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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

'Years ago, I interviewed Kweisi Mfume, then the president of the NAACP. "As between the presence of white racism and the absence of black fathers," I asked, "Which poses the bigger threat to the black community?" Without missing a beat, he said, "The absence of black fathers."' - Larry Elder

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A big reason for the absence of black fathers is institutional white racism.

The higher crime rates leading to higher incarceration rates is probably a bigger factor than "white racism".

Edit: Making this edit to clarify what I'm trying to say, since several responses has tipped me off to how it could be read. Being black doesn't have anything to do with committing more crimes. Higher crime rates is much more a factor of economic and family status. Both of which are negatively impacted by higher crime rates, which reinforces the cycle to everyone's dismay. Those statuses are on average worse in the black community than others, which causes a large part of the statistical difference. The causes of the difference stem from the legacy of racism and choices that were made in designing welfare programs, at least in large part. Which sucks.

The War on Drugs is the cycle of incarceration and racism

We can argue all we want about how ineffective and/or misguided the War on Drugs has been, but that doesn't change that fact that crimes are crimes. Were some of the sentencing guidelines structured in a racist way? Maybe, I've heard people say that and don't have any evidence showing the opposite, but that is a side issue.

Check out https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-shocking-and-sickening-st... if you're curious.

The money quote: > "You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, 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. 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.”

Bleh, yeah. Hadn't seen that before.

Not a fan on the War on Drugs, especially not after reading that. On the other hand, I'm strongly in favor of enforcing the laws on the books, and if there is a bad law it should be changed, not ignored.

The origins of that quote are dubious. Author Dan Baum claims that Nixon lawyer John Ehrlichman made this confession to him back in 1994, but Dan waited until 2016 to publish it-- long enough that most people in Nixon's inner circle (including Ehrlichman himself) have died and couldn't set the record straight.

However, Pat Buchanan (long time adviser to Nixon) said in an interview that the quote is nonsense.

Pat Buchanan is certainly a reputable source.

Didn't that quote only show up after the guy that allegedly said it died?

Crimes are indeed crimes. The problem is, whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates, but blacks are significantly more likely to be arrested.

Based on your comment, it seems like you haven't done much independent reading on this topic...

Here's a place to start: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5850830/war-on-drugs-racist-min...

Thanks for the link, will take a look.

> whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates

Not really though.

From the primary source:

MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 4.5% black: 6.1%

> whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates

Not really though. From the primary source for marijuana:

MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 4.5% black: 6.1%

Now for coke:

MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 0.1 black: 0.3

Now for crack:

MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 0.0 black: 0.3

Ok, ok, how about heroin? We know those white boys just can't get enough smack right?

MORE THAN 100 DAYS OF USE IN PAST 12 MONTHS white: 0.1 black: 0.2

Nope. Not sure how people can interpret these numbers to be "equal rates" when habitual daily use numbers are multiples higher for blacks.

https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481...

That Vox article is being misleading when they frame it based on "reported using the drug in the last year" because doing coke once on New Years is a lot different that doing coke daily. Looking at the daily use stats their statement that "In 2007, black people were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white people." doesn't seem so extremely disproportionate considering the daily usage is in some cases 3x as much. Very dishonest article.

Sorry for double post, it wouldn't let me edit the other one for more clarity.

Edit: Downvoters care to counter?

In which case is it 3.6x higher?

The most common drug people get arrested for is marijuana, and the difference in use (even by your chosen metric) is nowhere near 3.6x.

The only drug where you can make an argument even approaching 3.6x is crack, which is a relatively small percentage of arrests.

I also note you omitted the "stimulant" category (which in the 2011 dataset covered methamphetamine).

Where in the logic loop are we?

Mostly the place where everything sucks. It is a nasty self reinforcing problem. See some of my other responses for more context.

Wasn't trying to imply that black people are natural disposed to committing more crimes, just that currently they do, from a combination of economic and social reasons.

I was making an admittedly content-free "wry comment." I agree with you completely!

Are you implying that a human with black skin is predetermined to commit crime at a higher rate? Or might there be some confounding variables, such as poverty, caused by hundreds/thousands of years of institutional racism?

Already responded to a few other similar question. Absolutely not what I'm saying. There are lots of factors driving the different rates, and black people are just on the wrong end of a lot of the trends. My original post was probably more snarky and should have had more background to what I was thinking, given how many people have asked questions like this.

You're saying that black people have a higher propensity for crime. Is it not more plausible that humans are more or less alike, and the difference is outside their control?

Black people aren't predisposed to commit crimes more often than anyone else. It is just that a higher percentage of them grow up poor and/or with just a single parent, which are factors in likelihood to commit crimes, which leads to higher incarceration rates, which just feeds the beginning factors. When you control for economic status and parents, white people have similar rates. The factors that make it more likely for an individual to commit a crime are outside of their control yes, but committing a crime or not is always an individual's decision that can't be blamed on anyone else.

When you saids "It is just that .." , did you really mean those are the only causes of the higher black crime rate? If not, what do you think the other major causes are?

I heard someone say a long time ago something along the lines that the frontal lobe develops differently between ethnic groups and that it controls your empathy and impulse reactions. I haven’t seen any research that supports this though (and did nit search for that). It would be interesting to see if this claim is supported by science.

Interesting but heretical for both scientists and laymen.

The very concept of heresy is antithetical to science.

> higher crime rates

Source? Everything I've read suggests that crime rates are pretty much the same across race and ethnicity when controlling for economic status. The primary variable is contact with the justice system, i.e. getting caught.

Everything I've read also indicates that it is mostly or entirely driven by economic status. White people who grow up poor and/or with single mothers are also highly likely to end up in prison compared to the normal population.

This isn't about ethnicity, it is about economics and culture. It only disproportionately affects black people because of historical trends and welfare programs decades back that encouraged single parent homes, as was said in other comments.

>White people who grow up poor and/or with single mothers are also highly likely to end up in prison compared to the normal population.

They are, however, much less likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to lengthy terms than similarly-situated black people. To be treated like a black person in the justice system, a white person must be some combination of much poorer, much less educated, and with a much longer criminal history. It is about race and ethnicity.

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe...

A couple of notes: (1) even when adjusting for the 'crime rates' the sentencing lengths and the conviction rates for white vs black are way off and (2) the whole war-on-drugs things should be read as a 'war on people of color in all but name'.

If it's a war on people of color I guess it was an inside job:

https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...

So how come there are less black fathers now than when racism was much more prominent? Also how come we see the same problem in lower class white communities? I don't know if "institutional" racism (whatever that is) contributes to it or not but there are certainly other more prominent factors.

The percentage of African-American children in single-parent homes went from 20% in 1960 to 65% in 2017. Is institutional white racism worse now than it was sixty years ago?

Yes.

You know what else happened in that time? The War on Drugs.

I also question the methodology behind those statistics. Many of them only count married parents as not being "single." My father would have counted for my sister, post-divorce, despite being a highly-ranked officer in the military who paid for her college with his GI Bill funds. So would my cousin, who is not married to the mother of his child but who is very much living a traditional domestic life with his partner and daughter.

The demonization and denigration of functional but unorthodox living arrangements is nothing new to American discourse.

I am European - does Canada have War on drugs? How many black children in Canada are raised in single-parent families?

Canadian, but I'm not really informed enough to answer your questions - just to point out that Canada and the USA have different racial demographics. They've got nearly the same % of white people, but Canada has a 3.4% black population vs 12.7% in the USA. (Canada mostly makes up the difference with Asian population, 14.7% vs 5.4%.)

racism can be "better" now overall, yet also be present in forms that make the absence of black fathers more prevalent than in the 60s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21957325 places the result of that racist + non-racist incarceration at 11% of the total male black population (20-34).

Are there any numbers on how many black fathers are absent?

On Larry Elder: https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/2003/11/19

And if you deem it beneath HN's standards to quote a comic strip as a response to another post, well, I would say the same about quoting Larry Elder.

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