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MrScorpio

(73,631 posts)
2. His paragraphs on why so-called "black-on-black crime" doesn't actually exist are instructive
Sat Sep 8, 2018, 10:39 AM
Sep 2018
And yes, blacks are arrested at higher rates and make up a larger percentage of the prison population. That is partly because crime is a socioeconomic phenomenon, as explained by The Root time and time again. It is also because blacks are stopped, searched and arrested for drug use at almost three times the rate of casserole eaters even though the rate of black drug use is less than that of white drug use. When they enter the criminal justice system, blacks are less likely to receive bail, less likely to be granted probation, more likely to be sentenced to mandatory prison sentences, less likely to be offered plea deals and receive prison sentences that are 20 percent longer. Of course we are a large part of the prison population.

I could teach a class about black-on-black crime (I actually have) and crime in black neighborhoods, but I will try to break it down for you in a couple of paragraphs.

For most of America’s history, in most cities and towns, blacks were relegated to segregated neighborhoods. Because of this, black lawyers, doctors and engineers lived alongside teachers, mechanics, factory workers and lower-middle-class blacks. When segregation ended, these neighborhoods became poor neighborhoods because upwardly mobile blacks moved out.

Now, there is a prevailing notion (including the h*tep-adjacent argument that “integration was the worst thing that happened to black people;”) that they ran to white neighborhoods, but that is a misconception. Black people simply moved to good homes in good neighborhoods because statistically, upwardly mobile people are the most transient. Plus, when the law afforded us the opportunity to live wherever the fuck we wanted, we lived wherever the fuck we wanted. Black people didn’t move to white neighborhoods any more than formerly poor Jewish graduates move to gentile neighborhoods. America is a white neighborhood.

The formerly middle-class black neighborhoods became pockets of poverty in the same way poor Irish and Italian neighborhoods did. Poverty leads to crime, which leads to lower property values, which leads to a lower tax base, which leads to underfunded schools which lead to poverty which leads to crime which leads to lower property values, etc.

There is crime in a lot of black neighborhoods because there is poverty in a lot of black neighborhoods. Historically, the black unemployment rate is always twice the white unemployment rate despite that the high school completion rate and college graduation rate between races are much closer. Studies show blacks are still underpaid, criminalized and underemployed when compared to whites with the same education, experience, parental income and from the same neighborhood.

So the question should be: If their education, skill, location and parenting outpace their employment and wages and mobility, why are black so much poorer?

I think you know the answer.

I really thank you for validating my intelligence and writing ability, although you forgot to mention that I am also articulate, well-spoken and “one of the good ones.”

However, I am also a poet who sometimes uses flowery and incendiary language to make a point. Sometimes, I wish that were not so. Behind all of the grandiloquence and bombastic prose is 20 years of macroeconomic research, data and teaching race as an economic construct. If you strip away the florid language, there are numbers and data meant to dispel the prevailing narrative of lazy, violent, good-for-nothing negroes of which I am one.

And, as for you and future trolls, I challenge you to find a piece of a sentence where I have written that blacks are not guilty of committing crimes. Find a portion of a paragraph where I dismiss the fact that single fathers often walk away from their families. Show me where I have written that black people shouldn’t worry about education, family and excellence. I know, and every single black person in America knows, that we can do better in those areas. But even if we did, it would not erase the immorality of racism.

If someone doesn’t work hard or value education, they likely won’t benefit from their lack of hard work. If anyone, black or white, steals, kills or commits an act of violence, I would hope that they are fairly punished for their actions.

Who I am writing for, are the people who are unfairly sentenced because of the color of their skin, whether their sentence is prison, poverty or prejudice. A seat at the table is all I ask for. I am not asking for a head start, just a chance to run the race. As I said in the article:

“Opportunity is the thing.”


Posted for future reference.
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