Interestingly enough, I live about a mile from one of the highest-crime, lowest-income parts of Dallas (Forest @ Audelia, FWIW), but I live in a predominantly white, upper middle class suburb (Lake Highlands) where the median household incomes are around 100,000, if you throw out the really low-income apartments.
There’s no frame of reference- those people in the apartments murder each other with abandon and do all sorts of other unsavory things, but my real concern is more being hit by a stray bullet or other random things like that. It literally doesn’t affect me in any material way, other than petty annoyances like having to hear the police helicopter flying around at night, or sirens, or possibly that the local grocery stores waste shelf space on substandard, inexpensive crap, rather than products I want to buy.
It’s not physical proximity, but rather involvement in that particular subculture that defines your exposure to those things.
It’s partly due to the fact that there are so many of them that it’s more dog-bites-man, and partly (IMHO) due to the fact that murderers are black too so it’s a bit un-PC to focus on it too much as a general ongoing topic.
But it gets a lot of coverage too. Not sure where you live, but if you read the papers in cities that have a lot of gang warfare, there’s constant discussion of it, and even national when it’s on the increase (e.g. Chicago, Baltimore, of late).
There is discussion of the fact of it, but not much discussion about causes and solutions–at least not compared to other more trivial problems–and very rarely is it invoked except as it related to other issues like police violence or as justification for gun control measures that wouldn’t actually affect it at all. Or, at least, it seems that way to me. I acknowledge that in 2016 we all live in our own distinct media environment.
I agree there are probably many factors in play that determine how much public discussion there is. I’m not especially convinced that this topic is avoided because it is un-PC to talk about black murderers. That strikes me as the kind of concern conservatives have about talking about race, based on the views of some oversensitive college kids, that is rarely born out in the real world of adults.
I mentioned earlier Jill Leovy’s book, Ghettoside, that tackles some of this head-on. AFAIK, she is not regularly accused of racism and the book has received warm praise from many political quarters.
Well there are different types and levels of publicity and it’s hard to pin down what you’re comparing to.
What I thought you were comparing to was if there were murders/kidnappings of white people or their kids. I don’t think you’d get a whole lot of “causes and solutions” discussions - you would get outrage-publicity. The factors I’ve cited account for the lack of this type of coverage for black-on-black crime.
In general, you get in depth discussion of causes and solutions in relatively obscure publications, but it’s hard to measure how much you’re getting versus how much you should be getting on a given issue because of this very obscurity. And even here, you have to be careful what you say. Daniel Patrick Moynihan went on to a distinguished career after writing some un-PC material on the subject, but it still got brought up as a black mark against him till the day he died and beyond, and the world has only become more PC since then.
Your approach seems reasonable. However I think there’s a potentially large credibility gap on both those points in the political realm. Of course it has a racial component: the problem itself does, we’re speaking particularly of black victims and black killers.
But there have been many failed policies to deal with the black underclass problem (the legacy of racism if you prefer) somebody called ‘promising’.
And for point 2, it might make a difference in outsiders’ emotional reaction to learn that fewer inner city murder victims than they assume were serious criminals themselves, but rather perhaps living according to the norms of a particular sub-culture they were born into and wasn’t easy to escape, and where deadly arguments over petty matters are much more common than in the mainstream culture. But either way that sub culture has to change, same goes even for people in such communities hit by stray bullets who are totally innocent. How can public policy do that? I think one must recognize some justification in how jaded much of mainstream society is about govt action addressing this problem, or at least asking what are we going to spend less on to spend more on a promising new policy.
That said, we know that much of the decline in the US murder rate from 1990’s to recently was due to decreases among blacks. The black murder rate is still higher now than the average but it was higher by an even greater degree back when the national average was higher. But there seems little broad agreement why that happened, and one possible reason, ‘broken windows policing’, is under active attack now. Some might feel factually justified to attack it, but building a consensus is another thing. The public discussion often features the accusation of ‘racism’ to try to brow beat people into agreeing on various things. That’s counterproductive, fortunately not the case in this discussion.
The problem, as I see it, is that if you try and directly identify the problem and address gun violence as a problem that is perpetrated and suffered overwhelmingly within black communities, then you instantly start getting tarred with the racist brush and accused of being patronizing, etc…
But if you treat it like it’s a problem affecting the nation as a whole, black, white or other, it seems rather ludicrous to a great many people, as gun violence affects them not one bit, and they’re smart enough to realize that it is a problem primarily of black, low-income communities, and are rather skeptical or hostile to gun control efforts that impact them disproportionately, while having little perceived benefits to the low income black communities.
Again, I don’t think this is true. I understand why some people might expect this, but I think it is a false expectation. I have seen no such outcry when the issue is raised by white people like Jill Leovy and Lois Beckett.
I haven’t read the work of Leovy or Beckett. Can you briefly summarize how they’ve addressed the issue? I readthis one articleabout Leovy just now. What it appears that Leovy has been doing is calling attention to an underreported issue. But how well do you think it would take if people took the approach “black communities need to do X”?
Reading the publisher’s summary of Ghettoside is probably faster than me re-typing it. And Beckett is the ProPublica reporter I cited in the OP, who has published a fair bit on this and similar topics. I have heard several (white) local and state politicians in the Northeast speak about poor black communities in careful and respectful ways without being labeled racists.
In answer to your question, I think a lot depends on how that person frames the issue, and whether they come across as sincere and informed instead of attempting to scapegoat the community for political gain. The notion that significant numbers of Americans regard it as racist to respectfully discuss problems facing black communities is something that exists mostly in the realm of right-wing fantasy, IMO. I see that kind of unreasonable backlash anecdotally, but I don’t believe it represents anything other than the kind of phenomenon embodied by the comments on online articles–a small, non-representative sample of the population with extreme and irrational views.
My workplace is predominantly black and lower class and when I’m sitting in the break areas it can be a real eye opener. These issues are real and affect many of them (although not all). Many live in solid middle class neighborhoods and the big issue is the drive bys. They are just as angry at the violence as we are and the persons in their own community who do them. They put alot of it down to lack of fathers and strong parenting. They give the cold shoulder to the young men coming in with the ghetto look.
Then their are the other AA’s who live totally out of this. For example the single black mother who moved out of Kansas City Missouri and struggles to pay for an apartment in the suburbs so her son can go to a good school. She isnt affected by gun violence anymore and her son will grow up in an area where its unheard of.
My bad, I didn’t note the author of the piece you linked.
There is a risk though. Discussing issues regarding race is fraught with peril, and it would not be surprising to find that people avoid it because of that. When Obama was elected, there was much talk about how he was in a unique position to talk about race.
Statistics regarding teen pregnancy, single parent households, graduating high school, and the relation to future success in life are pretty clear. I don’t think it would play well to hammer those points in a way that targeted groups based on race. And really what this does is move the conversation away from gun homicide to other socio-economic issues. It doesn’t fit the narrative of gun control supporters to not talk about guns and talk more about other issues. What it does is reinforce the idea that the issue isn’t guns.
And separately, I think the racial disparity in victimization is an important issue and belies the genuineness of the response from gun control folks. It’s quite a common theme of discussion among gun rights folks that gun control historically was a way to suppress minorities and often was targeted at minorities. In CA where I am most familiar, early gun control was targeted at Chinese and Mexicans, and later against the Black Panthers.
In my view, the principal peril associated with talking about race is the likelihood that you say something incorrect (which of course everyone does from time to time), and that is taken as a sign of personal animus toward people of color rather than merely a sign of being wrong or misinformed. That’s a real danger that exists. And it’s worse for people who don’t know that much about the sociology of poor or black communities (and are therefore more likely to put their foot in their mouths) and who lack other ways to establish their good faith or who aren’t trusted for other reasons–which means its a burden that falls disproportionately on white conservatives.
But the fix to that isn’t for people to avoid talking about problems that disproportionately affect black people or affect black people in unique ways. A much better fix is to de-escalate the label “racism.” A person can hold incorrect ideas about a group of people that he holds because of the racism that exists and has existed in the past without that person having any personal animus toward anyone. It is entirely correct to call those ideas racist and we shouldn’t stop doing so out of some misplaced sense of politeness, but it’s a word that ought to be taken in context, instead of like some kind of scarlet letter or declaration of war. It should be something closer to the way we treat misogyny–a bad thing that infects a lot of our social customs and thinking that everyone should make an effort to reduce but that doesn’t destroy your reputation if you say something marginally misogynistic.
Thank you for linking to the very enlightening article, Richard Parker. It is unfortunate that attention focuses on a few “newsworthy” massacres while the large majority of preventable murders are ignored. Although Obama and Biden seem culpable for not pushing this successful program harder, Congress must share the blame:
Despite thread title, your OP barely mentions racism: “racism is … I think … part of [the reason].” Yet Dopers ignore Ceasefire itself to seize on your title as though the ambiguous semantics of “racism” is the interesting topic rather than the efficacy of the Ceasefire program. :smack: Welcome to the SDMB “debating” society.
ITSM that the burden of the fix you describe falls disproportionately on blacks and liberals. The only thing white conservatives can do about the race card is ignore it, and that does not IME de-escalate the term.
Shodan: I mostly agree. But there’s work to be done on the conservative side too in acknowledging that something doesn’t have to be KKK-level bigotry to be racist.
I tend to think that there needs to be another descriptor for inadvertant/unintentional/cultural/casual racism than the generic “racism/racist”. The 90 year old lady who still uses the term “negroes” is in a totally different league than people who deliberately discriminate or screw people of other races just because of their race.
Using the term for people in the boat with the 90 year old lady dilutes the term when it’s applied to the second group, IMO.
I think that may be a good outcome, but I think it’s unlikely to come to pass any time soon. There is very little upside to trying to de-escalate the label, and the peril you recognize is real. I don’t think you can simultaneously call a wide swath of behaviors and beliefs racist while at the same time de-escalate. No one would be willing to be the first through the gate.
Do you think the problem with high rates of gun homicides in minority communities is tied to guns themselves? Or rather something in the socio-economic makeup of those communities that leads folks to gravitate to violent behaviors?
Well, I mean, I will. I have racist thoughts all the time. I’m not worse off because I recognize that; I’m actually much more able to talk about it. And I certainly think a lot of the burden here is not on minorities and liberals – it’s on perfectly normal pro-Brexit types who are fully capable of recognizing that a lot of their beliefs and thoughts are motivated in subtle and un-subtle ways by prejudices. Observing how common these things are is itself a form of deescalation.
For me, it seems clear that both are necessary conditions.
Sure, but the gun part of that equation isn’t inherently special, other than being an extremely effective method of being violent. It’s every bit as likely that we’d see a similar amount of less-lethal knife violence or bat violence or even fist violence from that particular population in lieu of gun violence.
The fundamental problem is that black men seem to have an outsized propensity for violence in today’s society. How do we address that effectively, without ham-fisted attempts that manage to fuck the party up for the overwhelming numbers of people who don’t have that predilection for violence, and who obey the law?
I don’t think you can say “other than…” when you’re talking about gun violence. Gun violence to fist violence isn’t an incidental distinction.
I also don’t agree that you can say black men have a propensity for violence (that is a racist statement, in fact). If you include rapes, arson, assaults and burglaries in your definition of “violence,” which crime reporting does, white men have an outsized propensity for violence, too, and the white vs. black distinction isn’t that significant. If you only look at murders, which is a tiny slice of the whole picture when you’re talking about violent crime, it looks like blacks are especially violent. But that tiny slice means it’s very likely that these other factors can also have outsized effects on the data. Blacks are not committing assaults against each other to any outsized degree; they are just a population where gun violence is extremely prevalent.
This also runs counter to the idea that there’d be a similar trend of bat or knife or fist violence if guns were out of the picture.
