That report I linked you is a piece of investigative journalism that I merely stumbled upon when I was reading stuff about Ferguson. Their numbers are based on data provided by local police departments and various news reports about the incidents published online (all of which are listed in the report). The site works just fine for me.
And I still have no idea what exactly are the conclusions you draw from the numbers you presented. Can you explain?
@ Headheaded1
Quote:What is woefully missing is the lucid explanation of how majority oppression, or its legacy, causes a Black man on the street in 2014 to go around the corner and shoot his fellow Black man. The explanation must in like manner explain how similarly oppressed minorities in other subcultures and at other times in American history have not turned to murdering their own in like numbers. Where were the same rates to be found among the Irish, the Italians, the Mexicans, or the Poles as they came to America and lived in their own ghettos. All of them were ground to dust in poverty as they began working their way up here.
Slavery only existed for less than a century for America after we became free of England. We have now lived longer post-slavery than during it as an independent nation. Jim Crow laws existed regionally for over a century after emancipation. Great numbers of Blacks fled the South and sought a new start in the industrial North. Their legacy has resulted mixed success. Some climbed the ladder and found footing in the middle class, but far larger numbers wound up in the urban ghettos of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, NYC, Detroit, Chicago, and so forth. They were far from the sites of slavery. They were employed in large numbers during the wars and manufacturing booms.
One must explain how the systemic racism, in the North, has bred a subculture that destroys itself as a reaction to lack of opportunity, etc. The logical explanation is that it would have triggered a revolt. Heaven knows that subculture is heavily armed. Why does it turn on killing one another rather than the [supposed] White oppressors?
And this is where you turn to social science (Publishers like Verso, Polity or Pluto would be my choice). I obviously cannot give you a totalizing explanation for all of the questions you asked. That would be ridiculous and clearly out of the boundaries of my knowledge anyway.
It should be noted though that I am not of the opinion that poverty is the ultimate cause of everything because that's the view you seem to attribute to me. Of course all sorts of factors come into play when we're trying to explain a social phenomenon. Poverty, for instance, acquires different sorts of effects and meanings in different contexts and with different actors involved. It cannot be a singular point of reference for causal explanations.
Of course, like you said actually, what is missing here is a lucid explanation for what this "bad culture" actually consists of, how it reproduces itself and draws black adolescents to its sphere of influence, etc. I have no doubts whatsoever that there exist class and ethnicity based habituses but I am very doubtful about this kind of cultural determinism. As if incidences of crime and violence were all homogeneous and could be linked to this very same cultural dimension, as if there didn't exist cultural divisions among black people, as if culture operated in a social vacuum as a kind of an autonomous force determining behavioral outcomes, as if economic exploitation and racism didn't exist and we really lived in a land of equal opportunity, etc. Moreover, the cultural explanation assumes a high level of social cohesion in deprived communities (as enculturation is reinforced in communities where there exist strong social ties), which is often not the case. Rather, there's been some focus in social sciences recently on the link between anti-social behavior and social distrust.
Quote:Actually, one doesn't have to be implying anything. The incidence of murder IS the primary point, not a secondary one, nor one demanding the analyst go to the deeper level. The murder rate, prima facie, is the point. Like the Stalinist murder of millions of his own people through oppression and poverty and secret police, it is wrong in and of itself. One doesn't have to dissect the political ideology and grapple with it. The murder of the Ukrainians in the early 20th century was wrong as an absolute. By like offense, the ongoing murder of so many Black Americans by their fellow Black Americans is wrong. The sad truth is that it has been accepted by too many in the very communities in which the murders occur, accepted as a fact of a life.
I don't agree with this kind of logic. What you're doing here is depoliticizing a political issue. By abstracting from the social context you're able to present the violence in black communities as a simple abstract wrong to be condemned and corrected (by what?). The whole point is not to just stare at crime statistics with a bleeding heart but to ask the crucial question why is all that happening. Yes, murder is bad, but you need to understand reasons why it happens. Otherwise you'll end positing equivalences where they don't exist.
And since you took up the Stalinist scarecrow - take for example the Stalinist labor camps and Fascist concentration camps. Millions of people got killed in both of them yet it would be wrong to treat Stalinism and Fascism as two aspects of the same coin. Stalin's labor camps and Hitler's concentration camps were emphatically not the same phenomenon. Whereas the latter are tied to the racist and anti-semitic ideology of Fascism (itself a symptom of the social and political failures of the Fascist project), the first were the consequences of the failures of Stalinism (for example the rapid process of industrialization and Stalin's failure to integrate peasants to his socialist project) with entirely different ideological and social underpinnings. Just treating both camps as evil places where lots of people got killed risks positing an equivalence between Fascism and Stalinism (i.e. lumping them together into the same category of Totalitarianism - a term loved so much by democratic liberals) where there isn't one.
We could list various reasons for violence and murder being more prevalent in the black community, the one reason that can not show up is that it is because they are black.
A persons ethnic/racial composition in and of it's self can not make them more prone to commit crimes.
Yet, with that being said, murder and violent crime rates are higher in inner city black neighborhoods.
My opinion is not popular, but I believe it to be correct, it is because of decades of injustice, oppression, lack of equality and prejudicial treatment that a culture of violence and crime is a daily occurrence in the inner city.
People turn to drugs, prostitution, theft and other crimes when they believe that they are disenfranchised.
In the '50's when I was a boy the attitude in my family was that "they" should stay in there place.
In the '60's sweeping civil rights legislation was passed and became law.
Still to this day if we are honest we have to concede that the black person in the US does not have an equal opportunity with their white counterpart.
Resentment and anger are what we see when a white officer shoots an unarmed black man.
When young blacks are killed by non blacks such as in this case or in others like Travon Martin, this anger erupts.
Is it right, no. Is it understandable, to me it is.
[MENTION=21077]Aike[/MENTION]
The site you want me to go to ( mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/operation ) won't open on my macbook and says "Safari can’t open the page “https://mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013...pdf” because Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server “mxgm.org”.
mxgm = Malcolm X Grassroots Movement using them as a source is the same as using Tea Party, White Supremacists, Neo Nazis or other extremists. If you would like to quote the figures here, fine. I feel quite sure the figures will deal exclusively with the deaths of 8.9% of black men not killed by blacks rather than the 90.1% who are. (2008 figures) Reality is a disposable luxury in the rhetorical narratives of extremists of any flavor. None of them are in business to spread truth but sway opinions by any means possible.
Virge Wrote:My computer will not open the site -- detecting malware and or other malicious bugs.
Aike Wrote:The site works just fine for me.
Virge Wrote:The site you want me to go to (. . . deleted . . . ) won't open on my macbook and says "Safari can’t open the page . . . because Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server “mxgm.org”.
Aside from the debate and the points put forward, I do believe the link has malware at the site, as I clicked on it using a PC with Windows and my computer froze in mid-launch. I thought it was my problem until I read Virge's posts. I'm going to ask a mod to check it out and/or remove it.
And to the point about sociology, it's too convenient to simply claim the murder rate stems from unfathomable complexity. It's not that complex. And it is most certainly rooted in poverty, as Blacks who escape poverty don't see any higher murder rate than their neighbors of other ethnicities. And, to my earlier assertion, the similarity between Black ghettos in the urban centers of America DO bear great resemblance, and do reflect something of a shared subculture.
You called Virge on not answering your question about conclusion. You likewise have made not attempt to answer why other oppressed minorities have not seen the same murder rates as seen by Black American males. That question looms large, and it highly relevant.
There is no point in the Stalinist reference other than to say that social ills can be decried on their surface value, without asking for a vivisection to get at the motives. Murder is murder. And it is illogical to suggest that a man is made to murder his fellow man by some indirect social force. You assert it is so, then you must defend that conclusion with evidence. Simply asking your opponent to read generalized texts is not proving anything, merely deflecting.
11-30-2014, 02:51 AM (Edited 11-30-2014, 02:56 AM by Aike.)
Quote:Aside from the debate and the points put forward, I do believe the link has malware at the site, as I clicked on it using a PC with Windows and my computer froze in mid-launch. I thought it was my problem until I read Virge's posts. I'm going to ask a mod to check it out and/or remove it.
I still find this strange because I had no problems with the site. But OK. I tried to add a warning to my post about the link but it looks like I can't edit my posts now. Great.
Quote:And to the point about sociology, it's too convenient to simply claim the murder rate stems from unfathomable complexity. It's not that complex. And it is most certainly rooted in poverty, as Blacks who escape poverty don't see any higher murder rate than their neighbors of other ethnicities. And, to my earlier assertion, the similarity between Black ghettos in the urban centers of America DO bear great resemblance, and do reflect something of a shared subculture.
You called Virge on not answering your question about conclusion. You likewise have made not attempt to answer why other oppressed minorities have not seen the same murder rates as seen by Black American males. That question looms large, and it highly relevant.
What exactly do you want from me? Some kind of an analysis of ethnic minorities in the Unites States and how all sorts of racist attitudes and policies affect each of them differently? I never claimed to possess such knowledge and it would be absurd to go through all that in a discussion forum. Plus, I never claimed that there's "unfathomable complexity"; all that complexity can be deconstructed by social scientific means. If you were seriously curious about this issue, you'd turn to books rather than some random commentator on a discussion forum.
But, since you insist, here's one window you can look through to understand the plights of black people in today's America. Coates shows persuasively how the legacy of slavery translated into racist housing policies (the notorious redlining of neighborhoods) and financial expropriation of black people through predatory lending and other speculative devices. It's only in the light of this entire history that we can understand contemporary geographic segregation along racial lines, currently prevalent racist practices in the housing market (like the redlining done by banks and white flight) and why the financial crisis of 07-08 dispossessed so many black home-owners as opposed to white. (And, if you're interested, here's Coates's piece on Ferguson.)
The sole reason I entered this debate was because I saw Virge pointing out statistics with the obvious implication that these numbers were proof of the naturally or culturally implanted violent tendencies of blacks. I just wanted to point out that there are serious problems with this kind of argumentation. First, numbers on their own don't prove anything, you need to provide an explanation illuminating the causes and reasons behind such numbers before coming to conclusions. Second, the cultural explanation that you guys seem to propagate is vague and as deterministic as the simple reference to poverty.
Moreover: "The similarity between Black ghettos in the urban centers of America DO bear great resemblance, and do reflect something of a shared subculture." - This is extremely vague and borders on being a tautological statement: you're simply lumping together all sorts of acts, calling it "culture" and proving the existence of such a culture by referring to the existence of these very acts. No, if you are serious about this statement you need to make at least a superficial attempt to illuminate the contours of such a culture, how it emerges and reproduces itself and works to produce behavior independently of various others factors, such as economic ones (which you, by the way, don't even deny).
Quote:There is no point in the Stalinist reference other than to say that social ills can be decried on their surface value, without asking for a vivisection to get at the motives. Murder is murder. And it is illogical to suggest that a man is made to murder his fellow man by some indirect social force. You assert it is so, then you must defend that conclusion with evidence. Simply asking your opponent to read generalized texts is not proving anything, merely deflecting.
My point was precisely that social ills must never be treated with such a superficial sentimentality because in doing this we risk not understanding the roots of these ills. As for the statement you made about murder being an act of free will (not caused by "some indirect social force"), you just tossed social science (and most human sciences) out of the window. And actually you just tossed your own idea about a sub-culture being at the root of black crime out of the window as well. If you really believe that we are completely free and autonomous agents acting out of our own choices, you'll have serious trouble understanding why there exist strong correlations between poverty and crimes rates for instance. Since we're not moved by such social forces, correlations like that should not exist. Moreover, if black crime is to be explained by a shared sub-culture (i.e. a social force) how can you reconcile this hypothesis with freedom of agency?
You can decry the immorality of murder all you want but it's not going to reduce homicide rates in black communities. All you end up doing is covering the real social roots behind these rates with self-righteous moralism. (And how does such condemnation of murder translate into social policy anyway? More incarceration of black people?)
Quote:@Aike said
"The sole reason I entered this debate was because I saw Virge pointing out statistics with the obvious implication that these numbers were proof of the naturally or culturally implanted violent tendencies of blacks."
You drew your own conclusions about the numbers I cited.
My purpose was to draw attention to the total lack of effort by race exploiters to prevent the 9.1 deaths resulting from black on black crimes and burning down towns for the death for every black man killed by a non-black. Go back and look at the context in which I used it.
You are right there are deeper issues that lead to the conditions that make these things happen but in the here and the now they are irrelevant and are only used as lame means of justifying behavior that cannot be justified with reason or reliance on facts.
FACTS: Michael Brown entered a store with the intent of stealing dope smoking materials, (a felony) and assaulted a store employee before leaving (a felony) Police were alerted to look for a large black male in a red cap with yellow socks.
FACTS: Officer Wilson spotted Brown walking down the middle of the street obstructing traffic and told him to move to the sidewalk. Brown refused and reached in the police car and hit Wilson (7 witnesses) Wilson drew his gun while still in the car; Brown attempted to get it from him and was shot in the hand, arm and chest. (7 witnesses and the evidence of two autopsies and forensic investigations by the state of Missouri Crime lab and the FBI) Brown walked away; Wilson got out of the car and followed telling Brown to get down to the ground. Brown aggressively charged Wilson and was shot several more times (7 witnesses + the 2 autopsies + the 2 forensic investigations)
You cannot tie anything that happened in all this to any socio-analysis or your links to articles about slavery or commentary on what Obama did or did not say. There is NO justification for what an irrational mob did to their own city for this. There it NO justification for two extremists in an extremist organization to plan 2 assassinations and the bombing of a national monument. There is NO justification for members of an extremist organization leading chants for the death of Officer Wilson 7 days after Michael Brown's death without any evidence about the circumstances of the shooting.
and... **of *course**... just because he was white he's guilty... and all white people in the USA are racists.
Tell me what's wrong with this? Lay off the mumbo-jumbo and deal with the issue.
Reality is a disposable luxury in the rhetorical narratives of extremists of any flavor. None of them are in business to spread truth but sway opinions by any means possible.
Putting the issue whether individual cases can or can't be tied to social analysis aside for a moment.
Virge Wrote:There is NO justification for what an irrational mob did to their own city for this. There it NO justification for two extremists in an extremist organization to plan 2 assassinations and the bombing of a national monument. There is NO justification for members of an extremist organization leading chants for the death of Officer Wilson 7 days after Michael Brown's death without any evidence about the circumstances of the shooting.
Let's say all of this is true. There's no justification for such actions and they should be morally and/or legally condemned. Now what? Let's just throw more black people in jail? Let's teach them a lesson on proper manners? You write with a sense of urgency but what exactly is the beef of your argument? What are your concrete proposals for a proper course of action and how are they going to contribute to social change?
*
As for police brutality - I did quick google search and this Ferguson case really seems to have launched a wave of reports based on data provided by the FBI. Journal-News found in their report that, while violent crime has tended downward, there's been a significant increase in the number of people killed by the police. Moreover, black people were twice as likely to be killed than whites. Similar findings were reported by Mother Jones and ProPublica (the latter report says that the risk of getting shot dead by the police for young black males was as much as 21 times greater than for their white counterparts). Of course, it would be easy to dismiss such findings by referring to to the fact that blacks just commit more crimes and, therefore, are more at risk of getting into fatal encounters with the police. However, the people at Vox inquired into the circumstances leading to shootings by the police:
Quote:The SHR lists 118 victims of "justifiable homicide" who were killed while fleeing, committing a felony, or resisting arrest â not because they were attacking anyone. And 102 of those weren't killed with a rifle or a shotgun, but with a handgun. In these 102 cases, the necessity of the officers' use of force is the most ambiguous. And in these 102 cases, the victims are more likely than in any other justifiable homicide categories to be black.
...which leads into the conclusion that...
Quote:The less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black.
All of this clearly implies that the police is ready to use disproportionately harsh measures when dealing with black people. And to think that killings by the police are only the tip of the iceberg...
[MENTION=21077]Aike[/MENTION] This goes back to the point I was getting at by citing the figures about 9 blacks being killed by blacks for every one black killed by a non black.
For a moment, try to put aside this knee jerk reaction to assume that all police in the US are irrational haters. racists and xenophobes (as you called me and have yet to even address) who are involved in a nationwide ultra secret conspiracy against black people. Just for the sake of argument look at the police as sane well trained law enforcement officers.
Then apply this axiom,
Contradictions do not exist. When you find one you're basic premise if flawed.
So far you've not done this and only assumed that the police are wrong because that fits within your own personal political narrative.
The real truth is much simpler and better documented than the necessary nationwide organization of racist cops that would be necessary to make your narrative work.
Within lower class and middle class black culture children are taught by osmosis nearly from birth to have a distrust and dislike for all people associated with law enforcement. They grow up with it and at the same time live in communities where the most respected (but really feared) individuals are those who are ex felons, or current criminals --- or both who are also the people the youngsters are exposed to with anything that resembles wealth. The cops are the enemies of the people the youngsters grow up admiring for being strong and rich therefore the cops are bad.
This is their worldview. Here's a real life example of how this is accepted in their "worlds." June 2012 my boyfriend, my room mate and I had been to Memphis Tennessee for their famous Beale Street Blues screne. Leaving town we stopped to gas up near the interstate in a busy crowded store where the cashiers were behind bullet proof glass. We overheard this conversation between the cashier and a young man about 20 who the cashier knew but had not seen in a while and was very glad to see.
CASHIER: Where you been?
MAN: You aint heard? I been incarcerated. I shot me my first niggah. (he smiled)
CASHIER: For real? Who?
MAN: (he gave a street name she knew)
CASHIER: Well at least it wasn't none of your own blood (family or gang). (she laughs and so does he)
MAN: I aint that crazy. If I shot some of my own blood I'd be dead now myself. Gimme a pack of Newports and five in gas on pump four.
Try to imagine the environment someone would have to be raised in to make that a subject of conversation they wouldn't worry about having in a crowded store -- as if they were talking about the weather.
They grow up to adulthood as they have been taught by their environment. Have you heard of the phrase "not black enough"? That's how students who excel in school and don't associate with criminal groups are often described in their neighborhoods where education and goals that don' include crime are looked down upon. Please stop whet you're doing and google the words "student called not black enough" and see it for yourself. They are bullied, stabbed, beaten, killed and even raped for it.
Informing to police can get you killed in most black communities where the words "Snitches get Stitches" are known by every seven year old. From early ages they are taught not to report crimes even when they are the victims.
Now... this has been long recognized by US politicians and their solution was to throw money at the problem. Guess what? Money has done nothing to stop the problem or slow it from becoming worse. When was the last time you heard of the well known professional race exploiters having an emotional rally to drive out crime in a neighborhood with the same intensity they ranted against Officer Wilson? Whe was the last time Black Panthers organized a death chant for gun totting drug lords and their violent gangs instead of for a cop like Officer Wilson? When have blacks ever rioted to burn down drug houses and gang hang outs instead of pharmacies, cell phone retailers, groceries,restaurants and hardware stores? For that matter try to find any organized efforts comparable to the ones in Ferguson to save the lives of the nine black men killed by black men for every one killed by a person of another race.
If you check you'll find out that around forty years ago the federal government started multi million dollar programs to fight this problem in black neighborhoods. As with every social program ever conducted from Washington the problem has only gotten worse in direct proportion to the money thrown at it. The only successes have started within neighborhoods themselves with no help from the federal government, by the people who live in them, who step up and take responsibility for changing their neighborhoods into better places.
How many of us don't know at least one person who persists in viewing the world as the fucked up source of every problem in his life and never once considers that he might be his own worst problem? This is just a larger version of that. It's easier to blame others for all your problems, cast responsibility on them and ignore the truth. It's like a woman saying she doesn't date because all men are sexual animals who want nothing from sex from a woman rather than admit that she weighs 500 pounds. The principle in black communities is very much the same and you can see it in action all the time... if you stop believing the rhetoric that fits in your own personal political narrative and start looking for answers that exist right before your eyes.
Just for curiosity I googled the demographics of Finland and found out Somalis (who are not necessarily classified black) are the fourth largest ethnic minority in Finland at 0.29%. With an entire non-indigenous ethnic population of less than 11% I imagine Finland is one of the top nations for a lack or ethnic diversity. Just an interesting observation.
I think when someone starts preaching the neoliberal gospel of individual responsibility and the wonders of the free market, full of emotionally loaded imagery, personal anecdotes and generalities presented as self-evident truths, it is my cue to leave.
Since you hate government intervention, you should be happy to know that the dismantling of public services and slashing of funding for social programs is an on-going process in the United States. We'll probably start seeing the fantastic results of that in a few years.
Capricorn
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