Racism seem to exist, but "unjustified" racism (e.g., disproportionate to crime) is relatively low and seems heavily city dependent.
So why do black communities tend to have higher crime? It seems to be fatherlessness, not poverty; poor, father-intact families have low crime.
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So why do black communities tend to be more fatherless? It's partly a self-sustaining cycle; fathers are incarcerated, thus more likely to have boys who become incarcerated. But how did it start?
I'm less clear on this, it seems like this trend got going in the late 80s/early 90s
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I have a poor grasp on the details around this shift, but likely due to society responding to increasing crime rates (which were in turn... due to lead or something?). Stuff like anti-drug laws, the Broken Windows policy and (ironically) the Biden Crime Law likely contributed.
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A big part of this seems to be the crack cocaine epidemic (and subsequent laws around it), which primarily affected black communities. I don't know why black ppl tended to do crack more than white ppl; was it a cultural thing? Was it correlated strongly to poverty?
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Regardless, this resulted in both black and white communities demonstrating strong support for harsh sentencing laws, and the result was a new, large discrepancy in which races went to prison - and the new gender ratio hit black family structures harder.
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If perceived racism comes downstream of cultural effects from families fucked up by the justice system, then it makes sense we're seeing the results today - kids being raised in the broken families of the 1990s are now adults showing the effects themselves.
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Not only has this resulted in the greater black crime rates we see today, but I suspect has had other effects on black culture; black men are more likely to report cheating on their partners (which makes sense as a sexual strategy if there's less sexual competition), but also
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there's stronger sexual conservatism as a whole; black ppl report higher rates of religion and also lower acceptance of homosexuality and trans people. In general, the culture imo shows signs of high pressure from insecurity around childrearing.
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Overall, I think that it's very had to distinguish the racism that exists today from cause vs. effect; as in, to what degree is racism a reaction to the problems black communities face, vs. the cause?
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I don't know enough about the original problems - why crack cocaine hit black people, how much racism was a motivation for the laws passed to try to supposedly protect black communities. It seems like there's a good chance this was a significant incentive.
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I don't think the perceived widespread racism in the US comes from white people being inherently racist; I think it's likely an amplified relationship to the difficulties caused by a specific set of (maybe racist?) policies a few decades ago.
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White people are not inherently racist. It is taught to us by our parents and our society, often without anyone realizing what they are teaching. Thus “systemic racism”
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After slavery, black populations were segregated and criminalized to make it easier for them to end up in jail, where slavery is still legal. This has kept happening in different forms ever since.
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but according to the data i've seen (again, link me other data if you have it), it seems like black incarceration wasn't actually a severe problem until the 1990s, where it suddenly skyrocketed.
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Serious question: the US was founded on the extermination of the native population, and subsequently built on the chattel enslavement of African Americans. Do you actually think this has nothing to do with what is happening in the US, considering that was only ~ 200 years ago?
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Yeah, I think this is very largely responsible, whether directly or indirectly, for the poverty rates of black people.
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It's the legacy of slavery, systemic racism, neoliberal capitalism and cycles of violence and misery that those breed. Nothing less, nothing more
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naw of course not, I'm trying to answer why we seem to have an increasingly severe race problem right now when things are the most friendly/inclusive towards black people than they've ever been.
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This is what I thought for a long time but then I read some stuff that made a good argument that fatherlessness is the actual problem; that low income actually wasn't strongly correlated with crime in black communities as much as is claimed, which really surprised me.
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