Voicing limited and qualified agreement with a bigoted stereotype

Great Debates
181

You can’t really look at crimes committed by Black people in isolation because it’s so greatly affected by how society treats Black people general. It would be surprising if they didn’t commit more crimes. It seems like any group which is systematically oppressed, segregated, ostracized, and denied access to most resources would engage in more criminal activity. It has nothing to do with any trait inherent to Black people. Rather, it has everything to do with how white society has treated Black people.

Imagine if there was a stereotype that white dogs were more aggressive. People would then react as if white dogs were more aggressive and be more fearful of them, reject them more often, throw things at them, etc. And then–surprise, surprise–white dogs would actually act more aggressively. But it would have nothing to do with any inherent aggressiveness of white dogs. White dogs are born just as friendly as any other dog. But because of the way people treat white dogs, it creates an environment where white dogs are treated in a way which fosters and amplifies aggressiveness. In this scenario, there would be all kinds of stats where white dogs are more likely to be strays, get into trouble, bite people more often than other dogs, etc. While all that may be true, none of it is inherently due to the whiteness of the dog. Rather, it’s all due to the way that the society treats dogs with white fur. If the society treated white dogs like all other dogs, the behavior of white dogs would not be any different than any other dog.

182

OK, so to sum up the OP and the responses, a few people in this thread have indeed pointed out that a kernel of truth exists to some negative stereotypes. I’m not sure where the thread now goes with that, but yes, it played out mostly as he said. 1) some people voiced limited and qualified agreement with bigoted stereotypes, and 2) others objected, claiming that there wasn’t even a kernel of truth.

183

But we don’t know whether Black people commit more crimes; because, ahem, unfair justice system. So stating it as an unqualified fact isn’t accurate.

Interesting. I’ve heard that about southern (USA) whites.

I must have pointed out a dozen times by now in this thread that it’s not a “kernel of truth”. However you spell it.

Cites, then?

Yup. So blaming it specifically on Islam is both a bad idea, and inaccurate.

No, they haven’t.

A few people in this thread have insisted that if some people in a group behave in the stereotypical fashion, then even if most people in that group don’t behave in that fashion and many people not in that group do behave in that fashion, then that counts as a “kernel of truth”. Which it doesn’t.

What we appear to me to be arguing about is what “truth” means.

184

If you take that attitude, we can’t ‘know’ anything. Maybe the US homicide rate is actually lower than Italy’s, and the FBI is inventing their statistics from whole cloth.

In reality, you can apply reasonable assumptions like “there are not thousands of unreported murders of white Americans each year” to set rough limits on the amount of distortion that could be produced by bias in the criminal justice system. You could also look at actual studies on bias in the CJS, though IIRC they are somewhat contradictory.

Anyway, there’s still no reason to jump from ‘real disparities in number of crimes committed’ to “intrinsically more inclined to lawbreaking”. It’s hardly implausible that a group that’s generally poorer and more socially excluded would commit more crime.

@Kimstu just did something very similar to this, and - surprise surprise - got no pushback from anyone but me. Whether or not you agree my statement is factual, it clearly does not necessitate her conclusion.

We also don’t know that men commit more crimes than women, since that fact is based on the same sources of data, and there is evidence that police and courts are biased in favour of women (men are more likely to be stopped by the police while driving, and much more likely to be stopped in the street, for example). Yet strangely, the evidence is considered good enough in that case.

Yes, the theory is that this is an aspect of US Black culture absorbed from white culture in the US South. Supposedly, homicide rates are higher among whites in the South than in the North for the same reason, and this was mentioned as evidence for the idea. But I haven’t checked that.

FBI data can be found at the link below. Despite the large difference in population size, there are more black homicide victims than white, and more black homicide offenders than white. You can calculate the disparity vs population, and estimate how much of it your proposed explanations can plausibly account for.

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/shr

Yup. The answer to the OP is that you can’t point it out. Even relatively inoffensive stereotypes get tons of pushback, in this thread and generally.

185

Nobody says ‘young people and men need the police on their backs 24/7 because of how dangerous they are’ though. Or ‘young people and men need to be corralled into ghettos so they cannot corrupt the rest of society’ or ‘rehabilitation is wasted on men and young people because they are genetically prone to crime’. Despite the fact that statistically, a young person is far more dangerous than an old person, and a man is far more dangerous than a man, compared to the crime rate difference between blacks vs whites.

Whats funny is men and (arguably) young people are genetically prone to crime. While the higher rate of (some) crimes among black people vs white people is likely a result of all the cultural persecution black people face, men and young people are designed by evolution to be more dangerous than women and the elderly. At least men are, or especially young men.

186

So I’m going to avoid the topic, but I do want to point something out.

Nobody ever says things like:

  • Ashkenazi Jews have the right to abuse and mistreat everyone else because Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs

  • East asians have the right to mistreat white people because east asians have higher IQs

  • Black people in 2025 have the right to go back in time and mistreat white people before the ~1960s because black people from 2025 have higher IQs than white people in the 1960s due to the Flynn effect

  • Black people in the US have the right to treat black people in Africa like garbage because black people in the US have higher IQs

  • Women with an IQ of 110 have the right to abuse and mistreat men with an IQ of 105

  • Black people with PhDs in STEM fields have the right to mistreat 99% of the white people they interact with.

  • Women have the right to mistreat men because women have more bachelor and graduate degrees.

The point is like I was saying earlier, when a latino immigrant rapes and kills someone then all the white nationalists jump on it and use it to justify mistreating latino immigrants. When a native born white christian commits a rape and murder (like Ted Bundy) nobody calls for a nationwide program against white christian men and their crimes.

People latch onto ‘legitimizing myths’ that are true, false and misinterpreted, and use those to justify the social hierarchy and why downtrodden groups deserve to be mistreated.

187

Does anyone say these things about black people? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

It would be impractical to try to exclude men and young people from society, but the police target proactive policing measures towards men and young people, and this is not controversial. Men and young people are heavily overrepresented in jails, and almost no one says this is a result of bias. It’s legal to create a community where young people are banned from living, and it’s not uncommon for shops to have bans on groups of kids entering because of problems with shoplifting. It’s also socially acceptable to refer to presumed-delinquent young people as ‘hoodies’ and ‘yobs’.

There’s evidence men get longer sentences than women for the same crime and are more likely to receive the death penalty, and though few people would defend this, also few seem to care.

I even see arguments from conservatives that repeat criminals, especially violent ones, should be kept in jail until they reach a certain age, when they are considered less likely to reoffend.

So I don’t think it’s as true as you think that people ignore these patterns of criminality.

I think it’s more that elderly people are less capable of committing crimes, and the same is true of women vs men to some extent. But high testosterone does seem to encourage risky behaviour in young men, and that probably is the result of evolution.

188

Who was suggesting that there are unreported murders? What has been suggested is that it isn’t a good idea to extrapolate who committed approximately 50% of the murders in the US based on the approximately 50% of the murders where we reasonably do know who committed the crime.

It might be reasonable to make assumptions on the unsolved 50% BUT, there’s a long history of racial disparities in homicide investigations which has led to, as but one example, serial killers having longer ‘’‘careers’‘’ because the murder of Black sex workers and Black children is not a investigatory priority. Is that a significant difference? Who can tell without trials and convictions?

Anyway, there’s still no reason to jump from ‘assumed real disparities in number of crimes committed’ to ‘based on that very incomplete data set it’s clear that Blacks are more likely to commit crimes than Whites’.

189

You know what is uncommon? Americans calling ‘stores’ ‘shops’ or referring to anyone as a ‘hoodie’ or ‘yob’. Stop conflating your non-American lived experience with actual American lived experience.

190

I’m way behind on reading this thread, but wanted to offer a pithy thought – something I find myself saying with alarming frequency in this life:

For [choose: thoughtful, educated] people, statistics are the beginning of a conversation. For [choose: thoughtless, uneducated] people, they’re the end of the conversation.

It’s as though so many people use statistics as the jumping off point for the scientific method [ie, Recognize the problem, make Observations about the problem, arrive at a Hypothesis, design Experiments to test the hypothesis, draw Conclusions based on the results of those experiments. Wash. Rinse. Repeat]

But they skip right from “Recognize” to “Conclude.” It lacks intellectual rigor.

191

For that matter, “bans on groups of kids entering” isn’t especially common in the States either. (I think I first learned about it from “Hot Fuzz.”)

192

My experience is that when people find statistics - or social science studies - are on their side, they cite them and don’t investigate further. If they read a headline that supports their beliefs, they don’t bother to check whether it’s accurate. But if the statistics or the study or the headline support a conclusion they disagree with, then they will put in the effort to check it, and often enough find that the headline is misleading and the study weak.

But it isn’t just thoughtless and uneducated people who have this kind of bias. It’s not some ‘other’ we can comfortably look down on. It’s everyone, including me. It’s a lot of effort to check everything and suspect everything, and the vast majority won’t do it unless prompted - by their own disbelief, or by someone else’s.

193

Those aren’t the only options.

It’s easy enough – easier, I would argue – to ignore the ‘stereotype’ or the statistic that caught your attention in the first place. One can treat it like gossip. I’ve long said that we should all be “where gossip goes to die.”

There are other choices than deep research or blind acceptance based on ones own biases. Not engaging with the stereotype at all is one such choice, and it’s quite often the best option.

194

Maybe this sort of prejudice against young people isn’t so common in the US, then. But America isn’t the only country in the world, or the only one that matters. The post I replied to said “nobody says”; it wasn’t specific to America.

It’s precisely my experience in the UK, where even in all-white areas there were bad schools, crime-ridden council estates, and gangs - and plenty of people who would blame those things on the residents - that makes me disbelieve what seems to be a frequent narrative in the US: that race is at the root of such prejudice.

What, purposely chose ignorance? Refuse to engage with the evidence for and against a position? I would never do that: I want to know the truth, as best we can know it at this moment in time.

195

And besides that, stereotypes are a very small part of social science, statistics, and newspaper headlines, and everything is like this. Headlines are written to catch attention, not to inform. Statistics can be equally misleading on issues that aren’t political, or that you find unobjectionable. And social science is chock full of poor studies that don’t replicate, ignore confounding variables, don’t have the power to find the effects they claim, and use incorrect statistical methods.

The big issue here isn’t the studies and articles I’m believing, it’s the studies and articles governments are uncritically using to dictate and justify their policies.

196

FWIW, I have seen signs announcing a limit on how large a group may enter a store. YMMV.

Only the most hardened and uncritical of bigots claims that criminal behavior is genetic, an inborn characteristic of sub-Saharan Africans (although doubtless that belief used to be much more common). But plenty of people find it uncontroversial that pathological cultures exist.

197

Before or after Covid?

And only a bigot would describe criminal behavior as a pathological characteristic of sub-Saharan African culture.
If only you had written subcultures but no…

198

I did not intend to imply that all African-Americans belong to a monolithic culture; I did not even intend for “pathological cultures” to refer specifically to African-Americans. Subculture it is.

199

For example

I know of no case where a black man killed his wife was able to avoid meaningful suspicion by claiming that some random white guy had done it, but I’d be interested in hearing of one

200

My dear fellow, the crime statistics in no way support such a ridiculous alibi!