Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

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> It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit".

That statement, as it stands, is ambiguous, and that its implications depend a lot on what it's taken to mean.

Statement 1: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black.

Statement 2: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay.

Statement 3: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay because of some actual difference between black people and white people.

Statement 4: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay because black people are stupider or nastier or crazier than white people.

Statement 1 is clearly true. Statement 2 is not clearly true. Statement 3 is very likely false. Statement 4 is almost certainly false. (These are of course all my own opinions; I am not claiming that they are self-evident.)

Statement 4, if true, might well have implications like "We should try to get rid of the black people" or "We should make it easy for white people to keep black people away from them" or "Black and white people should be segregated". Statement 1, on its own, would not.

There are plenty of people around who would endorse something like statement 4, and who would be happy to draw such conclusions. It is widely considered (and I agree) that these are not very nice people, and that the policies they prefer would be socially harmful, and that many of the things they believe about black people are factually wrong, and that if their ideas were more widely believed it would be a very bad thing.

That is why expressing views like statement 4 may "get you shunned". For the same reason, if what you intend is (say) only statement 1 then it seems to me that you ought to make that clear.

(I must say that I don't see why anyone would find statement 1 interesting, unless they think that what's really true is one of those later statements. And if someone finds such statements worth making, I am going to suspect that they may have in mind some conclusions of the sort I mentioned above. I suspect I'm not alone in this.)

Disclaimer: I'm biracial (Black and white).

People misunderstand the issue at hand in these conversations a lot so I figured I'd chime in a bit. Is there a difference between blacks and whites? Yes and no, it's complicated. The real differences at hand, as I think some commenters below pointed out is the difference between affluent and those that are less so. These are cultural differences and tend to manifest themselves as racial differences because of the disparate wealth numbers for the different demographics (25% of Blacks are in poverty and the median income amongst blacks is about 16k less than that of the national average).

It would be more correct to refer to this group as a sort of sub-culture, the group includes people of other ethnicities also. Sadly, this doesn't answer the original question. We have a subculture in America, one made up of primarily African Americans, that the glamorizes drugs, violence, and a victim mentality; While simultaneously villainizing education and success. Is this a trait of "blacks"? No, absolutely not. It is however the traits of the culture many blacks have aligned themselves with.

In the context of America, black is an ethnicity as well as a race. Maybe we should have two different words to distinguish the two, but we don't, and that's the way the word is used. A racial-ethnic group is a group up people who share characteristics of lineage, culture, dialect, mores, norms, etc. Obviously, all talk of ethnic characteristics will be unfortunately general. Not every Italian likes espresso, not every American-urban-black person likes fried chicken, etc.

I think it is a very well supported statement to say that the "american-black-ethnic-group" that moved north into Detroit had levels of crime that the prior residents of Detroit found quite disturbing. And a major proportion of this crime was directed at white people in a racially charged manner. That is not to say that violence is an indelible attribute of all black ethnic groups, at all times, and all places. But high rates of violence was a property of this particular ethnic group, at this time, at this place. The movement of this ethnic group into the city, and the interactions of this ethnic group with other ethnic groups in the city, is important for understanding what happened. The Detroit story is partly a story of an ethnic-sectarian conflict, just as in Kosovo, Israel, post-bellum Atlanta, or innumerable other times and places in history.

What are the practical reasons is it important to recognize and talk about the ethnic nature of the conflict? I can think of a couple:

a) The current conventional wisdom (that I learned in college) was that white flight was due to an irrational and bigoted revulsion of black people. Thus the solution to preventing future white is to re-educate white people to make them not racist. The actual story, I think, is that white flight was a result of ethnic violence. White people feared black people moving into their neighborhood, because they had the quite rational and well-supported belief that this would dramatically increase the probability of black-on-white ethnic violence. The solution, then, is to take the same techniques of law enforcement and re-education that were used with tremendous success to reduce white-on-black ethnic violence and white-on-black racism, and use those techniques to reduce black-on-white racism and black-on-white violence.

b) If you are governing a city or a country that's experiencing a large influx of ethnic migration, and that ethnic group has cultural patterns that are causing problems, you need to work on strengthening your institutions to handle that influx. And if the influx is too much and too sudden, and your rate of building institutions too slow, you might want to think about ways to limit the influx, so you can properly assimilate the migrants, before the migration overwhelms your institutions entirely and you lose the city.

Thank you. You expressed that more clearly than I could have expressed it. Unfortunately, even starting to go down this path can cause misunderstanding.

Your thorough breakdown of that part of the issue -- as good as it is -- is still only a part of the problem. Wrapping our heads around the whole thing would require making as thorough a breakdown as yours on all of the other factors, as well.

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