14 ms·

Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

131 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

np422 11y ago
I recall the ted talk http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo..., if a black man is found guilty of murdering a white woman in Alabama, he is 400 times more likely to be sentenced to death compared to a white man found guilty of murdering a black woman. I sometimes think about what the reaction would be if statistics showed that the German courts disproportionately often decided to sentence Jews to death? Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States?
- theklub 11y ago
  You're not factoring in lawyers. They make a big difference. It has more to do with money and less to do with race.
  - sharkweek 11y ago
    Money and race are certainly not independent of one another in a lot of cases in the US
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Yes they work together to help us ignore the serious problems we have with both. "Oh, the fact that cops beat up poor blacks is because they're poor, not black, so it's OK!" "The terrible public schools that the poor have to use don't seem so bad when you control for race!"
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - monknomo 11y ago
    I'm fairly certain that even if you control for income and education, black people are still treated more harshly by the justice system. I won't venture to guess whether there are regional differences as well...
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    And yet race predicts economic disparities quite well, so while access to lawyers may be a second-order effect of racism it is nonetheless a real one. Now I certainly don't suggest that race is the only factor here. The USA is a very classist society, not least due to a residual Calvinism that equates earthly wealth with a sign of God's favor and thus some inherent moral superiority, a view which seems to have been implicitly incorporated into the platform of one major political party.
    - damagedcake 11y ago
      So much wrong with this statement it's hard to even know where to start.
      - anigbrowl 11y ago
        Perhaps you could begin by identifying which of the various statements I made you found disagreeable. If you can't be bothered to make even a minimal effort, why should I care what you think?
  - np422 11y ago
    Even if income could explain the whole difference it would still not be a very agreeable explanation. Even though it's a naive idea, I still think that everyone should be entitled to the same level of legal support in a criminal case regardless of your socio-economic status.
    - VLM 11y ago
      As helpful as that sounds, it still wouldn't help earlier in the pipeline effects such as policing (a fighting kid in a white school is just a fighting kid who gets de-escalated and a note sent home, a fighting kid in a black school is arrested automatically). Or another difficult early pipeline area is prosecution and plea bargains being racially different (the white kid gets a plea offer for municipal loitering, the black kid gets prosecuted for misdemeanor possession of burglary tools). Explosive growth in income inequality makes the debate meaningless. There won't be grades of legal support, they'll just be billionaires who above the system and dirt poor peasants who get no support at all. Now (or recently) is probably not a good cultural era to go into the defense attorney field, for example. Being a defense attorney in an era where no one needs or can afford a defense attorney is like being a really great star trek warp field engineer in 2015, thats nice but how do you pay your bills?
      - anigbrowl 11y ago
        That's why I dropped out of law school. I went to a large-ish legal conference and realized how utterly hopeless the odds were, and decided to cut my losses. I'm not proud of it but my mental health is too fragile for me to function effectively under those conditions, which makes me worse than useless as an advocate for anyone else.
    - BurningFrog 11y ago
      Agreeable or not, understanding reality is needed to know what, if any, problems need solving. If you assume the problem is racism, while in reality it's income, your earnest efforts to combat racism will be do nothing (at best) to solve it.
    - CWuestefeld 11y ago
  - CapitalistCartr 11y ago
    One could write an algorithm to accurately predict application of the death penalty here in Florida just by factoring skin darkness, wealth, IQ, sex, and age. The particulars of the case beyond that don't matter.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    There are too many poor whites for the impact of lawyers to be that bad. But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980. The percentage of murders that are white on black is about 3% of all murders. And white men murder women about 30% of time they commit murder. So we are talking about probably 1-2% of all murders are white male on black female. So you'd only expect 2-5 white people on death row in Alabama for murdering a black woman. That is way way way too small of a sample size to make bold claims on. Though, I'm pretty damn sure racism has an impact on sentencing.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      > But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980. That's HUGE.
- hnpc123 11y ago
  I looked through the transcript of that talk and could not find a reference to that statistic. I was prompted to actually look into this claim because the incidence of white-on-black murder is extremely low and I imagine the incidence of white-on-black murder where the victim is a woman is even lower. I would be surprised if there were even 5 such cases in the past 50 years in Alabama. Do you have any sources? Or can you post the relevant snippet from that talk?
  - jkyle 11y ago
    Black on white murder is also extremely low. ~84% of white victims are murdered by whites and ~90% of black victims are murdered by blacks.[1] Crime is primarily a function of opportunity. When opportunity is taken into account, the main reason for the discrepancy is blacks are simply more likely to come into contact with whites day to day than the reverse. So while I can't confirm the above statistic for you I can refute the assumption that there is a significant discrepancy between white-on-black crime vs. black-on-white crime. 1. http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/updated-look-statistics-black-black-murders/ http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/update...
    - hnpc123 11y ago
      If blacks are more likely to come into contact with whites than the reverse then it would follow that blacks are more likely to be killed by whites than whites are by blacks.
      - jkyle 11y ago
        Yes it does, but that skew is very small. Only a few percentage points...as cited above. It would be a mischaracterization to imply one is extremely low, while the other is much higher. They are both, comparably, very low.
        hnpc123 11y ago
        For exactly the reason you stated the rate of black-on-white murder is much higher than the reverse.
- duaneb 11y ago
  > Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States? So many. But most of all, the attitude about what the hell prison is for needs to change. Many people embrace the death penalty in spite of increased costs, and support high sentences despite a low rate of successful rehabilitation. We need to care about our prisoners and vote for them for change to happen. It's not that people aren't aware of it, it's a matter of priorities. There's a reason Trump is emphasizing immigration changes.
- tzs 11y ago
  That's a pretty big difference. However, before ascribing it all or mostly to race, it would really be necessary to look at the individual cases. In general, murders where it is a lower class person murdering an upper class person in furtherance of a robbery or some such draw more vigorous prosecution and are more likely to get a death penalty than murders where it is some lower class person killing some other lower class person. Since blacks have disproportionately high representation in the lower classes, and whites disproportionately high representation in the upper classes, black murderer/white victim is disproportionately represented among the death penalty attracting lower class on upper class murders.
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    I appreciate that you are being careful about the possibility of a latent variable here. I don't have any data about poor-on-rich/rich-on-poor accusations and conviction rates, so I can't speak directly to that. However, the general conviction rate for "high class" black men is higher than the rate for "low class" white men: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the-week-the-black-white-gap-in-incarceration-rates/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the... I can't see any reason why I shouldn't assume the same applies to interracial murders as well. I do appreciate your point, and perhaps it is time for a civil rights movement among the poor, or among the white poor. I would support that. We should at least be getting the data. But since we have this data about black people specifically, it seems fine to try to solve that problem from a race-based perspective. As other data rolls in that shows there are similar problems for the white poor, then I think we should try to solve that problem too. Saying we shouldn't try to fix this problem because new data might come along that shows it part of a bigger problem is, to me, "great is the enemy of good" thinking.
powera 11y ago
The article is framed in terms of the 1965 Moynihan report, so I feel I should quote the recommendations Moynihan had at the time: "Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do—provide a guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report." Unfortunately, racists and demagogues eventually decided it was easier to just throw people in prison and be done with it.
- gdwatson 11y ago
  Moynihan's ideas didn't and don't fit neatly into an existing political coalition on either side of the aisle. Supporters of enlarging social welfare programs and supporters of the traditional, gendered nuclear family as a normative institution are not quite disjoint sets, but the overlap has been shrinking for decades.
happyscrappy 11y ago
We could really use someone like Moynihan these days but sadly none compare. How is Obama so silent on these issues?
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Have you not noticed how bitterly his comments are rejected when he does comment on them? I'd imagine that this will be his signature post-presidency issue, as he established a foundation called 'My Brother's Keeper' that aims to address the specific problems of black male youth. But you have people on the left demanding that he tear down the entire structure of white patriarchy, and people on eh right insisting that this is all he has done since taking office.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  Obama likely knows that a black person talking about racism gets deemed "the real racist" or "whining" by a significant portion of Americans.
anigbrowl 11y ago
One wonders whether the relative fragility of black families made them the unintentional first targets of efforts to dismantle patriarchal social structures, putting them at a relative disadvantage to a more conservative (qua slow-moving) aggregate. Moynihan [...] began pushing for a minimum income for all American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal — called the Family Assistance Plan — before the American public in a television address in August of 1969, and officially presented it to Congress in October. For all his faults, Nixon was a much more radical president than is often remembered today, though of course he also helped to launch the war on drugs, the burden of which has historically fallen disproportionately on black Americans. I wonder how things might have turned out differently if he had not had to deal with the mess of the Viet Nam war when elected - though I suppose you could argue that without that particular running sore, he would have had much less incentive to undertake radical domestic reforms than he did. Would love to get the perspective of older HNers on this issue, as I was born in 1970 and outside the US so my impressions of this period mainly come from books.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Given that Nixon sabotaged Vietnam peace talks in order to get elected, it hardly seems reasonable to talk about that war as something he got unfortunately stuck with.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    It's hard to sabotage peace talks if there isn't a war on already. I'm not trying to rehabilitate his machinations and policies about Vietnam, but speculating on what sort of President he might have been if the US hadn't been at war to begin with. Mainly I'm interested in the contrast between the general radicalism of the late 60s and the institutional conservatism of today, rather than wanting to argue that Nixon was a great guy.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      My point is just that there was a chance (probably not a good one, but a chance) to have the war end so that Nixon could be a peacetime President like you're speculating about, and Nixon himself made sure that didn't happen. I see what you're getting at, I just object to the presentation as the war as something Nixon got saddled with, rather than something he actively worked to have around for his own Presidency.
dudul 11y ago
Was "anonymous justice" ever attempted? What if judges, juries and lawyers worked on cases where the accused and the victim are anonymous. Neither their sex, nor race, nor anything is disclose. Would they help fix these bias where blacks get harsher sentences than whites and women lighter sentences than men for example? I don't know if it's realistic.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Was "anonymous justice" ever attempted? No, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. > What if judges, juries and lawyers worked on cases where the accused and the victim are anonymous. How is the jury going to evaluate guilt or innocent based on evidence (whether physical evidence or witness testimony) -- including, particularly, evidence relating to the perpetrator, victim, and the details of their interactions that are essential to the question of guilt or innocence of the crime, if the identities, sex, race, etc., of the accused and the victim(s) are obscured from the jury? What you might plausibly do is remove sentencing from the trial court, and anonymize the bare findings of fact before forwarding them to a separate body that handles sentencing. That might have some utility, though it would still be subject to bias in the trial courts actually in completing the findings of fact used for determining sentence.
  - dudul 11y ago
    How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent? What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind. Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing. Instead of "this black guy raped this white woman" they would make their decision based on "this person raped this other".
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent? It's pretty relevant to evaluating whether a particular piece of evidence (whether a video or photograph, a witness description, etc.) implicates the guilt or innocence of the particular person charged with the crime. Which is, after all, the whole job of the jury. > What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind. Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing. What I discuss in the last paragraph is something that can only happen after the jury has found the facts in a process in which the jury, judge, and lawyers knew who the victims and accused were.
hnpc123 11y ago
I know this is considered the most vile politically incorrect thing to say but please don't just downvote without comment. The Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and many more peoples all overcame decades, centuries, and millennia of brutal oppression to develop successful societies. Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average). When talking about population trends it's just physically impossible for blacks to compete on the same level as other peoples. Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence. This is a shitty truth, one that liberals refuse to accept. But it doesn't matter what they choose to believe since this is reality. Disclaimer: Obviously there are many intelligent black people and you shouldn't treat someone poorly because of the color of their skin.
- epistasis 11y ago
  I don't usually say this, because it's usually trite, but correlation is not causality.
  - mineshaftgap 11y ago
    Is there an opposite phrase to 'damned with faint praise'?
- EliRivers 11y ago
  please don't just downvote without comment. I downvoted because your proclaimed anti-liberal bias damages your credibility and is the mark of an immature arguer. Without going into your actual argument, you cripple your own credibility considerably by pasting a great big author-bias warning on it like that. If an argument will stand, it doesn't need its author pre-emptively saying that perceived opponents won't accept it because of their bias, and in the US today "liberal" and "conservative" have lost all meaning and become marks of lazy (non-)thinking and tribal attitudes. You can do better; you're just not trying.
- lemmsjid 11y ago
  You should really look into the history of IQ testing. In its infancy (in the United States) it was used to show that Italian Americans and Irish Americans were fundamentally inferior to Anglo Americans, because those populations had lower IQ scores. Lo and behold, those scores normalized as those populations became more assimilated. If you had written this comment (on paper) early last century you'd be telling us that the liberals refuse to accept that Italian immigrants are inferior to their Anglo counterparts. Such ignorant liberals!
kuni-toko-tachi 11y ago
Is Reddit full today? Is there any reason at all that leftist nonsense from The Atlantic keeps appearing on HN when it has no relevance to technology? White people are all racists and non-white people are all perfect people. We get it already. Oh and rich people are all bad and poor people are all good. Utter lies and nonsense.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 11y ago
  We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines repeatedly and ignoring our requests not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tigurtron60001 11y ago
I kept reading and reading, waiting for him to get to the point. He never actually tries to refute Moynihan's central thesis, that destruction of the black family and black men (by slavery, Jim Crow, and other things) is the central problem facing black Americans, and the ideal issue to target for a solution. Instead, it's mostly a bunch of meandering and frequently confusing anecdotes [1], emotional descriptions of (awful and disturbing, let me not dispute) white racism over the years, and pointing and sputtering at Moynihan's conclusions [2]. Ultimately, he throws up his hands and says, "Forget it! We just need reparations! Read this other article I wrote!" Well, we happen to be in agreement. How does affirmative action not constitute reparations? Because it's also provided to modern-day Somalian immigrants? There's a pretty simple solution to that. [1] Odell Newton...shot and killed the driver...Odell had the very bulwark that Moynihan treasured-a stable family-and it did not save him from incarceration. One guy with a stable family committed murder. Forget about it, and just keep subsidizing single-parent households through TANF and WIC. [2] Discussing what he’d do about the problem among blacks in cities, Moynihan said, “When these Negro G.I.s come back from Viet Nam, I would meet them with a real estate agent, a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, and a list of jobs. I’d try to get half of them into the grade schools, teaching kids who’ve never had anyone but women telling them what to do.” Everything about this quote is wrong. It's just wrong? That's it? You don't think kids should have positive male role models, or you don't think veterans should have help with housing and employment?
- heygrady 11y ago
  > It's just wrong? That's it? I would presume the author is rejecting a handful of stereotypes in the quoted statement. I think the author was rejecting the sexist undertones of men being preferable to "women telling [kids] what to do". And the sexist undertones of introducing young men to "a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll." And the tone-deafness of "meet them with a real estate agent." Maybe the author thought showing Vietnam Veterans "a list of jobs" was also tone-deaf. 1) In the earlier article about reparations, there was a large section about real estate red-lining. Importantly, minorities were not allowed to buy houses outside of designated areas. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/#article-section-8 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case... 2) There are any number of reasons that a military veteran may have difficulty finding a job (PTSD?). Suggesting that they simply haven't looked is a little bit insulting. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/recent-veterans-are-still-experiencing-double-digit-unemployment/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/re... 3) While there are numerous claims of the importance of male role models, these arguments are dubious. http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-Exceptional/dp/1594865388 http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-Exceptional/d... 4) I presume the bit about Diahann Carroll is suggesting that black men would get married and stay married if they met a sufficiently sexy woman. I think most people would consider that to be insulting.
anigbrowl 11y ago
Beyond that, there’s the expense of having to make long drives to prisons that are commonly built in rural white regions, far from the incarcerated’s family. It suits some politicians to have a large prison in their district, since the inmate population is included in calculations of representation (in accordance with the Constitutional design for representative government), but as the inmates can't vote, the number of people the congressperson has to actually answer to is that much smaller. http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-problem-solutions-and-what-census-can-do http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-...

131 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

np422 11y ago

I recall the ted talk http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo..., if a black man is found guilty of murdering a white woman in Alabama, he is 400 times more likely to be sentenced to death compared to a white man found guilty of murdering a black woman. I sometimes think about what the reaction would be if statistics showed that the German courts disproportionately often decided to sentence Jews to death? Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States?

theklub 11y ago
You're not factoring in lawyers. They make a big difference. It has more to do with money and less to do with race.
- sharkweek 11y ago
  Money and race are certainly not independent of one another in a lot of cases in the US
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Yes they work together to help us ignore the serious problems we have with both. "Oh, the fact that cops beat up poor blacks is because they're poor, not black, so it's OK!" "The terrible public schools that the poor have to use don't seem so bad when you control for race!"
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- monknomo 11y ago
  I'm fairly certain that even if you control for income and education, black people are still treated more harshly by the justice system. I won't venture to guess whether there are regional differences as well...
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  And yet race predicts economic disparities quite well, so while access to lawyers may be a second-order effect of racism it is nonetheless a real one. Now I certainly don't suggest that race is the only factor here. The USA is a very classist society, not least due to a residual Calvinism that equates earthly wealth with a sign of God's favor and thus some inherent moral superiority, a view which seems to have been implicitly incorporated into the platform of one major political party.
  - damagedcake 11y ago
    So much wrong with this statement it's hard to even know where to start.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Perhaps you could begin by identifying which of the various statements I made you found disagreeable. If you can't be bothered to make even a minimal effort, why should I care what you think?
- np422 11y ago
  Even if income could explain the whole difference it would still not be a very agreeable explanation. Even though it's a naive idea, I still think that everyone should be entitled to the same level of legal support in a criminal case regardless of your socio-economic status.
  - VLM 11y ago
    As helpful as that sounds, it still wouldn't help earlier in the pipeline effects such as policing (a fighting kid in a white school is just a fighting kid who gets de-escalated and a note sent home, a fighting kid in a black school is arrested automatically). Or another difficult early pipeline area is prosecution and plea bargains being racially different (the white kid gets a plea offer for municipal loitering, the black kid gets prosecuted for misdemeanor possession of burglary tools). Explosive growth in income inequality makes the debate meaningless. There won't be grades of legal support, they'll just be billionaires who above the system and dirt poor peasants who get no support at all. Now (or recently) is probably not a good cultural era to go into the defense attorney field, for example. Being a defense attorney in an era where no one needs or can afford a defense attorney is like being a really great star trek warp field engineer in 2015, thats nice but how do you pay your bills?
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      That's why I dropped out of law school. I went to a large-ish legal conference and realized how utterly hopeless the odds were, and decided to cut my losses. I'm not proud of it but my mental health is too fragile for me to function effectively under those conditions, which makes me worse than useless as an advocate for anyone else.
  - BurningFrog 11y ago
    Agreeable or not, understanding reality is needed to know what, if any, problems need solving. If you assume the problem is racism, while in reality it's income, your earnest efforts to combat racism will be do nothing (at best) to solve it.
  - CWuestefeld 11y ago
- CapitalistCartr 11y ago
  One could write an algorithm to accurately predict application of the death penalty here in Florida just by factoring skin darkness, wealth, IQ, sex, and age. The particulars of the case beyond that don't matter.
- rhino369 11y ago
  There are too many poor whites for the impact of lawyers to be that bad. But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980. The percentage of murders that are white on black is about 3% of all murders. And white men murder women about 30% of time they commit murder. So we are talking about probably 1-2% of all murders are white male on black female. So you'd only expect 2-5 white people on death row in Alabama for murdering a black woman. That is way way way too small of a sample size to make bold claims on. Though, I'm pretty damn sure racism has an impact on sentencing.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    > But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980. That's HUGE.
hnpc123 11y ago
I looked through the transcript of that talk and could not find a reference to that statistic. I was prompted to actually look into this claim because the incidence of white-on-black murder is extremely low and I imagine the incidence of white-on-black murder where the victim is a woman is even lower. I would be surprised if there were even 5 such cases in the past 50 years in Alabama. Do you have any sources? Or can you post the relevant snippet from that talk?
- jkyle 11y ago
  Black on white murder is also extremely low. ~84% of white victims are murdered by whites and ~90% of black victims are murdered by blacks.[1] Crime is primarily a function of opportunity. When opportunity is taken into account, the main reason for the discrepancy is blacks are simply more likely to come into contact with whites day to day than the reverse. So while I can't confirm the above statistic for you I can refute the assumption that there is a significant discrepancy between white-on-black crime vs. black-on-white crime. 1. http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/updated-look-statistics-black-black-murders/ http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/update...
  - hnpc123 11y ago
    If blacks are more likely to come into contact with whites than the reverse then it would follow that blacks are more likely to be killed by whites than whites are by blacks.
    - jkyle 11y ago
      Yes it does, but that skew is very small. Only a few percentage points...as cited above. It would be a mischaracterization to imply one is extremely low, while the other is much higher. They are both, comparably, very low.
      - hnpc123 11y ago
        For exactly the reason you stated the rate of black-on-white murder is much higher than the reverse.
duaneb 11y ago
> Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States? So many. But most of all, the attitude about what the hell prison is for needs to change. Many people embrace the death penalty in spite of increased costs, and support high sentences despite a low rate of successful rehabilitation. We need to care about our prisoners and vote for them for change to happen. It's not that people aren't aware of it, it's a matter of priorities. There's a reason Trump is emphasizing immigration changes.
tzs 11y ago
That's a pretty big difference. However, before ascribing it all or mostly to race, it would really be necessary to look at the individual cases. In general, murders where it is a lower class person murdering an upper class person in furtherance of a robbery or some such draw more vigorous prosecution and are more likely to get a death penalty than murders where it is some lower class person killing some other lower class person. Since blacks have disproportionately high representation in the lower classes, and whites disproportionately high representation in the upper classes, black murderer/white victim is disproportionately represented among the death penalty attracting lower class on upper class murders.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  I appreciate that you are being careful about the possibility of a latent variable here. I don't have any data about poor-on-rich/rich-on-poor accusations and conviction rates, so I can't speak directly to that. However, the general conviction rate for "high class" black men is higher than the rate for "low class" white men: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the-week-the-black-white-gap-in-incarceration-rates/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the... I can't see any reason why I shouldn't assume the same applies to interracial murders as well. I do appreciate your point, and perhaps it is time for a civil rights movement among the poor, or among the white poor. I would support that. We should at least be getting the data. But since we have this data about black people specifically, it seems fine to try to solve that problem from a race-based perspective. As other data rolls in that shows there are similar problems for the white poor, then I think we should try to solve that problem too. Saying we shouldn't try to fix this problem because new data might come along that shows it part of a bigger problem is, to me, "great is the enemy of good" thinking.

powera 11y ago

The article is framed in terms of the 1965 Moynihan report, so I feel I should quote the recommendations Moynihan had at the time: "Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do—provide a guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report." Unfortunately, racists and demagogues eventually decided it was easier to just throw people in prison and be done with it.

gdwatson 11y ago
Moynihan's ideas didn't and don't fit neatly into an existing political coalition on either side of the aisle. Supporters of enlarging social welfare programs and supporters of the traditional, gendered nuclear family as a normative institution are not quite disjoint sets, but the overlap has been shrinking for decades.

happyscrappy 11y ago

We could really use someone like Moynihan these days but sadly none compare. How is Obama so silent on these issues?

anigbrowl 11y ago
Have you not noticed how bitterly his comments are rejected when he does comment on them? I'd imagine that this will be his signature post-presidency issue, as he established a foundation called 'My Brother's Keeper' that aims to address the specific problems of black male youth. But you have people on the left demanding that he tear down the entire structure of white patriarchy, and people on eh right insisting that this is all he has done since taking office.
ceejayoz 11y ago
Obama likely knows that a black person talking about racism gets deemed "the real racist" or "whining" by a significant portion of Americans.

anigbrowl 11y ago

One wonders whether the relative fragility of black families made them the unintentional first targets of efforts to dismantle patriarchal social structures, putting them at a relative disadvantage to a more conservative (qua slow-moving) aggregate. Moynihan [...] began pushing for a minimum income for all American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal — called the Family Assistance Plan — before the American public in a television address in August of 1969, and officially presented it to Congress in October. For all his faults, Nixon was a much more radical president than is often remembered today, though of course he also helped to launch the war on drugs, the burden of which has historically fallen disproportionately on black Americans. I wonder how things might have turned out differently if he had not had to deal with the mess of the Viet Nam war when elected - though I suppose you could argue that without that particular running sore, he would have had much less incentive to undertake radical domestic reforms than he did. Would love to get the perspective of older HNers on this issue, as I was born in 1970 and outside the US so my impressions of this period mainly come from books.

mikeash 11y ago
Given that Nixon sabotaged Vietnam peace talks in order to get elected, it hardly seems reasonable to talk about that war as something he got unfortunately stuck with.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  It's hard to sabotage peace talks if there isn't a war on already. I'm not trying to rehabilitate his machinations and policies about Vietnam, but speculating on what sort of President he might have been if the US hadn't been at war to begin with. Mainly I'm interested in the contrast between the general radicalism of the late 60s and the institutional conservatism of today, rather than wanting to argue that Nixon was a great guy.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    My point is just that there was a chance (probably not a good one, but a chance) to have the war end so that Nixon could be a peacetime President like you're speculating about, and Nixon himself made sure that didn't happen. I see what you're getting at, I just object to the presentation as the war as something Nixon got saddled with, rather than something he actively worked to have around for his own Presidency.

dudul 11y ago

Was "anonymous justice" ever attempted? What if judges, juries and lawyers worked on cases where the accused and the victim are anonymous. Neither their sex, nor race, nor anything is disclose. Would they help fix these bias where blacks get harsher sentences than whites and women lighter sentences than men for example? I don't know if it's realistic.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Was "anonymous justice" ever attempted? No, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. > What if judges, juries and lawyers worked on cases where the accused and the victim are anonymous. How is the jury going to evaluate guilt or innocent based on evidence (whether physical evidence or witness testimony) -- including, particularly, evidence relating to the perpetrator, victim, and the details of their interactions that are essential to the question of guilt or innocence of the crime, if the identities, sex, race, etc., of the accused and the victim(s) are obscured from the jury? What you might plausibly do is remove sentencing from the trial court, and anonymize the bare findings of fact before forwarding them to a separate body that handles sentencing. That might have some utility, though it would still be subject to bias in the trial courts actually in completing the findings of fact used for determining sentence.
- dudul 11y ago
  How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent? What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind. Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing. Instead of "this black guy raped this white woman" they would make their decision based on "this person raped this other".
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent? It's pretty relevant to evaluating whether a particular piece of evidence (whether a video or photograph, a witness description, etc.) implicates the guilt or innocence of the particular person charged with the crime. Which is, after all, the whole job of the jury. > What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind. Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing. What I discuss in the last paragraph is something that can only happen after the jury has found the facts in a process in which the jury, judge, and lawyers knew who the victims and accused were.

hnpc123 11y ago

I know this is considered the most vile politically incorrect thing to say but please don't just downvote without comment. The Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and many more peoples all overcame decades, centuries, and millennia of brutal oppression to develop successful societies. Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average). When talking about population trends it's just physically impossible for blacks to compete on the same level as other peoples. Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence. This is a shitty truth, one that liberals refuse to accept. But it doesn't matter what they choose to believe since this is reality. Disclaimer: Obviously there are many intelligent black people and you shouldn't treat someone poorly because of the color of their skin.

epistasis 11y ago
I don't usually say this, because it's usually trite, but correlation is not causality.
- mineshaftgap 11y ago
  Is there an opposite phrase to 'damned with faint praise'?
EliRivers 11y ago
please don't just downvote without comment. I downvoted because your proclaimed anti-liberal bias damages your credibility and is the mark of an immature arguer. Without going into your actual argument, you cripple your own credibility considerably by pasting a great big author-bias warning on it like that. If an argument will stand, it doesn't need its author pre-emptively saying that perceived opponents won't accept it because of their bias, and in the US today "liberal" and "conservative" have lost all meaning and become marks of lazy (non-)thinking and tribal attitudes. You can do better; you're just not trying.
lemmsjid 11y ago
You should really look into the history of IQ testing. In its infancy (in the United States) it was used to show that Italian Americans and Irish Americans were fundamentally inferior to Anglo Americans, because those populations had lower IQ scores. Lo and behold, those scores normalized as those populations became more assimilated. If you had written this comment (on paper) early last century you'd be telling us that the liberals refuse to accept that Italian immigrants are inferior to their Anglo counterparts. Such ignorant liberals!

kuni-toko-tachi 11y ago

Is Reddit full today? Is there any reason at all that leftist nonsense from The Atlantic keeps appearing on HN when it has no relevance to technology? White people are all racists and non-white people are all perfect people. We get it already. Oh and rich people are all bad and poor people are all good. Utter lies and nonsense.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dang 11y ago
We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines repeatedly and ignoring our requests not to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tigurtron60001 11y ago

I kept reading and reading, waiting for him to get to the point. He never actually tries to refute Moynihan's central thesis, that destruction of the black family and black men (by slavery, Jim Crow, and other things) is the central problem facing black Americans, and the ideal issue to target for a solution. Instead, it's mostly a bunch of meandering and frequently confusing anecdotes [1], emotional descriptions of (awful and disturbing, let me not dispute) white racism over the years, and pointing and sputtering at Moynihan's conclusions [2]. Ultimately, he throws up his hands and says, "Forget it! We just need reparations! Read this other article I wrote!" Well, we happen to be in agreement. How does affirmative action not constitute reparations? Because it's also provided to modern-day Somalian immigrants? There's a pretty simple solution to that. [1] Odell Newton...shot and killed the driver...Odell had the very bulwark that Moynihan treasured-a stable family-and it did not save him from incarceration. One guy with a stable family committed murder. Forget about it, and just keep subsidizing single-parent households through TANF and WIC. [2] Discussing what he’d do about the problem among blacks in cities, Moynihan said, “When these Negro G.I.s come back from Viet Nam, I would meet them with a real estate agent, a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, and a list of jobs. I’d try to get half of them into the grade schools, teaching kids who’ve never had anyone but women telling them what to do.” Everything about this quote is wrong. It's just wrong? That's it? You don't think kids should have positive male role models, or you don't think veterans should have help with housing and employment?

heygrady 11y ago
> It's just wrong? That's it? I would presume the author is rejecting a handful of stereotypes in the quoted statement. I think the author was rejecting the sexist undertones of men being preferable to "women telling [kids] what to do". And the sexist undertones of introducing young men to "a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll." And the tone-deafness of "meet them with a real estate agent." Maybe the author thought showing Vietnam Veterans "a list of jobs" was also tone-deaf. 1) In the earlier article about reparations, there was a large section about real estate red-lining. Importantly, minorities were not allowed to buy houses outside of designated areas. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/#article-section-8 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case... 2) There are any number of reasons that a military veteran may have difficulty finding a job (PTSD?). Suggesting that they simply haven't looked is a little bit insulting. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/recent-veterans-are-still-experiencing-double-digit-unemployment/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/re... 3) While there are numerous claims of the importance of male role models, these arguments are dubious. http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-Exceptional/dp/1594865388 http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-Exceptional/d... 4) I presume the bit about Diahann Carroll is suggesting that black men would get married and stay married if they met a sufficiently sexy woman. I think most people would consider that to be insulting.

anigbrowl 11y ago

Beyond that, there’s the expense of having to make long drives to prisons that are commonly built in rural white regions, far from the incarcerated’s family. It suits some politicians to have a large prison in their district, since the inmate population is included in calculations of representation (in accordance with the Constitutional design for representative government), but as the inmates can't vote, the number of people the congressperson has to actually answer to is that much smaller. http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-problem-solutions-and-what-census-can-do http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-...