The logic behind my last sentence was based on bringing the OP 1 or 2 steps down from where he is now. Rather than giving him a shocking epiphany, I wanted to get him to recognize the flaws in his logic so he would be “less racist”.
A belief that is a step down from that is:
“Most black men are as safe as white men, but there are certain “archetypes” of black people I should be careful with”.
So now we’re just fragmenting the belief until we get to a place where we are judging each and every person individually. It’s all degrees.
I guess I don’t really get it; why not just hate black people that commit crimes? Unless you believe all black people commit crimes. Why not just withhold judgement? I mean, do you need to feel that you can accurately assess the character of a person based on one data point? That just seems intellectually lazy to me.
To play devil’s advocate, humans in general are intellectually lazy.
We’re filled with all sorts of shortcuts and cognitive biases. To use the OP as an example, I mentioned in a previous post a simple breakdown of his beliefs on the topic:
People who commit crimes are bad
A lot of black people commit crimes
Black people are bad
Now this, when you take away the emotionally charged issue, is a very common cognitive bias that can be seen in the following common (yet not as emotionally charged) beliefs:
People who smile a lot have fun
A lot of blondes smile more than brunettes
Blondes have more fun than brunettes
Girls who have sex with lots of guys are sluts
Stacy had sex with 3 guys that I know of
Stacy is a slut
Anyone who has a BMW is cool
Frank has a BMW
Frank is cool
A person who has these beliefs will then in conversations hint that blondes party more, Stacy gives out, and Frank is a fun guy to talk to. Most people get their beliefs like this, despite them not being 100% accurate. People develop beliefs like this for things as trivial as doing the laundry.
Some much more than others. Your brain generally wants you to make big generalizations like this, but if you’re aware of it you can do better. If you don’t give a shit and don’t bother, yes, you’re intellectually lazy.
eman77, while I agree with your point about cognitive bias, I don’t think all your examples are equivalent.
The BMW one, is exactly equivalent to a “Socrates is mortal” syllogism, and is perfectly valid. It’s actually the premise that’s wrong.
And in the slut example, you actually have good circumstantial evidence that she’s a slut. It’s not a generalization, it’s an inference that has a good chance of being right depending on how we define “a lot”.
Granted, it’s not quite right to say “Stacy is a slut” instead of probably or likely to be, but it’s still not the same kind of error as with generalizing about black people from what is actually a minority of black people.
Why should I believe that this is the only information available? I’d try to suss which group was screwing around or likely to do so. I’d also turn my attention towards more practical methods of protecting my car before driving it into possibly vulnerable situations.
As it happens, I have been hassled by groups of white teens whom I didn’t know and black teens whom I didn’t know. FWIW the white teen story was more harrowing. In neither case was race a particularly helpful sort of information. Nor was eye color. Alcohol was the more salient factor.
Completely off-topic nitpick: if a city has only two residents it has no median income. The median is the middle number of a sequence of three or more. The mean income in your example is $55,000.
Nitpick of a nitpick: this isn’t true. You can have a median of even a single data point. As in any case with an even number of samples, the median is usually taken to be the mean of the two central values. In the case of two samples (or even just 1 sample), the median would be the same as the mean.
A few responses:
(1) It’s the right thing to do, as far as making the world a better place is concerned
(2) Even if a black man is 10 times as likely to commit a murder as a white man (and it’s possible that in Atlanta right now, given various historical and economic factors, that is true), that might just mean that the black man is 99.99% unlikely to be a murderer while the white man is 99.999% unlikely to be a murderer. In a practical sense, it’s a wash.
(3) Most relevantly, to me, it comes down to the context. You come upon a park and see black youths loitering around and it makes you uncomfortable and you decide not to go to that park? Frankly, I can understand that just fine, I’m not going to crucify you for it. But are you someone who has hiring responsibilities? Are you a teacher? Are you a cop? If any of the above is true, then I think what you should do is judge each individual person individually. Are you hiring people to be programmers, and you assume black guys are too dumb to be programmers? Well, it doesn’t matter if you assume that as long as you just give each candidate a programming test and do your absolute damndest to evaluate the results of that test objectively.
Really, the word “racist” has so many different meanings and connotations that I can’t try to convince you not to be one without knowing exactly what you mean.
That’s fine, I just threw them together when writing the post.
Regarding the last one, I think it applies very well to the OP’s thought process.
If we assume the premise is correct (although most in these types of examples are subjective), it does not guarantee the inference is correct. Maybe Stacy has only had sex with 3 guys in her life and the belief-holder (I’ll call him BH from now on) knows about all of them but assumes there are more. Maybe her friend Suzy has had sex with 25 guys and the BH only knows about 1 so BH does not think Suzy is a slut. Maybe Stacy did not have sex with some of the original 3 at all and they are just rumors.
So what the BH is doing is generalizing based on limited information. Sure there is a good chance he is correct (based on how you define slut) but also a good chance he is wrong since this is all based on hearsay.
What the OP is doing is very similar. The difference between my example and the OP is that the OP has some statistics to back him up. Sure you can say that a murder charge does not mean the suspect committed the crime, but I think most people would say that if you are charged with a murder by the police, there is a better chance you killed someone than if a friend of a friend told you that somebody is sleeping with somebody else.
This is going off-tangent but what I am saying is that people form inferences and generalizations based on information far less reliable than monthly police reports. Thus in my opinion, it is very understandable how a person may come to this conclusion regarding crime.
However, when it comes to racism there is usually more than one belief causing it. I suspect there are other grievances the OP has with black people that is causing his racism, despite him not listing any others.
You’re right it was a brainfart. But my thought process still holds true on that issue, mean or median is an unreliable indicator. Even on a zip code level it’s hard to tell.
I’m playing a bit of devil’s advocate but to defeat the racist argument we must address the following:
Blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites
I wish to protect myself from crime by avoiding people who will commit a crime against me.
QED: Assuming all else is equal, I should go around a group of whites as opposed to a group of blacks.
Now, none of this says that all blacks commit crimes, or that one should avoid blacks at all times, or that they shouldn’t have basic civil rights. I don’t think anyone is saying that.
But what people do say is that if you grab onto your wallet a little tighter when passing a black person instead of a white person then you are Racist and Bad. What is the counter argument to the position that the person is being rational by doing so?
I think racism is more emotional than rational. I mean, do you think G-SE loved black people and then one day read all of these statistics and said “Well, I’ll be damned. These dark colored people seemed just like myself till I read this here article.”
I think the character of a person comes into all of this too. If the majority of black people were criminals etc. I wouldn’t be racist because it would mean condemning innocent people.
In my personal experience, it’s a complete waste of time and effort to “convince someone not to be racist”. When dealing with a racist adult, the go-to choice is ignore and avoid. Racists are not polite society. Any attempt to “convince” is simply coddling them.
I thought the OP was justified in asking. I interpreted it as a guy who came in here, showed us his statistics (which are not falsified and in general correct and representative of a large majority of cities) and asked “how in the world can you not be racist when you see this”. He also did not strike me as a total idiot, which is why I decided to post in this thread.
We’re just trying to get him to see that it does not mean that ALL black people are dangerous. If that was his only complaint, I think it is a perfectly understandable how someone came to that conclusion. But the key word is IF.
I believe there is more to his racism than what he posted in the OP. And to piss you off a little bit, I’m rewording your post slightly to point out some hypocrisy. You have the same exact belief structure as the OP, difference being it’s pointed towards different people.
I believe each person should do whatever he or she can to break the cycle of racism, poverty and crime that plagues our society.
If a black person who commits crimes asks me how to break the cycle, I will be quick to say to that person that they should stop committing crimes. Of course, I wouldn’t say that to the vast majority of black people (were they to ask me how to break the cycle you describe) because the vast majority of black people don’t commit crimes, as your statistics show.
Here, you have identified something that YOU can do to help break that cycle and appear to be asking whether you should do it. The answer is yes. Trusting black people to the same extent and in the same manner as that to which you trust non-black people will, as you have correctly inferred, contribute to a long term reduction in crime, and specifically crime committed by black people.
It is worth noting that it will be at virtually no cost or risk to you, since the statistics you site show that the odds of your being victimized by any particular black person you trust are virtually nil, just as for non-black people (assuming you exercise the same basic prudence you currently practice in trusting non-blacks).
This is true EVEN IF your premise that black people are much more likely to commit crimes than non-blacks is true.
If you were unwilling to do something that, at virtually no risk or cost to yourself, contributes to the betterment of society, the reduction of crime, and the end to racial inequality, then your problem would be much greater than being racist. It would be that you were basically evil. But since I assume that’s not the case, you should therefore stop being racist EVEN IF your statistics present an accurate reflection of reality.
Because to do otherwise would indicate that you were wholly incompetent at examining information, (i.e., failing to examine all extenuating factors and focusing on gross statistics without any genuine context).
Why would you want to behave in a way that would cause people to think that you were mathematically challenged and socially ignorant?
There has been enough information provided in this thread to indicate that the crime statistics have as much to do with geographic location, (and, probably, time of day), as the perceived “race” of people one encounters.
Unless you are also refusing to invest in any financial entity that is run by white men, you only demonstrate a seriously inconsistent pattern of thought, (as well as a failure to think logically), if you insist that a racist position makes any sense.
Being more wary of a group of unknown, young, black, males after dark in a neighborhood with a median income below $30,000 than of a group of known, elderly, white females at noon in a neighborhood with a median income above $80,000 is not racist. Being distrustful of any human being who happens to have a preponderance of African ancestry within the last 300 years is just stupid, with the stupidity taking the form of racism.
Your binary view of the world is painful to see in public.
How about, the white majority could stop actively promoting or accepting actions that harm black society, (DWB, Stop-and-frisk, separate and unequal sentencing for crimes).
Simultaneously, individuals, (such as yourself), stop regarding black people as some sort of monolithic entity that “commits violent crimes” based on the fact that a certain number of black people actually commit crimes.
B is actually a false claim, since “black people” are not committing crimes. Rather certain criminals are black. Should we hold you responsible for the bank failures that brought on the recent recession? White guys did that; you’re a white guy. It seems reasonable, (using your logic), to hold tell you to stop making bad banking decisions.
