people's biases and perpetuates their expectations... There needs to be a coordinated effort from the society made to eliminate the racial boundaries, and it has to come from both sides.
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What are the racial boundaries? That's an interesting story too, I understand people expect blacks to act a certain way too. I've had that thought in the back of my head at times, I use to use the n word 24/7, I use to sag a little, I use to blast that music into my ears that made you "hard" and glorified the streets. I understand it 100%. As I grew older I understood that the type of person I was wasn't for me in the long run. I think regardless of how people expect blacks to behave and act, blacks can do much more better. I'm just pin pointing the streets part of it though since I grew up on the ghetto side of town.
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