Hacker News Reader

Comment by JesperRavn | Hacker News Reader

This article is one sided in that it assumes that White fear of Blacks is baseless, when in fact Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites. Not all this difference can be explained by poverty, but even if it could, most White people are also afraid of White people who come from social classes with very high crime rates.

I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.

View on HN

That's the textbook definition of racism. All white people aren't judged by the actions of white criminals. But all black people are.

so why then don't you judge the actions of police on a case by case basis and choose tomassign them to all the white people? Does that make you racist?

More like Black victimization by police is considered a racial issue, but Black crime is not.

The two issues are distinct. Stop trying to justify racism.

You'll have to explain that better. Stop trying to shut down debate with the R word.

It is a complex issue. I suggest reading this thread on reddit on the same topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3afjx1/mur...

Can you point to a specific post, or a point you were trying to make. I accept that explaining the Black White crime gap is complex, but if by "it's a complex issue" you are trying to cast doubt on my claim that Blacks commit much more crime than Whites, then I disagree. And I didn't see any comments disputing this from a quick look at the post.

You right I should give a better answer than ists complex. But the thread goes in to look at factors such as segregation, density, and poverty. You have many poor people packed in to small places more violence is going to happen. These areas are more likely to have black people as opposed to white poor people who are more spread out, think Appalachia region. Do these factors explain everything, no but they do show it isn't as cut and dry as some try to make it.

Because of time will have leave a that for now.

But my claim was not that I know the causes of the higher Black crime rate, but rather that because of this higher crime rates, some White people have become fearful of Blacks. This would be the case regardless of the underlying causes.

Also [0] is only able to explain half of the crime gap through "structural characteristics". Of course this article would be considered extremely racist by many people in this thread (not you) since it assumes the crime gap reflects actual higher rates of criminal behavior, and not just bias in the justice system.

[0] http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~roos/Courses/grstat502/phillipss...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com