Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
As a black engineer, I've often thought that if there were data, science, math, and straight forward research on the more than $300B+ the slavery system provided for the U.S. in free labor (think of the biggest costs to business) and it's effects, that maybe we could have a conversation about data-driven solutions. Think of how we've added data to sports and created a new economy on improving outcomes because the definitions of success are clear with many pathways.
Looking at this thread, which I assume to be mostly engineers, slightly disabuses me of this notion. The longest threads are about the use of the word slavery (perception) and rural, (mostly white) america (not even sure why this is relevant).
I've thought about this, too - using data to work toward solutions to problems that plague our society. I'm constantly haunted by the belief that there is a set of solutions "out there" but am bedeviled by my own inability to accumulate, homogenize, and aggregate that data that I _can_ find. Even still, sites like 1degree.org do give me hope that the data is available and that there are folks who are willing to do the work of using it (though that's an admittedly different application).
At any rate, thank you for your post. It's stirred that thought within me again.
The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again?
I, for one, miss rural life (wide open space, less traffic, mom and pop stores, etc.) but unfortunately my career as a programmer doesn't cater to that lifestyle all that well.
You really need to fix the basic underlying economic issues, so that you don't have kids coming to school hungry, and you don't have the best and brightest of the community fleeing so they can find work.
The problem is that public education is public and so it runs into various forms of ideological resistance on that basis. Worse, the power of local districts to shape educational policy leads to predictable deficits, often also driven by ideology/politics.
We have the money, we just choose to spend it on healthcare inflation, and weapons to sell. We don't see an immediate profit in education, so it's sidelined or privatized. We are shortsighted idiots, as a species.
If you answered yes to these questions, you're not going to find many places rural America that satisfy your needs. At best you'll end up in an outer-exurbia like greater Atlanta.
I don't think remote work of a few well-paid professionals is a viable and sustainable solution for rural America.
Here in Ithaca NY, the property market (relative to income) is ungodly expensive, because most people either bought their houses decades ago when they were affordable, or they're college students who will pay any price in rent to get their quality education.
Some people commute in from as far away as Syracuse or even Pennsylvania. Property prices are much more affordable 15 minutes drive in any direction, but no college professor or staff would want their kids going to any of the crackerjack rural schools.
Can't say I speak for the Midwest, so it could be different there.
I live in a 50K-population city adjoining Boston, so they exist, I just don't know how well they exist independent of bigger cities.
I live a few miles from pavement, so I definitely need a car to go anywhere. But I don't need to go anywhere on a normal day. I go to the nearest city about 3-4 times per month.
I do take advantage of UPS deliveries a lot, but I could do without if I were more patient.
I've set up my life to not need a daily commute, but I haven't taken the car out of it. If I tried harder, I could probably go without the car, but I don't think that would be healthy (Amazon Pantry options are lackluster last I looked).
To reiterate, I'm not even close to a paved road, let alone a grocery store or city, and I can manage not to drive very often. Seems like you could too, if you made it your focus. But we've all gotten used to living a few minutes from this and that and so we have to go do something, in our car, nearly every day.
I grew up on island in Alaska. Completed my last two years of high school in a small farming community in North Carolina. Joined the military and after ten years separated from southern Turkey, yet, somehow I was able to land a job as a data scientist.
I joined the military due to a lack of academic discipline though I still was accepted to the state schools in North Carolina, just choose otherwise. I have friends who did the same, though one did attend Chapel Hill on academic scholarship he received while graduating in Alaska. I have another friend who is now an anesthesiologist who graduated from University of Washington's medical school.
A few remote workers will do wonders for rural America in the short and long term. Saying you need to live in a major city to be successful is hogwash.
I'm married and have children - but we homeschool them, so the quality of the local schools is not a limiting factor.
Healthcare is not nearly so different even in very rural areas as you've made it out to be, especially not when you have a tech salary to enable you to travel to a teaching hospital if the need arises. If anything, regular/preventive care is less expensive and higher quality with a rural family doctor.
Uber and Lyft don't even make sense in a rural setting.
My professional network is already spread across the country, so that's not really an issue. I plan to spend more time and money on travel for conferences and such.
The only things we're really giving up are faster Internet access (we'll have 300Mb for ~$100/m, instead of 1Gb included in our rent) and food delivery services (which are too expensive to be using as much as we are, anyhow).
So it can help, but you eventually feel like a fish out of water when nearly nobody you know understands what it is you do. I feel like we'll get there one day in the USA, paying under $1000 for rent for a comfortable home is a lifestyle I wish i could see more technical people adopt.
Frankly I think trying to develop rural America to be economically competitive to urban America is a bad idea wrapped in the cloak of a well-meaning idea. Infrastructure and services and much (like 2-5x) more expensive over a wide area. And you need a LOT of infrastrucute to reasonably support a professional class economy (just think how many specialist lawyers and doctors you would need before you could justify leaving a metro area).
Instead, we should focus our attention on lowering the cost of living in cities and enact policies that make it easy for people in rural, poorer areas to move to cities, such as a government-paid waiver on the first few months of rent, or a state-subsidized relocation package. There are a lot of people who would like to move but cannot save up enough to pay for relocation, security deposit, and things like that while they look for metro work.
Last time we seriously developed rural America it was in the 1930s, when the needs of an industrial economy were different and primarily the benefit was cheap rural manufacturing labor over costly metro manufacturing labor. But now far cheaper labor and supply chains are in China, so the New Deal framework is moot in this circumstance.
Make it easier for rural folks to come to cities, instead of trying to smear cities across the countryside. I can't see any other sustainable solution.
That being said, it doesn't mean everybody has to pack up for the coasts. A lot could be done to make inland cities like Indianapolis or Chattanooga or St. Louis more attractive to rural residents of their respective states.
Smaller non-coastal cities retain, in the mind of the typical rural midwesterner, a reputation for high crime and violent racial unrest (among those old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, anyway). The former especially isn't entirely undeserved. And anyway, even those are shockingly expensive by rural standards, unless you want to live in the very worst parts of the city where the concerns of high crime and terrible, dangerous schools are especially valid.
To say that moving to the city, for most values of "the city", isn't broadly appealing to the rural set, is accurate.
For instance it's very common for income debates on HN to be full of comments about how people "cannot live on 12k/year."
Replace 12 with whatever threshold you think it is.
But they can, of course. I did for half of my adult life. It's a matter of pickiness. I had roommates I didn't enjoy, I ate rice and beans and ramen, I cooked for myself, I drove beater cars, I had no cell phone or no phone at all. But I always had money in the bank and I could pay my bills. It's a matter of choices.
So yes, it's a matter of pickiness about the city. They're destitute in the country, perhaps, but they're living in the home their grandfather built, on the land he farmed, their cousin lives a mile up the dirt road, etc. Many of them aren't unhappy, frankly--people here have decided they are.
But they aren't sure they'll make a lot more money by moving to the city, and they're definitely unsure about how they'll like it. My best guess is that most of them wouldn't. I moved away from the city on purpose, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.
I would move back before I starved, but not much before that.
So maybe you land a job first, then move, and it turns out you can (barely) scrape by renting in some place with a roommate in an area where you hear at least one gunshot a week. Great. I mean you heard at least one gunshot a week back home, right? Granted the targets were of another sort, but hey, different strokes. Then something goes wrong, and you don't know anyone (your family and friends are all back in the trailer parks and falling-down family farmhouses back where you came from), and you're a couple weeks away from being out on your ass and trying to decide between spending your remaining time looking for a job so you can keep scraping by, and digging in the couch cushions for money to buy a sandwich and a bus ticket home.
That's what low-(valued)-skill rural folks expect from an attempt to move to the city—and it's not the high-(valued)-skill ones who need help. Renting a crappy trailer for a couple hundred a month or living in cousin Eddie's broken RV parked in his A-frame's front yard next to his spare-parts truck, collecting food stamps, and working part-time when you can doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
There just isn't an easy solution other than an intensive retraining in relevant skills. Or aggressively searching for jobs tailored to the skills they possess. (e.g. I remember reading about JetBlue using suburban stay at home women for handling customer support or something).
Also people who are used to their slow-paced, conservative and rural way of life will probably be more than a little shocked by city culture.
Why? City-dwelling is, broadly, much cheaper (in terms of infrastructure and services) and more environmentally friendly than other arrangements.
[EDIT] Transportation. Worth including on the list, in particular.
Smaller towns when done correctly can be more self-sufficient. Within an hour and half driving radius (minimum) from where I live, it is entirely farm land. I believe 90% of the food my family eats comes from these farms and is cheaper. I purchased half a cow recently from a local rancher - 295 lbs of grass fed beef for $1400 total, butcher fees included. Also purchased a whole pig from a local farmer ~250 lbs for $750, butcher fees included. From the same farmer I purchased 8 chickens a month from them at $12 - 15 per chicken from May - September, not cheaper but worth the money. We can get produce, raw milk, cheese and eggs from all the farmers here as well.
It takes money up front, planning and a deep freezer but we are supporting the local economy, reducing transportation costs and have locally sources food. If we didn't purchase our meat from the farmers I would hunt, but there isn't a need to do both as a family of four can only eat so much in a year.
These are some of the benefits when you downsize to small communities you can know your consumption patterns easier. We haven't been able to do this for everything but this year we have finally figured out the food issue. We still purchase spices, tea and coffee which at the store but those were the first items traded at a global scale if memory serves me correctly.
One would think there is enough land in the US to do this, but it would take a major cultural shift in eating patterns and the way we operate - feasible in theory but probably not reality.
Lots of utopian plans for city designs and such revolve around spreading people out farther and having lots of "green space" and farmland interspersed with living and business districts, but fail on closer examination because it's really hard to be more efficient (cheaper) and more environmentally friendly than having very dense cities yielding, as quickly as possible (i.e. minimizing sprawl and low-density suburbs/exurbs) to farmland. If you can find data supporting the case for lower-density living as cheaper (overall) and more environmentally friendly than denser living, again, I'd be very interested in seeing it. People come up with those spread-out hypothetical cities for a reason—agrarian (even faux-agrarian) living is appealing, if difficult to advocate given the economics of it.
We as a nation do not produce many good teachers. We do not produce enough doctors period.
This isn't SimCity. Can't just plop a school or hospital down for a fixed sum and expect things to sort themselves out.
That's like asking how to revive the blacksmith industry in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. These regions aren't declining because of inattention, they're declining because their native industries are shrinking.
Surely there are regulatory treatments that can be applied here to relieve some of the suffering, but "return to the good old days" isn't an option.
Of course the real problems are:
1) VCs don't invest here
2) A startup's success is usually based on its ability to sell itself (using networking contacts) to a larger corporation
3) who then REALLY don't want to have an office in Nowhere, Alabama
If they did want to do it, they would have done it already. Lord knows they have the money.
The solution to high San Francisco housing costs is high density development in exurbs and other cities, and very much not "let's all move to Nebraska".
For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical.
For another, employment and home ownership trends are bad for small towns. Employment is now more short-term. There are hardly any "jobs for life" now. This makes those with limited employment prospects (in that there are few employers in their area) particularly vulnerable to change. Home ownership makes the labour market as a whole less flexible/mobile.
The solution to these problems is urbanization.
What's more, the suburbs formed in WW2 with the explosion in private vehicle ownership and, for some reason, governments actively subsidized it. People will often declare (here and elsewhere) that they like to live in the suburbs. It's cheaper, the lots and houses are larger and so on. Thing is, no one is paying the true cost of this in terms of all the infrastructure to support it, be it roads, railways, utilities, schools, hospitals and so on.
If you look at the major urban centers, they tend to generate a surplus and that surplus is used to subsidize those that live outside that city. It's true in NYC. It's true in London.
At some point I expect this to end, which will strengthen the trend towards urbanization.
One problem is that construction pretty much everywhere is becoming unaffordable. This applies to housing and infrastructure. Homeowners get excited about their rising property values but that's pretty short term thinking. There was an article posted here last week about how all the cheap eats are disappearing from SF. Well, real estate costs (land + construction) are an input into literally everything. You simply can't have cheap services in an area with expensive real estate in the long term.
Construction costs are a real problem eg [1]. Australia, which once had a great standard of living, is now ridiculously expensive in local times. Honestly, it's like the whole country is Vancouver. IIRC the median house price in Sydney is now A$1.1m (up from ~$650k ~7 years ago).
[1]: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-hou...
Imagine a glut of cheap energy, rapidly improving materials science, pervasive robotics, and large-scale 3D printing. I think it's almost inevitable that construction costs would come way down. Between telepresence and cheap transportation, the need to aggregate people into urban environments would cease.
I think it's highly likely things will go in this direction at some point.
The bar has been moved so far, so quickly, that it's hard (for me) to say. I would venture that folks in rural America are living better than they ever have. I see truly destitute people, too...I live in one of the poorer counties of one of the poorer states in the USA. But people aren't starving, and depending how far back you go, that was a reality people would have to face.
Point is, we're now comparing rural incomes to city incomes, and thinking "well the farmer is busting his ass with a lot of risk to make 45k, and the baby-faced web dev in the city can make 90k twiddling his fingers." Sure, but they're both...okay. I'm not sure we have to make them equal. I'm not sure we can.
You would imagine it is a good thing until you realize it's a guaranteed case of Dutch disease, one that is reliant on having a lot of indentured labour around.
And then it will stop being profitable and demand subsidies.
"We never quit doing slavery."
It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty.
I would think one of the major points BLM should be making, is removal of slavery as a punishment. It has too many very degenerate ways it can fail - and in some ways I think were very intended. But I doubt in this political climate of this happening.
EDIT: Boy, I said it was an unpopular view. Wasn't expecting this much hatred and contention, along with this much -1's. I mean, it's not like the 13th amendment explicitly says.
The most 'aha' connection there was that a shocking percentage of black men have felony convictions of some sort or another, and we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Jim Crow indeed.
Only while incarcerated.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...
A couple of States even allow inmates to vote while incarcerated. In my now-home State, inmates are encouraged to vote and sometimes politicians will even go campaign inside the prison. That's pretty rare, but has happened.
So, it's a temporary loss in most cases. Notably, Maine allows inmates to vote and Maine is overwhelmingly white. Vermont is the same way. In my quest for more information, I found some commentary about that aspect.
Being overwhelmingly white is probably part of the reason; if you don't have a visible black underclass to subjugate, you don't take steps to subjugate them. In discussing the thesis of felon disenfranchisement as part of “the New Jim Crow”, pointing out that states without a notable visible black population don't engage in disenfranchisement is in line with that thesis.
Ah, and in the paragraph underneath that table:
Even in states where ex-offenders automatically regain the right to vote upon completion of their sentence, the process of re-registering to vote often is difficult. One reason is the complexity of the laws and processes surrounding disenfranchisement. In some cases, it is difficult to determine whose rights can be restored. This can vary in some states according to the date of the crime, the conviction, or the release from prison, or the nature of the crime. The complex restoration process also can be daunting. It often involves lengthy paperwork, burdensome documentation, and the involvement and coordination of several state agencies
This, again, is why Jim Crow is an apt comparison. It's a web of rules that all together add up to a system of control.
Nobody is saying "only" black people are being incarcerated. They're saying that incarceration is used as a tool to perpetuate many of the same outcomes as slavery. Which is trivially verifiable, if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race.
> they're being incarcerated explicitly for cheap labor
Virtually all prisoners are required to work for what amounts to as little as $.10/hour. $1/hour is considered an incredibly good wage for a prison job. Prisoners are, by design, excluded from minimum wage laws. This is not limited to private prisons; it includes inmates at state-run and federal prisons too.
In California, about a third of the people fighting the recent and ongoing wildfires are prisoners, generally making about $1/hour or less. The maximum they can make is $2.56. Again, this burden largely falls on black and other non-white people, because they're incarcerated at much higher rates and for much longer sentences for the same crimes.
Yet the theory breaks down once you look at a breakdown of race, gender, and SES.
There's plenty of research debunking this claim, which is a myth generally propagated by groups with explicit white supremacist agendas.
This assumes that incarceration rates should be equal for all races, which probably shouldn't be the case. There's a correlation between low socioeconomic status and incarceration. Black Americans tend to have a lower socioeconomic status. Murder rates are also much higher among blacks than other races in America.
> Prisoners are, by design, excluded from minimum wage laws.
Right. Prisoners are being exploited, but that's not why they're being imprisoned. They're being imprisoned because of drugs, violence, and thievery/burglary for the most part.
It's not hard to look up that google maps census dot map. And then go find prisons in Google Maps and find it on the census map. Might be pretty surprising what you see... then again, might not.
Hint: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/ Turn overlays. Go to Indianapolis, then look to the West side towards Avon and Danville. There's a dense green block (green dots = Black people) due south of Avon. Now, go look in Google Maps as to what's there.
Wash, rinse and repeat all across the US. You want evidence? There's pretty telling evidence right there.
Hell, I would go over the comment limit on even an abstract on this topic. We're talking 300+ years of history just in the US and colonies.
No, the real reason here why I'm being downvoted is because of a popularity contest. It certainly doesn't have to do with content, at least here. But some people are considered "unpopular". So we see rapid point swings and -1's. To me, its just some of the backward-ness how this community works. Every community has something like this. Grain/block of salt, and all.
By that I don't mean "ignore other people", only their effect on your comment score/karma. You should listen to their arguments nonetheless.
That's the problem with "Downvotes" in the way they're done here. Legitimate discourse, albeit unpopular will attract downvotes. And so will unrelated offtopic garbage (Spam, 1 word replies, crazy rantings ala TempleOS).
The end result to both "unpopular" material and "spam" is the same - hidden. Simply put, -1s = losing right to talk and be seen. So yeah, I am pretty disappointed in the community, and I have a justifiable right to be.
The HN community is what it is. It has certain norms and behaviors. By participating, you're part of it. If it doesn't operate in a way you prefer and you'd like to continue to contribute, be the change you want. Behave in the ways you want. I encourage you to do so! That said, if you want to be confrontational and argumentative rather than looking for points of agreement and teasing out more nuanced differences, I think you're likely to continue to see pushback on HN. In some sense, such behavior can be as corrosive as spam.
They are suggesting that prison, even today, is equivalent to slavery. There is injustice within the modern prison system, but prison is not slavery, at least in the right context it is a place for punishment and rehabilitation.
Sure prisons make a profit off their prisoners, but those profits are nothing like those obtained by slavery, it's an extreme exaggeration and the problem with the justice system isn't just race, if someone wants to suggest that.
removal of slavery as a punishment
What is actually being proposed here?
To say we "never quit doing slavery" is to ignore the massive improvements and lives dedicated to get rid of actual, you know, slavery.
Are prisons really profitable though? Do they produce anything of real value from this free labor ?
Are private companies generating significant profit off of cheap prison labor ? Am I buying something from a walmart shelve made from prison labor ?
Yep.
A quick google search with that very question finds lots of entries, many of course with an axe to grind. The Economist is rather dispassionate on the subject though: https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-...
But if you interact with the government, go to McDonalds, etc you're using prison labor. Whole Foods too (http://theweek.com/articles/630907/corporate-america-secret-...)
I said "yep" because I figured you were asking a general question; in the specific case Walmart's position is that they don't use prison labor (but plenty of web sites will tell you it's not true. Here's Huffpo: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/walmart-prison-labo...).
This link is pretty good but requires a bit more epistemological digging: https://www.cagedbirdmagazine.com/single-post/2017/03/28/50-...
How about the ENTIRE "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" movement was based on a known LIE. That didn't stop BLM, though, did it?
How about being "unarmed" does not mean "docile" or "not dangerous"?
How about statistics that that BLM and the regressive left don't like to hear? like how the Welfare system is a GENERATIONAL crutch that drags society and their individual communities down [3-7], but what do people vote for? MORE WELFARE, and anyone who votes against less welfare (or anything that doesn't "redistribute" or otherwise steal money) is obviously racist. Its things like THIS that gave you Trump. Identity politics is what gave you Trump. Yet very few in this country want to take responsibility for their actions or their current situation. It's always someone else's fault, and someone else's job to fix it. Stop wallowing in the past. Today and every tomorrow is a blank sheet. It isn't "my" fault that some people can't see or don't take advantage of their opportunities. But what do I know? You've probably already labeled me a "racist", not knowing my race, not knowing my background or circumstances.
[1] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/c... [2] http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-kno... [3] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/more-welfare-mo... [4] https://www.brookings.edu/research/work-and-marriage-the-way... [5] http://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/povert... [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/22/the-e... [7] http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/21/opinion/spalding-welfare-state...
one more for good measure: http://nypost.com/2017/09/26/all-that-kneeling-ignores-the-r...
However I disagree that slavery - as the term is usually meant to mean - still exists in the form of incarceration.
We as a society have decided that certain things are illegal. The black community, because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws and so there is disproportionate incarceration.
Slavery is the root cause of this disproportionate incarceration, but we should not blame the fact that we have a system which punishes criminals, or equate the enforcement of laws with slavery.
Instead we should be trying to eliminate outdated laws - the illegality of marijuana for instance - and also reducing crime in the black community.
The two are very different, and using the word 'slavery' to refer to both conflates meaning and disguises the important differences between the two.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
What you're referring to is chattel slavery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
--Lee Atwater, 54th Chairman of the Republican National Committee (Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...)
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
-- John Ehrlichman, Nixon domestic policy chief (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...)
What if the policies can be shown that a distinct criminalization was made to expressly target a specific demographic? Or what if we can show that health and infant mortality trends mirrors that of the 18060's map of slave county census? We have more than a smoking gun - we have the blood spatter and the bullet, and the gun in the person's hands still smoking. 150 years later, and it's still going strong.
BTW, how's that water upgrade going on in Flint, MI? I'll give you a hint: they're a bunch of black people who live there. It's already out of the news.
I highly recommend you listen to that entire interview to understand why it's important. He said it while he was a campaign strategist for Reagan and was talking about historical campaign strategies of the 50s and 60s.
Your second point may be true, but that's the case for almost everything. Doesn't mean that everything is right or wrong. We need to judge things on a case by case basis.
This is so simplistic that it borders on a racist falsehood. Increased police presence, inadequate legal representation, racially motivated jury-selection and expansions of prosecutorial power are huge factors.
Educate yourself.
> "Educate yourself."
The topic at hand is highly contentious. Regardless of how wrong you think the other party may be, it behooves us to strive to be even more civil in our discourse in such circumstances.
Poverty tends to beget crime, this is very hard to deny. Because the black community - as a result of the slavery of its ancestors in this country - suffers disproportionately high rates of poverty, it also suffers from disproportionately high rates of crime.
Not correct. Blacks don't disproportionally break laws. The problem is that non-violent crimes in America are disproportionally enforced. Several Thousand, probably close to a million cases of illegal white collar crime go unenforced every year. Stuff like insider trading, corruption, fraud, laundering, etc. Crimes that white people are more likely to break simply are not regularly enforced. Non-violent crimes like drug possession in Black urban areas are highly enforced, while whites in suburb areas use drugs at the same rate, are not enforced. There is a bias in the enforcement laws
I'd be interested to see statistics on white collar crime, but I know that there are significant resources put towards catching and sentencing white collar criminals.
I guess this topic is like climate change.
I have noticed a gross difference in how US history is taught today (to my son and my gf's sons) vs how it was when I attended a US high school. Much less depth, much more boosterism, no discussions of "how would you act if this old institution were still in place today".
I only say this because your post implies that the only reason someone would disagree with them is ignorance or racism, but some of us just have an appreciation for honest views about history, as I'm sure you do.
Or one can look at plenty of longform articles about this very topic. Or countless books in this realm. Or if one doesn't believe the evidence, look no further than that 1 dot per person map, and finding prisons. They stick out.
But yeah, "climate change" rage inducing indeed. I mean, we have people denying simple (easily verifiable) claims with feelings and "simplistic" retorts.
Except data shows this isn't the case. A closer match is male = criminal, criminal = slave. The legal system is far harsher on a white male than a black female. And even closer is poor = criminal, criminal = slave.
The legal system discriminates first on SES, then on gender, and finally on race. So what reasoning is behind there being a disproportionate focus on race over SES and gender?
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines by posting generic commentary about the voting on your posts, how unpopular your opinions are, and whatnot? It's pontificatory, tedious, and off topic.
Also, if you're going to post on an ideologically inflammatory topic like slavery or race, make sure your comment is substantive enough not to be flamebait. An example of how to do this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543652. Your comment fell on the flamebait side. We don't need yet another flamewar! We need thoughtful discussion.
Worse, when you start posting comments that go Atwater, Erlichman, and Flint (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543975), you're just going full generic, which is what makes flamewars burn hottest and be most tedious. Please don't.