(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best minority demographic studies

Really?

Your DR is likely an outlier compared to the criminals we are discussing. Maybe s/he did not grow up in the hood, or was in a high SES, or had an exceptional mentor, or bussed to a high performing school, or came from an overeducated family, or had exceptional character that allowed s/he to rise above peers, or any other number of variables that makes s/he not fit the majority we are discussing.

Talking about a single example like your Dr when discussing averages of a large groups is pointless. There will always be exceptions. We don't care about exceptions because they are not in our sample and are therefore meaningless to the conversation.

Bringing up your Black doctor who doesn't fit the studies as a reason to nullify the research behind black crime is like citing a freak snowstorm to discount all the data pointing toward global warming.

This is BASIC research design for social science, and all scientific studies really. If you want to be able to talk about this topic intelligently, start by studying up on research design, and then if you are really interested in the foundations of black crime rates try reading this excellent textbook on race relations in the US: http://www.amazon.com/Majority-Minority-Relations-Census-Update-Edition/dp/0205006574

Serious question: you complain to a friend about the weather being 110 degrees, and your friend says "that's nothing: it's 130 in the Persian Gulf right now." Be honest, your response is a) "wow man, thanks for that perspective. Really changes how I feel about going outside today." Or b) "how the hell does it being 130 degrees in Bahrain make 110 degrees any more comfortable for me right now?"

So it was bad for Black people in the 50's and 60's. White people need to stop saying that.

A problem that's fairly new is everyone can see how everyone else lives now. The data is in: systemic racism is not a debatable point.

When young disenfranchised Black people reach out to young disenfranchised White people only to have young disenfranchised White people lash out with inanities about the 60's, it makes all of us less safe.

Yes, things have gotten worse for young white people since the 60's. Things have gotten better for young Black people since the 60's. Black people are still fighting for things White people don't even have think about.

Y'all know there's been civil rights books written for our day since MLK, right? Read some Eric Lamont Hill or some Michelle Alexander for chrissake.

Most importantly, White people turning a blind eye to systemic racism (or worse, punching downwards) ensures two things: that the people in power stay in power, and that violence will happen.

It is a fundamental strategic reality that if you kill Martin Luther King Junior, you will get Malcolm X. People will be heard one way or another.

>So racism is a combination of that inherent distrustfulness, tied together with cultural stereotypes about different groups. So maybe we'll never be truly rid of racism; the best we can do is teach our children about these negative thoughts, and learn to examine those thoughts for real truth.

I'm going to have to vehemently disagree with you on this point. While there is certainly a personal aspect to racism, to reduce it to a mere combination of "inherent distrustfulness" and "cultural sterotypes" is to ignore the vast systemic issues that constitute true racism. Under your definition, only persons can be racist. How then are we to critique - for example - the carceral state in America, in which blacks are imprisoned at a significantly higher rate than whites. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009.[41] According to the 2010 census of the US Census Bureau blacks (including Hispanic blacks) comprised 13.6% of the US population. (Elizabeth Anderson recently wrote a very well argued book on this issue)

Any constructive discussion of race in America (which I am attending to specifically, forgive me if you are a non-American, it is the area in which I am familiar) must, necessarily, attend to systemic issues of economic exploitation, cultural devaluation, and political disenfranchisement as well as the personal prejudice and cultural stereotypes that underlie individual participation (not to discount apathy and fear, which play a significant role) in the maintenance of a system of racial domination.

Some critical race theorists whose work I find very prescient are David Theo Goldberg and Charles Mills.

(thanks for jump starting the conversation by the way, it is much appreciated)

Edit: realized they were Aussies, but I find that the point about focusing on individual prejudice rather than systemic oppression still stands.

Chattel slavery gave a legal basis for ownership of another human on a racial basis, something that regardless of where it occurred developed a standing race theory that due to the color of an individuals skin they were inferior, or ‘heathens’. This distinction of the legality of slavery and the viewing of slaves as pieces of property influenced future thinkers to condemn those of African descent as inferior by nature. Individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, whose ideas were used in the future to justify slavery, described his doubts that Blacks could learn complex melodies, or have proper mental and moral characteristics (Gossett 42). I believe that chattel slavery induced these new types of theories individuals were generating about the race of African Americans, therefore constructing a race theory. Their inferiority and comparison to cattle or property made it easier for white individuals to deem them as an inferior race in general, and therefore generate a new race theory about their status within society and as humans. I think that the "pro-slavery" arguments you are referring to are much constructed from the race theory created by inferiority in slavery, especially between slaves whose close ancestors were enslaved alongside whites in the United States. The distinction between an African American and white "indentured servant" and in United States history wasn't actually made into law into the 1660s (Gossett 30). The book I am referencing is the second edition of Race: The History of an Idea In America by Thomas Gossett. A long (but great) read, and you can find it on Amazon relatively cheaply digitally here.

synopsis: This week, Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) sits down with human rights lawyer, activist, and author Arjun Sethi (@arjunsethi81) to discuss the one year anniversary of his book, American Hate: Survivors Speak Out —as relevant as ever after the massacres in El Paso… and, in the short time since, the arrests of six white men on charges related to mass violence. Arjun and Ana also discuss their frustration with how hate crimes are typically depicted in the media, and how the average American can get involved in the fight against white supremacy.

Then, Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) from The Atlantic discusses his bestelling new book, How to Be an Antiracist. In soft-spoken, gentle urgency, Ibram guides us through the idea “there is no neutrality” in the face of racism: there is only racism and anti-racism. Ibram and Ana then discuss his various encounters with cancer; exploring a profound extended metaphor between the disease and racism in America.

show notes

> If you would argue that racism is institutionalized in America, even considering the attending action campaigns, then i understand why you would feel the same way about rape. I think you are seeing systems that aren't there.

I actually do argue this. Here's a good article from US News showing that institutional racism does in fact exist. And even if we discount "minor" forms of sexual assault as, y'know, sexual assault, and restrict it solely to penetration (which is itself troubling), you're still looking at around 1 in 12 female students who are raped, which is still staggeringly high for a four-year period.

> Racism is a racist acting alone, same of rape.

This is actually not what racism is - this is an example of what Racial Domination, Racial Progrss, one of the more comprehensive textbooks on race, defines as the "individualistic fallacy." The fallacy, in short, is the core belief that racism is perpetuated by a small minority of explicitly racist people instead of by institutions and cultures as well as being perpetuated unintentionally and implicitly. If you are to believe that racism is individualistic and not rampant on an institutional/cultural level, I'm not sure you'll agree that the opposite is true of rape as well. However, there are many, many sources which argue persuasively otherwise.