3 ms·

You don't understand why when you google a complex topic such as "crime" and then apply a narrow, racial lens to it, mostly racist organizations show up? The te

by kohanz 11y ago

You don't understand why when you google a complex topic such as "crime" and then apply a narrow, racial lens to it, mostly racist organizations show up? The term "X on Y crime" is suggesting that the relevant information about people who commit crimes and are victims of crime can be summarized by the color of their skin. That's as racist of a notion as it gets.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
Correct. There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. The point is not that it can be perfectly summarized by skin color, the point is that there is clearly something happening and it would be great to find out what. Of course, as it relates to my original post, the only relevant fact is that indeed there is something happening that a white male might have reason to feel irrational fear of. (The table shows that most crime is intra-racial, not inter-racial) Let me remind you of the original point: various people are feeling irrationally large amounts of fear but that fear is of a real thing (either historical, as in maaku's case, or real but exaggerated things in the case I described).
- joshuahedlund 11y ago
  > There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.

by kohanz 11y ago

yummyfajitas 11y ago

Correct. There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. The point is not that it can be perfectly summarized by skin color, the point is that there is clearly something happening and it would be great to find out what. Of course, as it relates to my original post, the only relevant fact is that indeed there is something happening that a white male might have reason to feel irrational fear of. (The table shows that most crime is intra-racial, not inter-racial) Let me remind you of the original point: various people are feeling irrationally large amounts of fear but that fear is of a real thing (either historical, as in maaku's case, or real but exaggerated things in the case I described).

joshuahedlund 11y ago
> There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.