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Comment by neurobama | Hacker News Reader

It's not strictly speaking the color of anyone's skin, but the taboos around discussing criminals of a certain shade that bugs me.

>Classism is the issue.

Crime does correlate somewhat with income, but racial differences in rates of violent crime are poorly explained by income level. Page 93, Table 6:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/9...

And here, see "Analysis of the Combined Data" and the conclusion section:

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

The author claims a large amount of the difference is explained by family structure. I'm inclined to agree, and I wish our leaders touched on this more often. You can't welfare or police your way out of a failed subculture where kids aren't raised to respect life and property, or themselves for that matter.

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It’s worth pointing out that insofar as the failed subculture is failed, its failure was deliberate. Same thing happened with Native Americans. The playbooks for destroying cultures are centuries old and they’re intended to reap exactly the sort of dysfunction you still see generations down the road.

Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be addressing the issue head on and talking about it openly, but it’s definitely more complex than the genetic argument that tends to emerge.

Know of any good books documenting these deliberate actions you talk about or are you speaking more generally?

I’m sure there are plenty, but a few of the strategies that I’m pointing to:

1. Forbid people from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures/religions (slavery)

2. Relocate children to schools of the subjugating culture or prevent them from being educated (happened during slavery)

3. Make drugs and intoxicants widely available (CIA bringing drugs into black neighborhoods)

4. Enslave people

5. Post-slavery, give them fewer rights and a caste-stratified society (Dread Scott)

6. When/where these cultures build wealth, destroy it (Tulsa massacre)

This history is important and relevant in the abstract, but what does it tell us about solutions for today's problems? I don't see what Dred Scott tells us about stopping rampant car thefts in Milwaukee. We are where we're at, now how do we improve?

Not sure! But one important component of a solution is probably to avoid the thinking that generated or at least perpetuated many of the problems in the first place (i.e. intrinsic racial inferiority). Probably also not by acting like everything is all good or that there’s no agency within these communities.

Class and income are not direct parallel. An upper class person falling on hard times still has a generation or three of family and connections and other support structures to reduce the impact. This notion of treating class as about primarily income rather than relationship to control over your own life obscures more than it enlightens. Income affects that control, but so does e.g. societal structures. Family structure is itself a class issue.

>Family structure is itself a class issue.

Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, both very poor parts of the world on average, have a higher ratio of married couples with children to single parents than do the United States and Canada:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/286433/women-worldwide-single-m...

David Drummond, former head of legal at Google and recipient of $47M in total comp in 2019, had a child with a woman who he abandoned and abruptly cut off:

https://www.businessinsider.com/david-drummond-earned-47-mil...

I can provide more anecdotes and data if you like, but my strong sense is that family formation isn't as nearly as tied to class as you think. If anything, low-income people save relatively more money by co-habitating.

I didn't say "family formation" is tied to class. I said that family structure is a class issue.

I also specifically argued against the notion of seeing class as determined by income.

Um, have you been to America before, or read any of it's history? Of course we don't openly discuss the racialized class of cheap reserve peon labor that is maintained for everyone else's benefit, that would be super uncomfortable.

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