In the spirit of voicing limited and qualified agreement with a bigoted stereotype;
Thomas Sowell spends too much time in the ‘house’ and has put to memory the lyrics to ‘Zip’-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.
Explanations available to the less informed on request.
I don’t know but I really don’t believe so. For example, the idea that there is a large pool of white murderers who never get arrested because society doesn’t police white murder doesn’t sound realistic to me. This is why I discussed both murder and drug use.
Black people make up about 13% of society, but make up about 50% of arrests for murder. Black people also make up about 50% of murder victims.
Meanwhile black people use drugs at about the same rates as white people, but get arrested about 4x more often.
For drug use, the issue is over policing. Drugs associated with black people (like crack) get policed much more heavily than drugs associated with white people (like powder cocaine).
Only a small % of crimes are reported to the police. Every time someone takes an illegal drug, buys or sells one they’re committing a crime. But only a tiny % of those crimes result in an arrest. Blacks commit those drug crimes at the same rate as whites, but are 4x more likely to get arrested due to over policing.
Murder meanwhile seems to be a crime that is investigated far more heavily than drug crimes. Thats why I brought it up. With drugs, maybe 1% of the drug crimes are brought to the attention of police. With murder, a very large % are brought to police attention. Society isn’t choosing to ignore endless murdered white people. So I don’t see how over policing can play a role in the difference in the murder rate, because police tend to investigate every murder.
What can play a difference in the murder rate is the fact that people internalize societies lack of value and respect for them. I’m watching a documentary about Ted Bundy and the Green river killer. Ted Bundy murdered women who had value to society. Attractive, college educated white women. The Green river killer murdered people who society didn’t value. Prostitutes and runaways, many who are non-white. As a result, the police, political and media resources devoted to catching Ted Bundy were much higher than the resources devoted to the Green river killer. Bundy was a more intelligent killer than Gary Ridgeway, but because Bundy targeted victims who society values more, more resources were devoted to catching him. So Bundy was arrested after about 2 years of murder, but it took 20 years to catch Ridgeway.
Imagine a hypothetical society that consisted only of women divided into two groups. One group was made up of high socioeconomic status, college educated women. The other group was made up of low socioeconomic status prostitutes.
in the prostitute society, there would be more violent crime between the residents. However genetically they are the same group of people. The difference is that the residents in the prostitute society learned from birth that prostitute lives hold little value. As a result, the women in the prostitute society would learn that their lives don’t value, and the lives of other prostitutes don’t have value. There would also be issues with internalized self hatred too, where prostitutes unconsciously hated each other because they were taught by society to view themselves as vile.
In this environment where the prostitutes learned their lives had no value, that the lives of their neighbors had no value, and where there was a lot of externalized self hatred and contempt, there’d be more violence. Its the same with black people. Black people are taught from birth that their lives aren’t as valuable, that society hates them, and as a result that removes some of the psychological barriers against violent crime. Black people have a murder rate much higher than whites, but a big part of that is probably just because black people grow up in a society that teaches them to hate and not value themselves or each other, which makes violent crime easier.
Then as a society, after we’ve taught black people to hate and not value themselves and each other, they end up commiting more crimes against each other than other racial groups (like whites) we then use this fact to justify treating and hating black people even more. Its a positive feedback loop. Black people are taught they are vile and unwanted, which makes black people value their own lives less, which makes blacks commit more crimes against each other, which makes society view blacks as vile and unwanted all over again.
I don’t agree. There are something like 200 countries on earth. If you take groups that measure freedom and democracy like freedom house, they break countries into groups like
free - wide range of political, civil and human rights
partly free - hybrid regimes with both democratic and authoritarian tendencies
not free - authoritarian and oppressive
Of the 200 countries on earth, about 150 are non-muslim and about 50 are muslim. Of the 150 non-muslim nations, about 60% earn a ‘free’ rating by freedom house. Among the 50 muslim nations, 0% earn a free rating from freedom house.
Even if you go to sub saharan africa, the % of non-muslim nations that are labeled ‘free’ is far higher than the muslim nations in sub-saharan africa.
You can’t call that strictly chance. Sub saharan Africa has experienced colonialization, disease and poverty. But the non-muslim nations have more human, civil and political rights than the muslim nations there. This trend holds true in Africa, in asia, etc. Nations which are geographically and demographically similar are more free if they are non-muslim.
Nearly two-thirds of violent crime reported to law enforcement went unsolved in 2022.
In 2022, 63 percent of violent crimes in the United States that were reported to police went unsolved. This means that in a single year, there was no one arrested, charged, and referred for prosecution in over 800,000 violent crimes, including an estimated 10,000 homicides, 525,000 aggravated assaults, 169,000 robberies, and 98,000 rapes.
Percent of Violent Crime Not Solved in the U.S. by Offense, 2022
@Wesley_Clark did specify murder, which does receive more scrutiny than other violent crimes; and unsolved doesn’t mean that investigators didn’t try. Contrary to police procedurals on television, if there were no witnesses and no smoking-gun evidence, the chances of someone getting away with murder are disturbingly high.
And that, IMHO, makes these racial breakdowns kinda useless for the purpose of declaring that Blacks are more murdery than other racial groups.
So on the subject of stereotypes, there are a couple of things that can cause a conversation to become hostile. One is IQ and race, and the other is the variability hypothesis.
The study also found that the average IQ for African Americans was lower than those for Latino, White, Asian, and Jewish Americans (85, 89, 103, 106, and 113, respectively; Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, pp. 273–278).
If you discuss the fact that historically marginalized groups like blacks or latinos have lower IQs than whites, people view that as a legitimizing myth designed to justify the oppression of these groups.
Another one is the ‘greater male variability hypothesis’
This theory basically states that because women’s reproductive systems are more valuable to a species than men’s, that evolution takes more chances with men. A species needs virtually all the women to reproduce, but a species can survive fine if only a small % of men reproduce. I think in genetic studies on humans, it is found that in prehistory about 80% of women have reproduced but only about 40% of men reproduce. When farmers try to select for specific traits they may breed 50% of the female animals, but only ~5% of the male animals when selecting for that trait.
What this means is that men are more represented on the far ends of the bell curve for a variety of traits, both the bottom and the top. One of these triats can be IQ.
Among mensa members, 64% are male and 32% are female. So a 2:1 ratio. The IQ minimum to get into mensa is about 130.
However, there are other high IQ societies, and the higher the IQ minimum needed, the more the gender ratio becomes lopsided. For the top 2% in mensa, the gender ratio is about 2:1 for men. But for the triple 9 society (the top 0.1% of IQ) the gender ratio is more like 6:1. For the mega society (the top 0.003%) the gender ratio is possibly as high as 10-20:1 men vs women.
So the theory is that evolution takes more chances with men, which means on the far ends of the bell curve distribution, there will be more men than women. Which also means that on the far right end of the bell curve for things like IQ, you’ll find more men than women. Evolution needs virtually all the women to survive and procreate, but only needs some of the men. If a small minority of men emerge with useful skills then they can dominate procreation, but the definition of ‘useful skills’ depends on what environmental risks a species faces.
For a trait like IQ, for every person with a very high IQ, you may end up with multiple people who end up disabled by autism, mental illness, or neurological diseases (ashkenazi jews suffer from numerous neurological diseases, possibly a side effect of their biology being prone to higher IQs).
Combine this with the race and IQ mentioned above, and when you look at the cognitive elite (the top echelons of scientists, mathematicians, physicists, etc) you are going to find a lot of ashkenazi jews, whites, east asians and men. You’ll find far far less latinos, black people and women at these top level cognitive careers.
Both of these things (race and IQ, and the variability hypothesis) can be viewed as ‘legitimizing myths’ designed to justify the persecution and mistreatment of marginalized groups (black people, latinos and women). But there is a kernel of truth to them.
I was wondering when race realism was finally going to come out to play. I mean that’sb what this whole thread is really wanting to talk about isn’t it?
Unpossible! There’s a rule against doing that!
Bullshit. These tired, bigoted hypotheses have been repeatedly discredited.
I don’t think they’re ignoring endless murdered white people. But a lot of murders aren’t solved (I don’t know the percentage) and some people are falsely convicted. If Black people are more likely to be falsely convicted than White people, that’s going to skew the statistics. If a larger portion of unsolved murders were committed by white people, possibly because white people are less likely to be charged, then that’s also going to skew the statistics.
I don’t have cites for any of that and have no time to hunt for them (or for the even more time-consuming task of deciding there’s a lack of them.) But I do think we can’t be confident that the murder statistics aren’t skewed. (Thank you, @crowmanyclouds, for some statistics.)
– I think you also have to adjust for poverty rates; and for whether people expect a reasonable chance to get out of poverty. You’ve probably got a point about people being taught their lives aren’t valuable; but people who think they’re caught in a financial trap they can’t get out of may also be more likely to be violent, whatever their skin color. (That might be seen as a version of the lives-not-valuable, I grant: ‘nobody will ever pay you a decent wage’ is, in this society, often taken to mean ‘because you’re not worth one’; instead of ‘because we need to fill all these shitty poorly-paid jobs and we’ve chosen Your Kind to do that.’)
And all of that is temporary; a picture at this given moment in time. During which the USA, for example, seems to be changing status.
I was carefully taught how to take IQ tests; which raised my score significantly, and made me highly dubious of the whole thing.
I’m glad I was finally able to answer the OP’s question, and it only took 152 replies
Well, dismissing what are the results of a bigoted stereotype leads to that.
Treating self-selected membership in a designated “high IQ society” as a reliable proxy for the actual distribution of IQ in a whole population is… not very intelligent.
Sure there is. The first thing the police with a crime do is look for an easily convicted suspect, which by preference means they grab some black man and accuse him of the crime. Failing that, they find a brown man instead. Heck, I recall how they screwed up the OJ Simpson case because they framed a guilty man, because they didn’t know how to handle a case where the accused was actually guilty.
Not if you say black people are overrepresented in prisons, because you can blame that on an unfair justice system. But if you say black people commit more crimes, then yes, 100%. Never mind that there can be many reasons for it, merely stating the fact gets you attacked as propagating some kind of bigoted stereotype. I know, because I brought it up here once in a discussion about police shootings, and that was the response.
So if you’re wondering why people are reluctant to give more controversial examples, this is why.
I think the other issue is under-policing, or lack of trust in the police. If your friend is murdered, and you don’t trust the police and justice system to catch and punish the killer, maybe you decide to take revenge yourself. Or if you’re in fear for your life and don’t trust the police to protect you, you decide to carry a gun, and when everyone is armed, confrontations can quickly spiral out of control. Involvement with minor crime makes this worse, because you can’t appeal to the law to solve disputes.
What I’ve heard is that it’s an honour culture, where respect is important, and allowing someone to insult you takes away that respect. Combine with everyone being armed, and what could have been a fist-fight turns into a homicide.
Maybe those are right and maybe they’re wrong, but there are plenty of possible explanations. Still, my experience matches the OP’s in terms of reactions to talking about the ‘kernal of truth’.
Since a majority of homicide victims are killed by someone of the same race, and murders with black victims are twice as likely to remain unsolved as those with white victims (here’s a disparity that ought to get more attention), unsolved murders are probably substantially less likely to be committed by white people. But even if you take those into account, it’s not going to come close to closing the gap. I looked all this up last time the subject came up, and after checking today, I see it’s only got worse since then. If you want to explain it away, you need to do the work: get figures and do the calculations, rather than just throwing out speculation. You certainly wouldn’t accept that level of ‘evidence’ to believe the opposite.
So? It doesn’t justify some wider stereotype that Muslim must inevitably = backward, but it’s still true and relevant today. Personally I’m skeptical that it’s Islam per se: I think the culture of those countries is the issue, combined with a rise in religious fundamentalism that tends to produce unpleasant results no matter the religion (I’m sure you can supply your own examples). But it can still cause various kinds of problems, which we shouldn’t ignore.
Let’s see a cite for this. You say you have an example – let’s see it.
I think the point you’re missing, though, is that the issue of how many crimes black people commit is inextricably tangled with the issue of whether and how much black people are unfairly targeted by law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
If you say “Black people have higher rates of criminal convictions”, I don’t think you’ll get pushback on that statement of fact.
But if you jump from that to the conclusion that “Black people commit more crimes”, meaning you believe that Black people’s behavior, irrespective of LE/CJ inequities, is just intrinsically more inclined to lawbreaking, then I’d say you’re being at best a bit credulous and naive. And yes, your credulity in that case is reinforcing some very noxious bigoted stereotypes about innate Black “savagery” and “lawlessness”.
It’s not just hierarchies. There’s an increasing movement on TwitteX to “repeal the 19th”, ie take away women’s right to vote, and a major driver of this seems to be gender polarisation in politics: when women voted similarly to men, right-wing men didn’t have a problem with us having the vote, but now that voting preferences have increasingly diverged and women as a group are standing in the way of those men getting the type of government they prefer, suddenly they believe women are too emotional and irrational to have the vote.
A similar sentiment seems to be partially behind the recent rise in antisemitism on the right, too.
This isn’t really true. It’s fairly socially acceptable to talk about men or young people being more violent, and often legal to discriminate against them (eg in pricing car insurance). Perhaps this is because they are not low on the social hierarchy, and nobody is seriously suggesting oppressive government control of them?
Holy excluded middle, Batman! Didn’t we just go through a whole bunch of different explanations why some groups might commit more crimes than others (or more of particular types of crime) that aren’t “they’re intrinsically more inclined to lawbreaking”?
I’d say this is exactly the kind of assumption being called out in the OP.
But the point is that absent a reliably equitable LE/CJ system, you have no way to KNOW who’s actually committing more crimes.
All you’ve got are data about arrest rates and conviction rates, etc., which you can certainly discuss in an unbigoted fashion.