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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but this seems to be a more recent thing though - the incarceration of black men didn't happen at this scale until the 1990s, despite black communities being poor for many decades before this.