What about the fact that Black men were disproportionately executed for rape, so much so that they stopped making the death penalty an option for rape cases? Is that institutionalized racism or just bad luck?
I was under the impression that it was actually poor men who were executed disproportionately for rape. And while we're tossing stats around, how about the general amount of crime committed by said Black men? It is higher per capita, is it not? Is that due to racism too?
> how about the general amount of crime committed by said Black men? It is higher per capita, is it not?
It depends on what numbers you look at. In terms of raw imprisonment numbers the plurality of prisoners are serving time for drug and drug-related crimes and those prisoners are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. However when you look at SAMHSA surveys and other research whites and blacks use & sell drugs at about the same rates.
Looking at violent crime on the other hand (murder in particular) blacks to appear to commit those crimes at higher rates, but in terms of raw numbers, those results are minuscule compared to the number of folks imprisoned every year (something like hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand per year IIRC).
I'm doing this from memory so I can't point you to the exact sources of this information (I'm one of the several thousand Massachusetts residents who lost power last weekend and I'm writing this via smartphone) but it comes from SAMHSA and BJS data (and to a lesser extent UCR although that's not quite as useful for these discussions). If you want citations I can provide them after power is restores on Saturday or Sunday.
You are incorrect, it is not poor men. "Of the 455 men executed for rape in the United States between 1930 and 1967, 90 percent were African American." Although I'm sure the vast majority of those men were poor.
re: stats please provide some if you'd like some in return because you've made a huge generalization and I'd say that it's your bias speaking (not racism). In response to your question, if it is true that black men commit more crimes I'd say that the situation of blacks in america is directly tied racism, slavery and the like so yes, it is due to racism too.
You're going to have to do better than citing stats that are 44 years old. All this proves is that 44 years ago, there was a problem, which is not exactly a point of contention among most sentient beings at this point.
"you've made a huge generalization and I'd say that it's your bias speaking (not racism)."
Seriously? These are not obscure statistics I'm talking about here. Here, check this one out:
"As of 2005, statistics show that offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites."
"These specific facts about the Bell shooting are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of data points that reveal a hard truth: any given violent crime in New York is 13 times more likely to have a black than a white perpetrator. While most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection, the incidence of criminal activity among young black males is off the charts."
And that was with five minutes of Googling. I'm not making some wild, off the wall assertion here. This is a well known and exhaustively documented fact.
"I'd say that the situation of blacks in america is directly tied racism, slavery and the like so yes, it is due to racism too."
I figured you would. Slavery ended 150 years ago, so if you want to assert that some 7 generations later it's still having effects, I welcome you to provide data to that effect. This, right here, is the problem in a nutshell - the minute these facts are mentioned, the hue and cry of racism and slavery goes up, and all further thought on the matter stops. The causes of this situation are complex, and reducing them to one dimensional truisms does no one any favors.
First of all, I was talking about the death penalty in rape cases, the statistics are old because it's an old problem, "The 1977 Coker v. Georgia decision barred the death penalty for rape, and, by implication, for any offense other than murder." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite... So your point is moot.
As for your wiki cite, first of all you're talking about murder when your first comment was regarding the total number of black people incarcerated. Which would you like to discuss? You pulled that quote (as of 2005) off of a graphic, had you read the text to the left you would have seen this: "As of 2008, statistics report that of 16,277 murders, 10,568 were committed by males, 1,176 were by female, and 4,533 were committed in which the offenders sex was unknown. Likewise, 5,334 murders were committed by white offenders, 5,943 were committed by black or black and Hispanic offenders, 273 were committed by offenders of other races, and 4,727 murders were committed by offenders whose race is not known. [12]" So white people murder about the same as black people. There are less black people in the united states, what do you think the reason behind this is? You think black people just have more bad apples in their bunch than whites? Are blacks just more prone to be criminals? Or is it based on the conditions of their community? How did their community get that way? Was it their own doing or did it have anything to do with Jim Crow laws, were those laws racist?
Your other statistic is NY specific therefore I will not address it because I am talking about a systematic problem, not NYC which is a major metro area and therefore likely to have more crime.
"Slavery ended 150 years ago" But how long ago was it that Jim Crow was in effect? How long did it take for Jim Crow to be completely abolished? There are still signs up that say whites only because they haven't been removed--I've seen some with my own two eyes.
It's unfortunate that you cannot see the connection between the current state of the black community and the trans-atlantic slave trade, hundreds of years of enslavement followed by legal racial segregation that just ended 40 years ago--I know plenty of people who went to segregated high schools.
"The causes of this situation are complex, and reducing them to one dimensional truisms does no one any favors." I don't believe I ever said it was due to one thing. Racism in itself is highly complex and in no way one dimensional.
I really have no interest in continuing this debate with you. I'll agree to disagree.
Rape used to be a capital offense in the USSR and no black had been executed for that. However they stopped making the death penalty an option anyways. The reason being that it turned most rapes into rape+murder.
