Thank you, Max. A good answer to the sneering progressives here at SDMB who even sneer at the idea that they’re sneering.
Slacker, is it possible that racism and bigotry and bias in society lead you to an incorrect conclusion that puts black people in a worse light than reality? If so, is it sneering to point this out?
Hang on, if we’re taking SlackerInc at his word, we’re looking for a different figure - percentage of black people who killed people.
Let’s assume for a moment that most of those murders are by different people (for simplicity’s sake - I don’t have the full figures on hand). With that, you end up with these figures:
Percentage of white people who killed a black person in 2016: 1,2310^-6
Percentage of black people who killed a white person in 2016: 1,4110^-5
…An order of magnitude greater. Possibly confounded by mass murderers, but I doubt that would bias it significantly in one way or another.
I don’t know that this figure actually means anything, or that it’s useful, or that you can draw trends from it, my only point is that I wouldn’t assume bad faith here. And this basically makes sense - black people are disproportionately the victims of and the perpetrators of criminal violence, as one might expect from a poverty-stricken group that often believes it cannot rely on the justice system.
But that shouldn’t be, statistically, what concerns people. People should be concerned (and are concerned) if they and their families might be in danger of being victims. And the statistics show that black people, statistically, have almost twice as much legitimate mathematical reason to be afraid of white people as white people do of black people, when murder is the concern.
This shows that stereotypes, like that black people are dangerous to white people, are both counterfactual and entirely manufactured. It’s entirely myth, not real. When the myth came about, white people were far, far more dangerous to black people than the reverse. And the statistics show that this is still true to some degree, statistically speaking. And yet Slacker portrayed it in a way that was meant to make us think the reverse – that black people are more dangerous to white people. I don’t know whether he did this knowingly (and I’m happy to give him the benefit of the doubt), but it’s just another example of the ways that the bigotry, bias, and racism in society at large can infect the thinking of people about race.
My numbers are from 2013, the most recent FBI stats I could find. If these are demonstrated to be a real outlier, I will retract the claim.
But in that year, there were 189 murders committed by whites against blacks, out of a white population of about 245 million. So one out of every 771,000 whites committed a murder of a black person. 409 black people murdered whites, so with a black population of about 42 million, that’s one out of every 103,000 blacks murdering a white person.
If these numbers hadn’t been so stark, I would have felt it necessary to dig up other years. But it would be shocking for the overall numbers to tell a different story and for 2013 to be a radical outlier, so I felt pretty safe in the claim without doing further research (I am a slacker, after all). Set me straight if that’s not so!
BTW, note that Evil Economist, as s/he has done before, didn’t read my assertion carefully. I framed it in terms of perpetrators, not victims (which I think is much more germane); and even though s/he quoted me, EE’s “rebuttal” switched that around. [Reading further down the thread, I see BPC got it.]
And Andy, you don’t think “a randomly selected black person is much more likely to kill a white person at some point in their life than a randomly selected white person is to kill a black person” is of any relevance? I’m not arguing that this makes black people inherently evil: the vast majority of them never kill anyone. But it makes the very essence of the BLM slogan highly vulnerable to attack by the alt-right. And then once they show young white guys that liberals and the MSM are not being totally straight with them about this stuff, they’ve got their hooks in and are able to obfuscate a lot of other data. Like, as I mentioned, the fact that black defendants are more likely to be railroaded. Or that people with black names are told apartments are already rented. Etc. We need to be honest, so as not to give the alt-right this way in.
Jesus fucking Christ, that is nowhere near my argument, and frankly I’m offended that you would say it is. WTF?!?
MaxTheVool, thanks for providing that excerpt from the AV Club, which is a nice representative of the genre. I just saw the movie “Tully” and read the New Yorker’s review, which is another good example:
:dubious:
Even framing it this way, in terms of the chance of being a victim rather than the chance of being a perpetrator, misses an important point: there are about six times as many white people as black people. So if a white murder victim is half as likely to have been killed by a black person as a black murder victim is to have been killed by a white person, that still means we’ve got a factor of three to deal with.
Progressives often make this error (or are purposely disingenuous, hard to say which) about other statistics too. For instance, they might say “most people who receive welfare are white”, ignoring the fact that the percentage of black people on welfare is much higher. Or they’ll say “More Americans are killed by terrorism committed by white extremists than by Muslim extremists”. This claim requires two kinds of massaging of numbers: first, it has to arbitrarily start on or after 9/12/2001, or it is extremely incorrect; and it again ignores the even more extreme difference in numbers between white Americans and Muslim Americans (leaving aside the tiny sliver that overlap in the Venn diagram).
This is why I say the percentage of these groups that are perpetrators is more germane. Many white people in rural or even exurban parts of the country are extremely unlikely to be killed by a black person or a Muslim simply because they rarely get close to either one! That is not a counterargument to whatever fear or suspicion they might feel. It’s the chance that a black and/or Muslim person, if encountered, might murder white people that is germane to this fear. And unfortunately the statistics do not rebut it–unless you simply point out that the odds of getting murdered at all are very low…but that also undercuts the BLM message even more dramatically (say, three to ten times more, depending on how you slice it). Still, being dishonest about that is not the way to start the conversation for the reasons I described above. And again, BLM’s very name looks slanderous in light of these numbers, which is not a good way to court white swing voters.
Yes, and?
If that’s what it is, then that’s what it should be called.
You fight the problem where it is.
Do you have a constructive alternatiive to offer here, not just more disdain for those actually bothering to try to fix a problem?
So party loyalty is more important to you than doing the right thing? Interesting.
Ditka’s point is very important to consider. Virtually all, if not all, of us here are partisans. Most voters are partisans. Thus the temptation to dismissively say “those people aren’t going to change sides even if we adjust our message”. True. But there is a relatively small group of low information swing voters in swing states whose fickle allegiance is crucially important. That is frustrating, even appalling at times. But it’s the cards we’ve been dealt.
So even if it offends the delicate sensibilities of the high-minded idealists among us, the reality is that we have to treat our situation like a game of chess, or better yet a game of Magic the Gathering—in which our opponent represents partisan Republicans, and the cards in play are those swing voters. We don’t try to convince our opponent to quit or join us, we try to outmaneuver him/her to gain control of more of the game pieces (swing voters).
Once we win, we quietly do Good Things by appointing judges and regulators that those low info swing voters don’t pay attention to. But first we have to win.
The numbers looked at for victims – and regular people are worried about being victims, not becoming perpetrators – were on a per capita, not total, basis. And on a per capita basis, when it comes to statistical and mathematical reasons for someone to fear being murdered, it’s a statistical fact that a black person has more legitimate reason (again, per capita) to fear being murdered by a white person than a white person has to fear being murdered by a black person.
This is a fact. So that means that black lives, per capita, are more in danger from white killers, than white lives are from black killers. That is what is meant by black lives matter – that black lives are not considered important by society, and the fact that black lives are more in danger from white killers than white lives are from black killers, and yet the media, culture, politicians, etc., focus much, much more concern and resources on the danger black killers pose to white lives. And society still holds a stereotype that black people are more dangerous to white people than the reverse, which is a fear held by man (maybe even most!) white people, and folks like you try to justify that stereotype and fear by looking at less relevant numbers (and ignoring the more relevant ones).
These are per capita numbers and facts. The facts show that, if regular people are just looking at numbers to prioritize who and what to fear, black people, per capita, have more reason to fear white people than the reverse. Facts.
Yes, politics is a numbers game, and based on lots of data that’s already been cited, including that most white Trump voters are motivated by racial/ethnic/cultural anxiety, and that young minority voters could easily move away from the Democratic party (to third parties or non-voters), means that in my judgment, it’s an easy call – motivate young and minority voters and Democrats win like in 2008. Fail to motivate them, in an attempt to reach out to racially anxious midwestern white Trumpers, who have bought into the right-wing entertainment manipulators already, and we lose.
Okay, how? What message do we use that will get them thinking but won’t hurt their widdle snowflake feefees? Is there any at all that meets with the approval of the disdainers?
Not all partisans are alike, btw. Some are loyal to their party no matter what positions it takes. Some are instead loyal to the *ideals and goals *that a particular party works for much more than the other (which may actually oppose them). Those who loyally support a party *despite *sharing the other’s ideals and goals more closely are the voters who can be convinced to reduce or drop that support. You see that in today’s poll numbers.
You are probably correct - if you interpret “you haven’t presented any evidence” as “you are correct” then there is no point in your continuing.
This is correct, but I doubt it will help - ‘twice as many whites are killed by blacks as vice versa, even though there are four or five times more whites than blacks, therefore whites are more dangerous’ is not based on mathematical reasoning.
Regards,
Shodan
An individual black person is twice as likely to be killed by a white person, based on these per capita murder statistics, than an individual white person is to be killed by a black person.
This fact is probably difficult for a lot of folks who’ve wholly absorbed the “blacks are more dangerous to white people than the reverse” myth, but it’s still a fact.
It doesn’t help that some people are quite skilled at applying post hoc rationalizations to any killings they prefer to see as justifiable, thus further skewing their impressions of both the threat posed and culpability levels therefor.
Something is wrong with these numbers. The FBI states there 17,250 murders in 2016 but the chart only accounts for roughly 7400 of the victims.
Evil Economist states the population is 235 million Black and Whites in 2010. The population is 325 million in 2018. I’m assuming Asians and Hispanics aren’t counted.
Am I reading these numbers wrong?
The chart says “single victim/single offender”, so it may be that the rest of the murders are either multiple victim murders, or multiple offender murders.
I don’t see what the problem is here – EE was just counting black and white Americans, not Hispanics, Asians, and others, which make up the remaining population.
No, Andy, this simply isn’t right. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are just being innumerate (probabilities are often difficult for people to understand, as the infamous Marilyn vos Savant “Monty Hall” question illustrates) rather than actively trying to do the opposite of fighting ignorance.
Here’s a “toy problem” to illustrate:
Imagine an isolated colony in deep space with 100 white people and 10 black people on it. 50% of the black people, so five of them, and one percent of the white people, so one of them, subscribe to a bizarre cultic practice: every year on New Year’s, right at midnight, they murder the closest person to them who is not of their race. No one knows wihich one percent, or fifty percent, it is, because everyone wears old-fashioned costume ball masks on their faces for New Year’s Eve (but their mouths and chins are visible). No other murders occur on this colony.
It’s five seconds to midnight, and a white guy and black guy are standing next to each other near the punch bowl. Nobody else is nearby. Which one has more reason to be nervous about the other’s intentions? If you say “the black guy, because ten percent of his population is going to die in the next minute and only five percent of the white population will die in that time”, then your innumeracy, or obstinacy, is out of control.
Furthermore, and more to the point, if one were to start a “_____ lives matter” campaign, to try to educate a population to value the lives of the other race more and stop this evil practice, which would be more justified? Does the black population of this space station seem to have a greater difficulty respecting whites’ rights to live? Or is it the white population where this moral failing is more prevalent? :dubious:
You do realize I have completely checkmated you–and I could go be the king of the alt-right with this analogy if I wanted to. But I don’t want to–eww, gross. (I honestly hope none of them are reading this!) Please stop and think about the implications, though, for how warranted BLM is and whether fence-sitting whites might not have a vague, implicit understanding that in 2018, something’s hinky with their specific complaint.
Absolutelytrue. If 79,646 votes had been cast differently in three states, Hillary Clinton would be President today.
No idea what your weird sci-fi scenario has to do with the actual factual numbers, which show that, per capita, a random individual black American has more statistical basis for a general fear that she might be murdered by a dangerous white person somewhere out there than a random individual white American has for a fear she might be murdered by a dangerous black person somewhere out there. Twice as much basis, roughly, in fact.
The numbers were very clearly laid out, and don’t need strange hypotheticals in space to explain them. Looking at the all the cross-race murders (and there were quite few – obviously white people should statistically fear being killed by a white person far more than being killed by a black person, and black people should statistically fear being killed by a black person far more than being killed by a white person), an individual black person has a higher chance of being killed by a white person than an individual white person has to be killed by a black person. It should trouble you that you, for some reason, feel compelled to fight against this fact, and fight against organizations like BLM which, quite reasonably, try to highlight the specific and additional danger black lives face in a society that places less value on them. But it clearly doesn’t. Hopefully it will, some day.