An honest question to progressives about race

Recently, there was a national news story about a grade school aged black girl who was held down by three white boys and had her dreadlocks cut. Like many stories of this nature, it quickly came out that it was a lie (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/girl-dreadlocks-lied-classmates-boy-virginia-hairstyle-hoax/), but only after national newspapers had uncritically run the story, and public figures had spoken out about it. In addition it's odd that, even if true, an incident of bullying between a few students warrants national media attention--unless somebody is trying to create a narrative. 

And it's obvious that the media is trying to spin a narrative. A narrative about hate crimes in Trump's America and violent white men going around oppressing minorities. But what do the actual facts say? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime), in 2018 there were 593,598 violent crimes that involved black people and white people. In 537,204 of them, or 90%, white people were the victims. This statistic is even worse than it sounds, because for every black person in the United States, there are around 5 white people. If propensity to interracial crime was equal, white people would be the aggressor in 83% of these crimes, rather than 10%.

My intent here is not to libel all black people as criminals, when the vast majority are not. Nor is it to fear-monger (although 500,000 violent crimes a year is not insignificant even in a country as large as ours), nor am I trying to play up white victimhood. Rather I am honestly curious how progressives reconcile their racial narrative to what the statistics actually say.

My question to progressives is this: how do you reconcile the reality of crime and victimization in the United States with the narrative that white people are oppressing black people? Materially, what is it that white people currently do to black people that outweighs a net 500,000 violent crimes every single year? Please be specific.

What whites do to blacks is usually legal 'on the edge' stuff or illegal but very borderline as well. It revolved originally around blatant discrimination, glass ceilings and all that, later it's become subtle but you're right if we are discussing black people having mobility between classes in the US, that's achieved today... it's just that it is only achievable at least 3 generations down the line because what's snowballing at the moment is starting them off equal in life to begin with. If the education, healthcare accessibility and/or quality is too severely different for the poor, be they black or white, it makes them have a brutal uphill battle in life.

I'm not one to talk of being a coward in the face of adversity. Me being me, I've been bullied my whole life and when I say bullied I don't just mean at school or by one individual alone. I understand that making 'excuses for your failure' is a toxic mentality to have and makes you fight for something other than your success, but the fact of the matter is that not everyone is as headstrong as the select few 'real grit-sturdy' beings like me and some others. Most humans hate self-reliance, they like teamwork and sharing and all of that stuff. That's fine and I fully accept that not everyone is wired how I am (after all, not understanding that I'm wired differently is the very ignorance that led to bullying me in the first place so I'd be a real hypocrite to ignore it in others). 

For the social beings, life is less about learning things themselves, fighting for their own worth etc, it's much more about supporting others in an overall big 'fight'. This mentality is common and had to be. The self-reliant types like me are rare. For whatever reason, despite us overall being superior competitors in a standalone sense, we were significantly outcompeted in the genepool by the teamwork-type humans. This is more than just extroverts vs introverts, even most introverts (which already are a 20-80 minority approximately) themselves like to fight for a cause that matters to them anyway, so they end up caring as well. 

It would simply be too ignorant of human nature and our species' majority wiring to go and say 'everyone fight for your own worth'. To begin with, anarcho-capitalism can't work because within 3 generations (the same amount of generations as it takes to fully defy apartheid), an Illuminati forms in the society. This bloodline-based coalition comes from original good competitors favouring friends and family above the truly competent. The nepotism then results in those with power and influence to be people who rarely ever actually deserve it and who are terrified of being outcompeted by genuinely superior beings at their tradescraft, so they work hard to inhibit them (rather than to be maximally proficient at what good they produce or service they provide). This is then why we constantly need a reshuffle, to even out the competition. 

It happens to be that most poor people, racially, in America, are of the 'black' race of human. That occurance then has led to deep, MULTIPLE generation-long snowballing of unfair advantage vs disadvantage. The children are usually improperly fed so their brains, even if they had the genes to become Einstein or Tesla, don't actually properly lead to genius brain development. This improper feeding is both due to lack of knowing what's good for one's child as well as lack of funds to get good food, since so much money is going out to the parents' healthcare etc, the children's same thing, bills, debts for loans that they had to take just to cope and all the rest. On top of that the parents are dead tired and sometimes need the 'good food' for themselves as it is a net-benefit to their family to have them fed well at times, in order to not cramp up at work and lose their physically demanding job.

If you can't accept that there's such a brutal snowball advantage that happens to mostly favour whites, you are simply ignorant of the statistics and reality.

Just to add to what RationalMadman said, Black people are also several times more likely to be charged with a crime than a white person. This isn't a hate crime but is an easy example, the case of Brock Turner. Despite being guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault he only ended up being sentenced to 6 months in prison. He got released 3 months early too. If a black teenager had been the rapist they would have thrown the book at him. I mean people were still calling the central park 5 guilty even after DNA exonerated them. 

In that example it was a judge's bias. But police and prosecutors have this bias too. If they catch a white person committing a minor crime they are several times more likely to send them off with a warning or to charge them with a lesser crime. So the stats can be very misleading if you take them out of context. 

Those stats will not show you the number of times police decided not to charge a white person of harassing or abusing a black person. 

I’ll get a longer reply to both you and RM out, hopefully today, but you are alleging literally millions of crimes going unreported. If propensity to interracial crime was truly equal, and whites commit 83% of interracial crimes between blacks and whites but a large amount go unreported, whites in 2018 would’ve committed 2,622,819 violent crimes against black people of which only 56,000, or 2%, were reported.

You’re gonna need a lot more than one example of a guy who got off easy to prove that. 

I'm not just alleging that whites committed more crimes that weren't charged. I'm also alleging that blacks were charged with more crimes than they should have which also inflates the stats.

For example, a black person is doing something a white cop doesn't like, lets say he is loitering, so the cop harasses him and tells him he has to go home. The black guy pushes the cop, the cop charges him with assault. In this example it might not have required a cop to get involved at all. Loitering isn't exactly a high priority crime. Even if it did, the cop being aggressive escalated the issue and made it into a confrontation. The cop then had the choice to charge him or not. In all 3 stages a white person would be treated differently. in this example there was either no crime at all, or the black guy was significantly overcharged for what occurred. This type of behavior inflates crime stats.

Then there are plea bargains. Prosecutors are much more likely to give a good plea bargain to a white person. If you got doing something violent but get plea bargained down to a non violent crime, then that violent crime doesn't show up in the stats. If black people don't get plea bargained down to non violent crimes as often, then their stats look much higher. 

There are numerous levels that all influence institutional racism. 

I think the narrative isnt that white people oppress blacks, the narrative is that black people are far less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt or shown leniency compared to white people who are accused of similar crimes, that black people are more likely to be arrested, charged, imprisoned, etc then white people who commit a similar action, and that black people are more likely to have to deal with these hardships simply because they are black.... 

Its not that white people as a whole or even in general oppress blacks, its that the justice system we have in place is noticeably less merciful and more punitive towards black people than towards white people in similar circumstances. The reasons for this vary from flaws in police training, historical biases in laws and their enforcement that have not been corrected/legislated out of the system, the worrying amount of privatization in the penal system that actively lobbies for tougher enforcement of laws and steeper penalties for crimes, misguided objectives in the past such as steep penalties for minor possession of drugs, etc.....

The media itself also plays a role in this since the biggest flashpoints of this issue revolves around instances of white on black crime, because historically there is about a 50-50 chance that the offender gets off, which can drive a media cycle for months and translates into free money for media outlets.... Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Grey, Walter Scott, Eric Garner... All of these cases are a month's worth of free talking points for news stations (4 months if its a 24 hour program), which can feed into the perception that they all have a particular bias towards the same agenda when in reality they're just chasing free money and losing out on it if they decide not to talk about it when every other station does. 

I do actually think that in terms of 'how often they do crime' that indeed the poor, whatever race they be, do it the most and get genuinely caught the most (not just unfairly convicted the most). That is, however, ignoring the reason for it. Let's ignore how much money plays a factor in how good a law firm you get to work to defend you in America, just to be clear on what could be different:

In Commonwealth nations the one who does the 'talking' is either yourself or a publically funded barrister, this is unable to be hired by you as such but yes indeed, there's ways to pull strings and get yourself the best one if you're rich and influential enough, basically what you pay for is all the behind the scenes work, the idea is that money can't gain you an advantage once already inside the court room for speaking more or less eloquent English or knowledge of the Law as all Barristers are experts both at speech eloquence and Law, but I don't deny there still is entire monetary advantage considering how much better background work will be done by the best solicitors out there vs the laziest). 

I don't actually care about this when I consider myself a Progressive, this is actually not the real issue when discussing crime and the poor. The reason why the poor do actually do so much more crime is not only the most obvious thing ever (I'll go into the other reason in the next paragraph, for now here is the obvious reason); the most people in any nation's classes are the poor to lower-middle class, so population-wise to compare the crime-rate percentage of overall crime between the race that happens to be the wealthiest vs the poorest is idiotic. You see, if you compared redneck-types or their rivals; antifa-types, you'd see that poor and lower-middle whites have a lot of crime, be it more 'organised' as in Mafia and Gangs, or dispersed. In fact, if it comes down to organised crime, the two races associated with lowest crime rate (whites and 'yellow' Asians) are actually consistently are the most deep-penetrating, sophisticated and therefore devastating organised crime bringers to the world as a whole. Whether we are talking UN-level corruption or your local alcoholic thugs, they have a whole range of crime but because they happen to be amongst the richest in the US, their race can say that much less of their race do crime and here is why:

Crime is not only much more optimal, the poorer you are, to get anything worthwhile in life (materialistically), but it also becomes much harder to cover up or work out ways to 'edge yourself' to the very edge of what's legal vs illegal so that you're on the right side of the line in the sand. From getting medical marijuana to begging a loan shark to get you out of a debt that banks don't want to risk on you, being poor gets you dragged into a world of 'sure, you can get what others have for themselves and their close ones, but that material-stimulated pleasure comes at a cost'. With services things are a bit simpler; you can settle for a shit service and suffer through the shit quality, but when it comes to trading goods, it's much harder to settle for something that is so bad you don't get the intended outcome. It's not just about getting high or getting a loan that you can't afford to pay back soon enough, being poor drags you into a lot of situations that other classes never even face, just because you are among poor neighbours, friends etc. You constantly will find yourself needing to keep your mouth shut about things going on, helping a friend sober up and lying about it. If you don't participate in this local kind of 'conspiracy', either the gang kills you for beign a snitch or in less organised crime scenarios, you get a reputation, revenge etc. The problem is that when you're middle class or higher, if your neighbour literally smashes your car to pieces, you will be able to give them their just deserts legally, but if you get into beed with a neighbour and you're dirt-poor who the fuck is going to sue them for you? They'll deny it was them and the other neighbours will even lie, incriminating you, if your street cred is too low. I know you think I'm talking like someone who has never been poor, imagining what it's like, but I can tell you that what I am describing is actually real. When I told some poor people I know about it, they understood it completely and agreed. It actually fascinates me how naive and crap the street smarts of most non-poor people are, they'd actually last longer in the dog-eat-dog world of backstabbing elitism than being poor, since the Elite know how to handle stubborn people without necessarily overtly hurting them, they just make you no longer a real contender for a position of power or level of wealth. Once that's achieved, you're yesterday's news. With the world of the poor, you don't quite understand how it is unless you've truly exposed yourself to the world. What I am saying is as true for a teenage girl who is not involved in any sluttiness or gangs, as much as it's relevant to the forty year old guy running one. When you're in the world of the poor, you are forced to keep your head down, mouth shut and participate at the very least by obstructing justice subtly, at many points. Sometimes the only pleasure you even can fathom in that life is a little high now and again, which gets you dragged into more crime.

Congratulations, you've identified one possible explanation for racial disparities in the US, and one that just happens to align with certain widespread cultural values which our society enforces practically at the point of a gun. Now the task is to make your theory falsifiable so that it qualifies as "scientific" and can be accepted or rejected on more than just an emotional basis. 

Sorry, I forgot to block you.

Oh comeon..this is way too easy.

Minorities are violent because they are oppressed by the white man.

"The children are usually improperly fed so their brains, even if they had the genes to become Einstein or Tesla, don't actually properly lead to genius brain development."

Perhaps that's why semi-starving Chinese farmers outperform both blacks AND whites in the US on IQ tests. 

Chinese babies also don't have a 70% chance of growing up fatherless.

Neither do white Americans. 

I’m hoping to get responses to you, bench, and RM today but working full time + school is a lot less free time than I used to have, but this data doesn’t come from prosecutions. It comes from the BJS crime victimization survey, so it draws from reported violent crimes, not prosecutions. So now your claim is that 2.6 million black people a year are mugged/assaulted/robbed/raped by white people but only 2% of them report it. And your evidence is one guy who got a light sentence for a crime 

Lies are a necessary tool for the white supremacist (which he has explicitly admitted to being elsewhere in a severe sense of the word).

- me

I meant 'get into beef'**

I think that the idea isn't that 'white people' are oppressing black people, as that black people are oppressed in unique ways by economic and cultural structures (those structures also oppress whites, and are enveloping more and more white communities each day). We like to pretend that people are both blank states and perfectly will-driven, but that isn't the case. Humans are social creatures, and we are often defined more by our upbringing, our communities, and our interaction with one another within a larger framework that incorporates land and history than we are by some sort of iron-willed free spirit.

One of the biggest things is land. The top 100 land owners in the US own more land than all black people combined; the ownership levels are abysmal. To have a healthy human community, you absolutely need access to land, a tie to the land, and a tie to your own past on that land. Folkways of this sort evolve overtime whenever a human society settles down somewhere, and aren't easily uprooted. Those folkways moderate antisocial behavior, they pass down specialized survival techniques for that specific environment, and they make the population resilient to outside forces that don't have their best interests in mind. In the US, black people largely migrated up north to be exploited in factories, a flux of labor population that closely mirrored other historical urbanizations, like that which took place in England during the 'industrial revolution'. The major difference was that these cities were already packed with people, and those people were organizing and demanding better labor conditions. The wealthy people in cities certainly had their interests served by the upheaval, as it created a fragmentary, internally hostile working class that could be more easily exploited. As someone who grew up in a northern city, I can tell you that the ethnic tensions created by this are powerful, and that animosity is still passed down to his day. This creates a hardened lack of political resolve to do anything that benefits black communities among white and other ethnic working class minorities.

So where does this history leave black people? They left the land in the South, which they often didn't own, but which they did have cultural ties to, to come to cities where they were ostracized from many of their social peers, met with resentment, and alienated from the culture. An ersatz sense of defensive racial community materialized, but it often wasn't any replacement for what they had: the traditions and rules of social engagement which preserved order and imposed duties on people, enabling collective action. When those things did begin to arise again, they were often violently suppressed or surreptitiously undermined by US government intelligence. What arose was something that goes beyond IQ or anything else mentioned here: a population which has had much of its essential human collective organization beaten out of it. A diaspora that was never allowed to settle in, or put down roots. Antisocial (from a national perspective) behavior in a group like that is going to skyrocket, and they will come up with rules that protect the ingroup fanatically (rules against snitching being the main one). If you want an analogue from Europe, look at the Romani and their conception of 'gadjo': when it comes to cultural norms, the outsider is outlaw.

Of course the popular ideology today, fed to both white and black people by the media and education system, is that white people created this system and benefited from it. This is a farce funded, cheered on, and perpetuated by the people who actually benefited: the rich elite. And it's a simple sleight of hand that they use: when black people are discriminated against in favor of white people, the white person does better and the black person does worse. Relative to one another, this is true. But the real question is: does the white person fare better than he would if he were facing down the rich person on this own, negotiating his own pay, without coming into conflict with the black person at all? No, he does not. The ethnic conflict serves as a smokescreen to both continuously beat wages down, and to dismantle any power structure which can resist consumerism and the cultural horror that accompanies it. Ethnic conflict is a tool of consumerist capitalism, and it uses any social structure it can get its hands on to push atomizing social dysfunction on all populations. In the end, regardless of IQ or anything else, what the richest people in our society want is a population enslaved by their most base personal desires, with no loyalty to a higher ideal, to a human community, or any thing else that might lead them to pick up pitchforks, head to the Hamptons, and solve 90% of our problems.

What policy would allow more even ownership of land?

Redistribution and decommodification.

Why redistribute?

Redistribution is just the same thing but in a slightly different format.

What's wrong with public ownership and freedom of access?

After all, what is the purpose of State and Government?

Public ownership at the moment doesn't mean public ownership, it means ownership by whoever controls the levers of power, which means the same cadre of wealthy people who have been molding policy to their benefit for decades. Saying redistribution is just the same thing but in a slightly different format is meaningless, you could say that about many things. A dead body is the same thing as a human but in a slightly different format. Redistribution and decommodification changes the structure of government and society to make it difficult for things to revert. Land was commodified in Protestant England after the commons were seized by the government and redistributed to loyal lords, and then the peasants were evicted from their land en masse (this was also part of the process of proletarianization). The goal is to get back to the prior point, where evictions and land confiscations were impossible because power structures existed which opposed those things. In medieval Europe, this force consisted of the nobles and the Church who supported them as a foil to the power of the monarchy. Those powers were destroyed by the reformation in England and Germany, by the Revolution in France, and were undermined by things like the Tavora Affair in Portugal. As things stand now, land will continue to be pulled into fewer and fewer hands, as will all capital, because there are no power structures powerful enough to oppose it. You have to build those power structures from the ground up. In many second and third world countries evictions of this sort, drive by rapacious global capitalism, are still ongoing.

Thanks for the history lesson.

But history was and things are now just about the same as before but in a slightly different format.

"Redistribution is just the same thing but in a slightly different format"

A concise statement that means exactly what it says.

The mission statement is all encompassing and so "meaningless" is simply not bothering. 

Things have a tendency to revert, no matter how hard some might try to force change.

I would suggest that the underlying influences that order society have very little to do with conceptual politics.

You're asking the wrong questions. The relevant issue is power. The issue of net harms to specific racial groups is mostly a distraction at this point, and based on the media creating false narratives around it, I'd say it's been co-opted & monetized. 

As you can probably tell, I'm a Bernie fan but don't care much for people like AOC. Just like the disagreements among those on the right re: things like nationalism/globalization, there's some big disagreements among those on the left as well especially re: the victimhood stuff. 

And btw, you say that you aren't trying to play up "white victimhood" but if you frame the issue as "whites vs blacks," it always turns into some sort of victimhood olympics. I'm very surprised that's the approach you take.

I just don’t think this answers the question. I would much rather be white than be black so I don’t disagree with everything that you say, but my question is a lot more specific. A growing plurality on the left supports cash reparations to black people as a result of past oppression. If we have to make that calculation, how do we factor in things like the OP? And what, *specifically* are white people *currently* doing to oppress black people?

I don’t necessarily disagree with this (I simply don’t know how racially biased the justice system is or isn’t) but if it is that’s certainly a problem. I guess I should’ve been more specific in my question and asked it to people who support reparations, because that entire argument requires specifically divvying up what each group owes the other, and I wanted to see how they accounted for this. 

When I think “power” I think “the group that is victimized 90% of the time.” How is the issue of net harms irrelevant when discussing oppression? 

That’s because a growing plurality on the left—spearheaded by several major presidential candidates—wants to take money from me for reparations. That is, by definition, a white vs black issue so if we have to divvy up exactly who owes who what, we should be allowed to make the obvious counter argument. 

Andrew Yang is a communist

Andrew Yang is the best democratic candidate to run in years, and a good man 

You are focusing on Sanders voters, lumping them in with Warren supporters and think you still understand the whole variety of 'Left' there is. You don't.

Are you a Nazi? Are you an Anarcy-esque-Libertarian? Are you a Reagan/Putin hardliner "Religious, Corrupt but 'safe'" style Conservative? There's a whole array of Right-Winger. You talk like you know what I think because of someone else who says they are "Left" does.

You want a whole agenda and manifesto? I can give it, I actually have a perfect solution to every single political issue in existence but your question in the OP was not about a solution, it was about understanding the issue.

The way you fix it is not necessarily easy because what if the endgame is actually to remain the elite bloodlines? Don't you get it? Would you want your family to be moved out of the top of a food chain that actually can and does work from the perspective of those running it and rigging it?

You're looking at the world like a chess match where the win-condition is to free the inferior beings and even the odds. Fuck no, that's not the win-condition for them or anyone benefitting from the system. You know how your computer was made? Research computer mineral extraction methods in Bangladesh and other such exploitation elsewhere for a variety of reasons. 

I'm not a bleeding heart Liberal, I am a pragmatic Progressive. The endgame is to respect the Illuminati, to let them rule as overlords in the open, exposed, named and held accountable for their actions. They're terrified to reveal the cartel and monopoly mentality of the richest of the world and therefore they will do anything and everything to distract us with other issues, lesser enemies etc.

You see, it is no wonder they are so corrupt and secretive. They know we loathe overlords ruling without being of our own selfish interest, into power. The fairest system is one where we accept that there are Elites that we gotta keep our heads down and respect but in return they grant extreme mobility between the classes, based on meritocracy that we can rise and accumulate wealth on our own efforts and strategy paying off but which our mistakes punish only us, not our children and their grandchildren even more brutally so.