I recall the ted talk 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?
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!"
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
That's simply not possible. And I don't mean it's impractical, I mean that the laws of mathematics won't allow it.
Legal support is a finite resource. There are only so many lawyers (thank god!) and of those that exist, some lawyers are better than others. It's simply not possible to give everyone the exact same quality of representation, short of ensuring that everyone has zero.
This is just one example of what the price system does in the market. The whole point is that resources are scarce, and the means of indicating how important a resource is for some purpose, is by voting with your money. And it's turtles all the way down: what gives you that money to indicate the importance of the scarce resource, is that you're providing some scarce resource to other people, who are paying you, and they are doing the same, and so on...
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.
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.
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?
~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.
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.
I don't know if percentages are the right metric to use here. You can certainly make up a scenario which is completely absurd, but still has your percentages. Assume 100,000,000 green people, and 100 blue people on a distant planet. Nine blue criminals kill 9 blue people. One green person kills one blue person. So that's 90% blue-on-blue murder, and an 10% of the blue population are murderers, and there is a 10% murder rate among the blue population. Now lets say there were there were 9 green people murdered by 9 green people, and one 1 green person murdered by 1 blue person. Again 90% green-on-green murder, and a 0.00000001% murder rate.
> 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.
Crime is primarily a function of opportunity in environments prone to crime. In environments not prone to crime it is primarily a function of motivated offenders, and most opportunities are not taken advantage of.
> 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.
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.
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... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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".
> 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.
But what is a "fact"? A whole lot of stuff comes down to he said/she said, or people interpreting complex interplay of factors differently. I'm not sure how often it occurs that "facts" in a criminal trial are uncontested.
Especially when we're talking about witness testimony, the jury needs to see the witness to determine whether they believe them.
> How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent?
Because it's part of the facts of the case (imagine for instance if you couldn't mention the color and make of a car that hit you)?
Not to mention how would you hide the race and sex of a defendant from the jury? Not let the defendant into the courtroom? Move everything to written testimony?
Well, you're going to have to sanitize all the testimony to obscure the specifics of race, gender, location, and other social context. In many cases all you'll end up with are an allegation and a denial, as you'll have no way to evaluate the demeanor of the various parties to the case. The fact that we are subject to bias doesn't mean that jettisoning our entire social technology (about how to read people and so on) is automatically going to lead to improved results.
I see the value of this idea but I also see a very dark side.
> Neither their sex, nor race, nor anything is disclose.
Who decides what is contained by 'anything'? That process will become corrupt and only serve power. I don't think justice will be served by withholding information.
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.
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.
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!
I appreciate your saying so. If I may be so bold, I believe I have a better frame for interpreting IQ results when it comes to population studies. IQ tests were initially created to assess pupils' readiness to succeed in the French school system. It was only when transplanted to America that they were used to 'verify' that populations were fundamentally less intelligent.
Such fundamental assessments have been undermined time and again by the fact that population's scores will go up or down with their relative socio economic and cultural success.
If we were to use IQ tests in the spirit in which they were originally created, they could be used to assess whether or not there's a problem that needs to be addressed by society. So when we see a particular population underperforming in IQ tests, we should A) attempt to assess whether or not there is bias in the test itself, and B) understand that we may have discovered a population that is disadvantaged in some way.
I don't have a plan of action. If my argument is sound and we accept it then the implications for what that would mean for public policy and society are not exactly nice or easy to think about.
I do know that we predicate school funding and a lot of other education/social policies on "bridging the achievement gap" and maybe this should be re-examined.
The fallacy in your comment is that you assume the degraded state to be inherent. I'm Irish myself and while Ireland became independent of its colonial oppressor and is a fairly prosperous nation today, people used to make the same assumptions about racial degradation and so on that you do about black people.
Your argument proceeds like this: Group X is badly off, because group X is inferior, therefore it's group X's own fault. Well, if you knew a group was at an enormous starting disadvantage in an iterated economic competition, naturally you would expect its position to decline over time. But if you were to provide group X with resources to mitigate its disadvantage, why would you not expect it to revert to the mean? On the other hand, give me a license to systematically oppress any group - people in your family tree, for example - and after a few decades I'll be able to make them underperform significantly, especially if operating the machinery of oppression allows me to collect economic rents.
There is so much wrong with the taking of this view. Instead of looking at the experience of growing up black, the horribly unlevel playing field, the reverberating echos of slavery and broken families. A resonance maintained by the complete disregard of the dominant system.
You point to a metric associated with intelligence only to a standard deviation at best, and say it's the reason? I think your reasoning is a lazy kind of cowardice. You want there to be a simple explanation because you want to believe it's not possible to elevate african americans and therefore you don't have to face the enormous effort that will be required to do so.
Finally, the Jews, Italians, Irish and Chinese were never slaves in america. They lived through terrible poverty as immigrants, but they were never slaves.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to place a large emphasis on the IQ distribution when trying to explain population trends. It's not laziness or cowardice in the slightest in the same way placing a large emphasis on BMI distribution is legitimate when trying to explain the prevalence of heart disease and other lifestyle diseases among populations.
Perhaps, if one asserts IQ is some quantity defined and birth, and not amenable to influence through education, diet, living conditions etc.
Then one might be justified in implying that black people are worse off because they are fundamentally, genetically limited.
But that assertion re: IQ is not at all well founded. And this is setting aside how well IQ even captures "intelligence". Let me just point out that your statement "Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence" means absolutely nothing, as in the statement itself is non-sensical. Of course "intelligence" is anti-correlated with "anti-intelligence". You go back and forth between "intelligence" and IQ as if they're interchangeable meanings.
Even if I allow you that assertion re: IQ, and join with you in believing that blacks are fundamentally, genetically limited, then that would put them in the same camp as people with down syndrome.
From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?
Why are you not looking at these circumstances and weeping for the way in which this genetically disadvantaged branch of humanity has been treated?
> From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?
He was making much the same point, at least before the post was flagged... the point being that we must take these perhaps unpleasant facts into account when making social policy, rather than maintaining elaborate fictions that force us to disregard reality in favour of expediency.
And as far as I'm aware, we don't place people with Down syndrome into ghettoes, nor do we harbour illusions that with the right environment they will all be future neurosurgeons...
My point is that offering up IQ as an explanatory variable which alleviates any obligation to help another group is cowardice. Even accepting that IQ difference is an irrevocable consequence of genetics (which I don't), the next step is not "so it's their fault and we should not help them because they don't help themselves".
Which is the point of the DS analogy. It was an appeal to what I consider fundamental humanity. Perhaps it was a waste of time as an argument. Perhaps I should have just stuck to pointing out how fundamentally flawed the idea is; of formulating social policy on a metric as flexible as IQ.
> 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).
You're comparing Jews, et al, to a specific group of Americans, African Americans.
While it may be true that the average IQ of African Americans is low, that is not inherent to their race, and more likely a massive by product of 400 years of American slavery, and then the continuation of oppression of Jim Crow laws.
"Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average)."
As someone with an interest in this (both as an African and someone who measures freakishly high on IQ tests way beyond my actual abilities, joined MENSA on a lark), I’ve had this argument over and over again. Most of this goes back to the IQ statistics cited in “The Bell Curve” as applies to Africans. The “Bell Curve” was a Storefront tract dressed in respectable clothing (sadly, every 20 years it has a successor, the most recent is Nicholas Wade’s “A troublesome Inheritance". The statistic in question was quoted as an average IQ of 75 for Black Africans. If you read the citations, it comes from a study quoted by Richard Lynn (infamous racist, google ‘Mankind Quaterly’). It is based on a study done in South Africa in 1927 by the Boer Govt (it actually concluded that Bantu Africans has an IQ of 70 and was one of the intellectual foundations for Apartheid). I leave it as an exercise for people to figure out why that study might have been slightly biased.
Keep in mind that an IQ of 80 is borderline retarded. So to believe this you have to believe that almost every black person you run into is either borderline retarded or just above that.
Now, you’ve been down voted into the grey, which I think is good, but just in case people think you’re being down voted for being ‘politically incorrect’ rather than for being a racist, here are some recommended readings
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do - Claude M Steele
The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America - Steven Fraser (Editor)
The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould
The “people are where they are because of some innate fault” is a very attractive argument that has been used time and time again (I know I used it growing up upper middle class in a country with a lot of poor people. If only those people were hard workers like me and pulled themselves by their bootstraps). It is used time and time again against African Americans, and it is ironic to see it argued here in an article that is one of 2 (with the linked ’The Case for Reparations’) that clearly lays out the case as to why African Americans are disadvantaged in the U.S.
There are None so Blind as those who refuse to see.
I think IQ tests can sometimes measure the limits of someone's ability to learn. But in the case of a population of people with lower than average access to quality education, an IQ test probably only measures how little they have been taught.
Reminds me of the idea that people with Uner Tan Syndrome were "devolved humans." Turns out that the main reason they couldn't walk normally was that they lacked access to proper physical therapy.
Anyway, if you watch the whole doc you can catch several scientists breathlessly describe how devolved these people are. And then at the end, $30 of equipment fixed the situation and "re-evolved" them.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadI 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?
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.
I won't venture to guess whether there are regional differences as well...
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.
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?
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.
Legal support is a finite resource. There are only so many lawyers (thank god!) and of those that exist, some lawyers are better than others. It's simply not possible to give everyone the exact same quality of representation, short of ensuring that everyone has zero.
This is just one example of what the price system does in the market. The whole point is that resources are scarce, and the means of indicating how important a resource is for some purpose, is by voting with your money. And it's turtles all the way down: what gives you that money to indicate the importance of the scarce resource, is that you're providing some scarce resource to other people, who are paying you, and they are doing the same, and so on...
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.
That's HUGE.
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?
~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/update...
It would be a mischaracterization to imply one is extremely low, while the other is much higher. They are both, comparably, very low.
Particularly when you take variance and margin of error into account.
With such a tight range, I would wager one could only definitely claim they were probably approximately within a percent or two at best.
Crime is primarily a function of opportunity in environments prone to crime. In environments not prone to crime it is primarily a function of motivated offenders, and most opportunities are not taken advantage of.
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.
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.
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... 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.
"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.
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.
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.
I don't know if it's realistic.
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.
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".
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.
Especially when we're talking about witness testimony, the jury needs to see the witness to determine whether they believe them.
Because it's part of the facts of the case (imagine for instance if you couldn't mention the color and make of a car that hit you)?
Not to mention how would you hide the race and sex of a defendant from the jury? Not let the defendant into the courtroom? Move everything to written testimony?
> Neither their sex, nor race, nor anything is disclose.
Who decides what is contained by 'anything'? That process will become corrupt and only serve power. I don't think justice will be served by withholding information.
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.
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.
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!
Such fundamental assessments have been undermined time and again by the fact that population's scores will go up or down with their relative socio economic and cultural success.
If we were to use IQ tests in the spirit in which they were originally created, they could be used to assess whether or not there's a problem that needs to be addressed by society. So when we see a particular population underperforming in IQ tests, we should A) attempt to assess whether or not there is bias in the test itself, and B) understand that we may have discovered a population that is disadvantaged in some way.
If IQ is that important, why use an unreliable, socially constructed grouping instead of measuring it directly?
I do know that we predicate school funding and a lot of other education/social policies on "bridging the achievement gap" and maybe this should be re-examined.
Your argument proceeds like this: Group X is badly off, because group X is inferior, therefore it's group X's own fault. Well, if you knew a group was at an enormous starting disadvantage in an iterated economic competition, naturally you would expect its position to decline over time. But if you were to provide group X with resources to mitigate its disadvantage, why would you not expect it to revert to the mean? On the other hand, give me a license to systematically oppress any group - people in your family tree, for example - and after a few decades I'll be able to make them underperform significantly, especially if operating the machinery of oppression allows me to collect economic rents.
It's a good argument and so it weakens the likelihood of my argument but it doesn't actually refute or argue directly against my points.
You point to a metric associated with intelligence only to a standard deviation at best, and say it's the reason? I think your reasoning is a lazy kind of cowardice. You want there to be a simple explanation because you want to believe it's not possible to elevate african americans and therefore you don't have to face the enormous effort that will be required to do so.
Finally, the Jews, Italians, Irish and Chinese were never slaves in america. They lived through terrible poverty as immigrants, but they were never slaves.
Then one might be justified in implying that black people are worse off because they are fundamentally, genetically limited.
But that assertion re: IQ is not at all well founded. And this is setting aside how well IQ even captures "intelligence". Let me just point out that your statement "Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence" means absolutely nothing, as in the statement itself is non-sensical. Of course "intelligence" is anti-correlated with "anti-intelligence". You go back and forth between "intelligence" and IQ as if they're interchangeable meanings.
Even if I allow you that assertion re: IQ, and join with you in believing that blacks are fundamentally, genetically limited, then that would put them in the same camp as people with down syndrome.
From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?
Why are you not looking at these circumstances and weeping for the way in which this genetically disadvantaged branch of humanity has been treated?
He was making much the same point, at least before the post was flagged... the point being that we must take these perhaps unpleasant facts into account when making social policy, rather than maintaining elaborate fictions that force us to disregard reality in favour of expediency.
And as far as I'm aware, we don't place people with Down syndrome into ghettoes, nor do we harbour illusions that with the right environment they will all be future neurosurgeons...
Which is the point of the DS analogy. It was an appeal to what I consider fundamental humanity. Perhaps it was a waste of time as an argument. Perhaps I should have just stuck to pointing out how fundamentally flawed the idea is; of formulating social policy on a metric as flexible as IQ.
You may want to spend some time investigating the human rights abuses that people with Down's Syndome (and other learning disabilities) endure.
> Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average).
You're comparing Jews, et al, to a specific group of Americans, African Americans.
While it may be true that the average IQ of African Americans is low, that is not inherent to their race, and more likely a massive by product of 400 years of American slavery, and then the continuation of oppression of Jim Crow laws.
"Why is that? Because African Americans have an average IQ of 85 and only 11-16% have an IQ > 100 (the national average)."
As someone with an interest in this (both as an African and someone who measures freakishly high on IQ tests way beyond my actual abilities, joined MENSA on a lark), I’ve had this argument over and over again. Most of this goes back to the IQ statistics cited in “The Bell Curve” as applies to Africans. The “Bell Curve” was a Storefront tract dressed in respectable clothing (sadly, every 20 years it has a successor, the most recent is Nicholas Wade’s “A troublesome Inheritance". The statistic in question was quoted as an average IQ of 75 for Black Africans. If you read the citations, it comes from a study quoted by Richard Lynn (infamous racist, google ‘Mankind Quaterly’). It is based on a study done in South Africa in 1927 by the Boer Govt (it actually concluded that Bantu Africans has an IQ of 70 and was one of the intellectual foundations for Apartheid). I leave it as an exercise for people to figure out why that study might have been slightly biased.
Keep in mind that an IQ of 80 is borderline retarded. So to believe this you have to believe that almost every black person you run into is either borderline retarded or just above that.
Now, you’ve been down voted into the grey, which I think is good, but just in case people think you’re being down voted for being ‘politically incorrect’ rather than for being a racist, here are some recommended readings
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do - Claude M Steele
The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America - Steven Fraser (Editor)
The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould
The “people are where they are because of some innate fault” is a very attractive argument that has been used time and time again (I know I used it growing up upper middle class in a country with a lot of poor people. If only those people were hard workers like me and pulled themselves by their bootstraps). It is used time and time again against African Americans, and it is ironic to see it argued here in an article that is one of 2 (with the linked ’The Case for Reparations’) that clearly lays out the case as to why African Americans are disadvantaged in the U.S.
There are None so Blind as those who refuse to see.
I think IQ tests can sometimes measure the limits of someone's ability to learn. But in the case of a population of people with lower than average access to quality education, an IQ test probably only measures how little they have been taught.
Reminds me of the idea that people with Uner Tan Syndrome were "devolved humans." Turns out that the main reason they couldn't walk normally was that they lacked access to proper physical therapy.
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/walking-fours-hum...
Here's some clips from an old Nova episode on the subject:
"If they were born anywhere else they would walk normally." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=47m50s
"Astonishingly, no one had thought to provide them with a $30 walking frame." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=49m40s
"frustration with the situation often spills into anger." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=52m24s
At the end, they erected some parallel bars for the family and everyone learned to walk just fine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=56m35s
Anyway, if you watch the whole doc you can catch several scientists breathlessly describe how devolved these people are. And then at the end, $30 of equipment fixed the situation and "re-evolved" them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[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?
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...
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/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/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.
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-...