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Comment by jauer | Hacker News Reader

"But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America?"

That's a bit incendiary without a citation. Got one?

Sure, in America there are at least three independent lines of evidence for the 10x figures. DOJ arrest rates, DOJ violent crime victim surveys, and simply by looking at the race of murder victims (50% are black -- most murder in the US seems to be intraracial).

Globally, you can look here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/13/homicide...

The numbers in Africa look bad, but South Africa is really the only place in Africa together enough to do statistics on this stuff. Of course, they also have the highest murder rate in the world (one assumes that other parts would have them beat handily if they could count it all). Jamaica also tops the list in our Hemisphere. The rate cited there for Haiti is half as high as I've seen it elsewhere, but Haiti isn't a great place for accurate data collection, of course.

I've got some estimates for crime rates of African populations in places where they are severe minorities (there's a figure on the internet that claim 80% of London gun crime is African/Caribbean), but it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing.

It's a mess of numbers, but there just doesn't seem to be much room for the case that America's problems are special (Brazil, for example, has somewhat similar population demographics, and broadly similar problems).

A table of homicide rates per country hardly counts as a "citation" for the statement, "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America", let alone, "The answer has everything to do with race."

No doubt political correctness is a distorting factor in the discourse; so is garden-variety racism. Therefore it's important for honest inquirers to be careful about how they put things. As you said, "it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing".

Did you Google for the DOJ stats I mentioned? Regardless, here's what we know:

1) Blacks commit on the order of 10x the violent crime of non-Hispanic whites and Asians in the US. This is well documented.

2) Africa has tremendous murder rates compared to almost everywhere else in the world. Again, well documented.

3) In this hemisphere, the majority black countries all have very high murder rates (Jamaica, Haiti) and the one major country with similar demographics to America has a similar problem with their black murder rate. Again, very well documented.

If you need Googling help on any of this, you can ask. But, really? Come on.

As far as this "racism" bugaboo you bring up...I know you didn't directly call me a racist, but that's just so tired. The Hap-map alone destroys any contention that we're all the same. We're different in countless ways. To me, that makes for a much more interesting world than one where everybody is a WASP under the skin. In fact, it's the race-deniers, not the realists, that I find to be the ones with the really dangerous and bigoted ideas.

Different peoples have different criminal tendencies? Well yeah. Let's admit it and do what we can to alleviate it rather than pretending it isn't there and building huge "great society" projects (The Projects) that make lives worse for the very people we're trying to help. Hurting black people with your verified non-racist good intentions is a really lousy way of helping black people.

You made a very strong claim: "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America". (In fact, that claim is so over the top that it suggests 'troll', but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.) DOJ statistics do nothing to back up the "everywhere" part. And citing a summary table of countries with black populations does next to nothing.

As for the rest, you're projecting (I don't believe the things you're objecting to) and resorting to rudeness. It would be better to shrink the scope of your claims to what you can actually back up, and tone things considerably down. That doesn't mean not saying controversial things. It means saying them in a way that's cognizant of the context, makes respect a high priority, and resists venting.

There is more genetic diversity among the different African native groups than there is among the rest of the world. The majority of “black” Americans have the genetic equivalent of at least one white great-grandparent. So what were you trying to prove about genetics, again?

When people calling you a "racist" becomes tired, maybe you should consider that some of the views you hold are actually racist.

So your data are limited to the few places on Earth that there's a significant population of Africans; being the US, the Carribbean, Europe and (of course) Africa.

Now, it's also true that in all of these places, people of African descent are poor, and it's also well-observed that poverty is correlated with crime, so I'm not really convinced that your "black people commit more crimes because of a biological tendency to do so" hypothesis is any better than the more conventional "black people are poor for historical and cultural reasons, and poor people commit more crimes" hypothesis.

I wonder, where are people of African descent least poor? That is, if one made a list of countries sorted by wealth of their African-descent populations, what would be the first few items?

Has nothing to do with race inherently, and everything to do with history. Let's see the countries you listed:

  USA
  South Africa
  Jamaica
  Haiti
  Brazil

Now, what do all five of those countries have in common, historically?

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