# Convince me not to be racist **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 17, 2014, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781 "2014-08-17T21:35:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/21 "2014-08-17T22:48:54Z")
> [@G-SE](#): > > No, I’m just processing it still. I appreciate you taking the time to answer it. > > At first glance though, it seems like a circular argument. Blacks commit crime because people don’t trust them because they commit crime because etc. No. Most black people do not commit crimes. Some do, as do some white people. Individuals commit crimes for a variety of reasons. My argument is that those reasons are more likely to be present among black people, largely due to the legacy of societal discrimination. If fewer people trust you and treat you decently, you have fewer options for a successful life, regardless of your race, and are more likely to commit a crime. > [@](#): > > If so, there are two ways to break the cycle: > > A) Trust blacks despite them committing crimes and they’ll eventually stop > > OR > > B) Blacks stop committing crimes and people will eventually start to trust them. > > But you’re saying society has to do A, because for whatever reason Blacks can’t do B? This is the wrong way to look at it. Again, most black people don’t commit crimes. Some do. Treating someone differently because they’re black is morally wrong – that’s good enough reason not to do it. It’s also a good reason because treating people differently perpetuates the cycle – you’re, individually, making life _harder for black people_, and therefore, contributing just a tiny bit to making some people more likely to commit crimes, if you’re treating black people with less respect and decency. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/22 "2014-08-17T22:56:42Z")
> [@Fretful\_Porpentine](#): > > Well, considering that there was a grand total of ONE arrest for murder during the month in question, it is perhaps unsurprising that several races are completely unrepresented among murderers. Thanks for doing the work for me. I wondered about those stats. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/23 "2014-08-17T23:00:44Z")
> [@G-SE](#): > > 12/13 - 5/14 > 35 arrests for murder: 100% Black. Wait a minute here. Arrests for murder are equivalent to murders committed? And there’s no racial bias in arrests vs crimes actually committed? That seriously does not compute. ---
**Author:** ![robertliguori](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/46a35a/32.png) [@robertliguori](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robertliguori)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/24 "2014-08-17T23:02:42Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > We know that races are social constructs, not biological ones. Being “black” in America is not a matter of genes – it’s a matter of society and culture. > > So knowing this, let’s make certain assumptions. Let’s assume that people come into this world and face difficulties in life in 3 different categories – people with easy life challenges, people with moderately difficult life challenges, and people with very difficult life challenges. > > These challenges can be likened to a “[difficulty setting](http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/)” on a video game. > They would include like the financial situation you’re born into, how you’re treated by society based on race/gender/religion/sexual orientation/etc., random events like crime and illness that affect your family, how you are treated by your family, etc. > > The vast majority of people born in the “easy” setting go on to have reasonably successful lives – they don’t go bankrupt, they don’t go to jail, they have families, they usually live to be pretty old. A very small portion of them commit crimes, and those that commit crimes are much more likely to be able to get away with them. For the people born in the “moderate” setting, most of them still do pretty well, but a larger percentage of them have failures – going bankrupt, committing crimes, going to jail, having strings of failed relationships, etc. And for the people born in the “very difficult” setting, a very large portion of them have failure. Many more of them commit crimes. And much fewer of them that commit crimes are able to defend themselves – further, some that _don’t_ commit crimes are more likely to be falsely accused, and less likely to be able to successfully defend themselves. > > So with these assumptions about difficulty setting, we just see that black people are more likely to be in a “higher difficulty setting” than white people. Sure, there are black people that are born into the “easy” setting, and white people born into the “very difficult” setting, but black people are more likely to be in the higher settings and white people in the lower settings. > > And this explains why outcomes are different. I don’t think “No, you shouldn’t be racist, you should just assume going into things that any given black person will have much less desirable life outcomes than a white person in a comparable situation!” is the knockout argument you seem to think it is. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/25 "2014-08-17T23:07:25Z")
> [@robertliguori](#): > > I don’t think “No, you shouldn’t be racist, you should just assume going into things that any given black person will have much less desirable life outcomes than a white person in a comparable situation!” is the knockout argument you seem to think it is. This was my attempt to explain different outcomes. The best argument to not be racist is that being racist is morally wrong, and has been, historically, responsible for immense evil and nothing good. ---
**Author:** ![G-SE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f0a364/32.png) [@G-SE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/G-SE)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/26 "2014-08-17T23:11:26Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > Wait a minute here. Arrests for murder are equivalent to murders committed? And there’s no racial bias in arrests vs crimes actually committed? > > That seriously does not compute. A) I never said arrests = commissions. I acknowledged in my OP that using arrest numbers is only one part of the puzzle, but I don’t have any other numbers to go by. B) Please explain to me the racial bias in arrests vs crimes when a Black police chief, Black District Attorney are the ones making the arrests? ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/27 "2014-08-17T23:14:01Z")
Since when do police chiefs and DAs make arrests? ---
**Author:** ![G-SE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f0a364/32.png) [@G-SE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/G-SE)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/28 "2014-08-17T23:14:54Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Thanks for doing the work for me. > > I wondered about those stats. Please see post #18 ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/29 "2014-08-17T23:16:50Z")
> [@G-SE](#): > > B) Please explain to me the racial bias in arrests vs crimes when a Black police chief, Black District Attorney are the ones making the arrests? I gave an explanation in post #2. The legacy of centuries of racism doesn’t just affect the opinions of white people. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/30 "2014-08-17T23:17:07Z")
> [@G-SE](#): > > Please see post #18 Open this thread in the pit where we can have a proper discussion and I’ll be happy to respond. ---
**Author:** ![G-SE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f0a364/32.png) [@G-SE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/G-SE)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/31 "2014-08-17T23:19:45Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > Since when do police chiefs and DAs make arrests? They don’t, but I believe they have a heavy influence on law enforcement efforts and direction that carry down and affect priorities of individual officers. They are also in a position to make the needed changes, if they are seeing a racial bias in arrests made by officers. That’s why it is hard for me to believe that with a Black police Chief and Black D.A., somehow the Atlanta police force is exhibiting a high racial bias against blacks with no recourse. ---
**Author:** ![G-SE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/f0a364/32.png) [@G-SE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/G-SE)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/32 "2014-08-17T23:23:00Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Open this thread in the pit where we can have a proper discussion and I’ll be happy to respond. So you accuse me of cherry-picking data, I show you that I’m not, and your response is a pit challenge. You can’t explain the numbers without being a potty mouth? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/33 "2014-08-17T23:35:25Z")
> [@G-SE](#): > > The other excuse I always hear is because of poverty. In 2009, the median income for a household in the city was $47,464 and the median income for a family was $59,711. (2009 US Median income for household was $49,777) First, “excuse” is a poisoning-the-well word. “Explanation” is the more reasonable word. Given your total lack of an explanation, you ought to look more carefully at the ones given you. Second, the median income of households is irrelevant, unless you find that an equal number of people above and below the median commit crimes. What you’ll want to find is the median income of folks who commit these crimes, and you’ll also want to find out whether there’s serious income disparity in Atlanta, such that the median income doesn’t account for big chunks of the population. [Turns out there is:](http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/jay-bookman/2014/mar/05/atlanta-breaking-poverty-cycle-proves-difficult/) > [@Atlanta Journal Constitution](#): > > Atlanta has the largest disparity between rich and poor of any major city in the country, according to a study released last month by the Brookings Institution. The ratio between the income of the wealthiest 5 percent of Atlanta households — those making $280,000 or more a year — and the bottom 20 percent — those making $14,850 or less — is significantly higher here than in any other American city, Brookings claims. So yeah, poverty may just account for some of this disparity in criminal arrests. Can you track for us any existent relationship in Atlanta between race and income, and between income and criminality? Unless you can show no such significant relationships, your dismissal of the poverty explanation falls flat. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/34 "2014-08-17T23:41:12Z")
[Check out this map of Atlanta](http://blog.metrotrends.org/2013/06/poverty-race-place-map-metro/) (you might have to select Atlanta from the drop-down box): the yellow dots represent impoverished black families, the blue dots in theory represent impoverished white families, although I’m not seeing blue dots. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2014, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/35 "2014-08-17T23:55:44Z")
Holy shit, [it looks like poverty, rather than race, accounts for much of Atlanta’s crime](http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/79/2/707.short)! Whoda thunk (besides people not committed to a racist agenda, of course)? > [@Thomas McNulty and Steven R. Holloway](#): > > This article tests a conditional effect hypothesis which predicts that the strength and magnitude of the association between racial composition and crime rates will dissipate with increasing distance of neighborhoods from public housing projects. We examine this hypothesis with 1990–92 geo-coded crime incident data matched with 1990 block-group-level census data for Atlanta. The hypothesis is supported in models predicting murder, rape, assault, and public order crime, but not robbery and property crime. Confirmation of our conditional effect hypothesis for several major types of crime suggests the potential for bias in interpretations of estimated race effects in multivariate neighborhood-level models that do not control for public housing. GS-E, at this point, if you continue to dismiss the race-poverty connection, even if you continue to attribute crime to black people rather than primarily to poor people, it’s gonna look willful. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2014, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/36 "2014-08-18T02:08:28Z")
Here’s the statistical breakdown of the OP: 1. There are 2,982,389 black people living in Atlanta. 2. One person was arrested for murder in May 2014. He is black. 3. Therefore, black people are responsible for all crime. ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2014, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/37 "2014-08-18T02:13:22Z")
But the OP also says that the numbers “hold basically true for any month you look at.” I invite the OP to show that, from month to month and year to year, every single murder, rape, and car theft arrest in the city of Atlanta was of an African American. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2014, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/38 "2014-08-18T02:16:23Z")
Here’s a statistic about why you shouldn’t be racist: Number of black people who were arrested in May 2014: 1,937 Number of black people who were not arrested in May 2014: 2,980,452 ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2014, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/39 "2014-08-18T02:22:52Z")
Why is this not in the Pit? ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2014, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781/40 "2014-08-18T02:23:11Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Here’s a statistic about why you shouldn’t be racist: > > Number of black people who were arrested in May 2014: 1,937 > Number of black people who were not arrested in May 2014: 2,980,452 Proof that the cops are guilt-ridden liberals who decide to let most black criminals off the hook. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/convince-me-not-to-be-racist/695781.md?page=3)