Hatefacts

southsiderosie

Permabear wrote: »

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I noted in my post that blacks do commit more crimes. But as I said, most of that criminal activity is levied at other blacks - itself in part a legacy of high levels of residential segregation in the US.

To be quite honest, I find the whole 'avoid black people' thing to be both lazy and dehumanizing. It teaches kids that all members of a group are bad, and the only people that they can trust are people who are like them. It also contributes to the seething anger that many professional blacks feel when, despite their fancy degrees and good jobs, they still can't get a taxi at night, despite the fact that they are standing in front of an office building in a suit. The flip side of that is when middle and upper-class blacks hear 'we you aren't like other black people' - as if that is some kind of complement.

Maybe my experience is unusual because I grew up in a mixed-race household, in an integrated neighborhood, and I have lived in cities which have large black middile and upper-class neighborhoods. This isn't actually unusual; not every black neighborhood is like Beirut. But the very idea seems to cause cognitive dissonance for a lot of people whose views of blacks were shaped by the 10 o'clock news and the warnings of ill-informed and 'mildly racist' folks like the author in question.

Permabear

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LostinKildare

Cavehill Red wrote: »

Yes, it's based primarily on the largely unsupported argument that black children will be unfairly treated by law enforcement.

This article nicely summarises (with reference to studies by Human Rights Watch, the American Bar Association, etc., as well as testimony in US Congressional hearings) how blacks are treated unfairly at every stage of the US justice system.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/fourteen-examples-of-raci_b_658947.html


A couple of facts from this link:

* Although whites and blacks engage in drug offenses (possession and sales) at roughly the same rate, blacks account for 37% of the drug arrests (though they are only 13% of the total pop, and only 14% of monthly drug users). Blacks are arrested for drugs offences at rates 2-11 times higher than whites.

* Police are much much more likely to stop and frisk a black person than a white person. Only about 10% of stops resulted in arrests. Most people stopped are youths, males, and black. Check out the stop and frisk stats for the NYPD here:
http://www.nyclu.org/node/1598
89% of those stopped were people of color (55% black, 30% Latino). The number of blacks stopped represents 21% of the city's population, whereas the number of whites stopped represents just 2% of the pop.
In these stops, police used force 50% more often on blacks than on whites.
Here's the kicker: "Cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspects," and more stops of whites result in arrests.
So if stops of whites are more likely to produce arrests, why do they so disproportionately stop blacks? Note that 15% of the police officers who filed the majority of the stop/frisk reports never stopped any whites at all.

When you say

Cavehill Red wrote: »

The reason why my parents didn't need to warn me about being treated unfairly by the RUC or British Army is because I didn't do anything illegal to attract their attention in the first place. Similar applies here.

that's incorrect -- it's not similar. You do not have to be doing anything illegal to attract the attention of the police in the US -- 90% of the stops by the NYPD result in no arrest (which is surprising, since stopping an innocent person and using force on them may cause them to commit an arrestable offence!). To attract police attention, you need only be "suspicious," and apparently NY cops are many times more suspicious of blacks than whites, even though whites are more likely to have committed a crime.

This is largely incorrect, too:

Cavehill Red wrote: »

By contrast, the statistical facts of black on white criminality are rather hard to argue away with semantics or suggestions of systemic racism. People are tried in courts of law in the US in front of their peers, many of whom will also be black. It may well be that they are profiled in advance of their arrest, or disproportionately sentenced afterwards because of the colour of their skin. But what is certain is that they were guilty of the offences.

With reference to the HP link above, only 3-5% of criminal cases go to trial, the rest are plea bargained with the promise of a much shorter sentence if you don't exercise your right to a trial. In a country where 80% of criminal defendants are assigned hugely overworked and sometimes very poor public defenders, most people take the deal, even when they are innocent (this according to the American Bar Association, "not a radical bunch").

For those that do go to trial, according to studies cited by the Equal Justice Initiative, blacks are often illegally excluded from criminal jury service.

Then, black drug offenders are 20% more likely to be sentenced to jail than white drug offenders;
they are 21% more likely to receive mandatory sentences; and
they receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crime.

So, "African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses."

Hatefacts.

southsiderosie

Permabear wrote: »

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Having been a female student at several politically correct East Coast universities, I must have missed that at orientation. But nice whataboutary there.

Permabear wrote: »

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That they are converging to the general norm of suspicion of all black people, regardless of whether that makes sense or not given the situation.

Permabear wrote: »

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Again, nice whataboutary here. Someone calling me an Oreo has little to no effect on the way I will be treated by police, my peers at work, or the criminal justice system.

Permabear wrote: »

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Yes, and black people tell their kids to avoid those areas as well BECAUSE THEY ARE DANGEROUS, not because they are full of black people. But that is not what the author said.

Nodin

Permabear wrote: »

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Yet wheres the added caveat referring to poverty etc? Instead it focuses on skin colour.

Chuck Stone

Cavehill Red wrote: »

It's evident you cannot understand simple statistics.

There are no 'simple statistics' when it comes to issues of race and crime. We're not counting the amount of red cars that go through a junction here.

Firstly your headline figure relates to all crime, including threats. Actual completed crime stats on the same page show blacks completed 20% of all crime against whites, despite being only 12.9% of the population.

What exactly is 'crime against whites'? Why is 'black' the identifier of the perpetrator and not socio-economic status? Are mixed race people black? These are some of the problems with using these woolly terms.

Drilling down further, it gets more out of kilter. Blacks are responsible for 16.4% of all rapes of whites, while whites are responsible for - zero* - percentage of rapes of blacks.

Here's another (I'm presuming black person's) view of these 'simple statistics'

Rape/sexual assault (a), Race of victim:

White only 117,640: perceived race of offender: 74.9% white, 16.4%* black
Black only 46,580: perceived race of offender: 0.0%* white, 74.8%* black
The star means “Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases.”

So if you take 16.4% of the 117,640 white women raped in 2008 that gives you 19,286 white women raped by black men! That means that even if as many as ten white men raped black women that year, the highest number allowed by the table, blacks rape white women 1,927 (yes 1,927) times more than whites rape black women.

So our commenters seem to be pretty much right.

Well, no:

Misreading #1: The numbers are not about “rape” but “rape and sexual assault (a)”. Sexual assault means any kind of unwanted sexual touching, like groping or kissing. And the “(a)” means “Includes verbal threats of rape and threats of sexual assault”. So it is way more than just rape. Rape is probably just a small part of it.

Misreading #2: Notice that the star meaning “ten or fewer” applies not just to white-on-black “rape and sexual assault (a)” but to black-on-white cases too! So if we claim that ten or fewer black women were raped by white men then we should also say that ten or fewer white women were raped by black men!

Misreading #3: The star means “Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases”, the key word here being “sample”. They did not ask everyone in the country but a sample of 77,852 people, about one in 4,000. So there could have been as many as 40,000 black women raped by white men that year!

Misreading #4: The reason for the star is because ten or fewer sample cases are way too few to draw any firm statistical conclusions. Mere chance could throw the numbers way off.

As it turns out, of the 77,852 people surveyed, only 56 people reported “rape and sexual assault (a)”. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) only 7.5% of sexual assaults are rapes and of those only 6.7% are between whites and blacks. So out of the 56 sample cases, maybe only 4 were rape and of those probably none were interracial.

So this is a case of white people seeing what they want to see, of misreading facts to fit racist stereotypes.

Source

johnnyskeleton

SamHarris wrote: »

Either it is wrong in all cases, or it is wrong in none. This picking and choosing when people can make judgements on big groups, especially without any statistics what so ever is par for course throughout certain media and less formal discussions as long as that group meets certain, hidden, criteria. See the reaction to the Traveler thread for another example of this in action.

I think there are circumstances where it is acceptable and circumstances where it is not. In America, any mention of race good or bad is a hot topic, and negative comment on race is utterly verboten.

However, mild to moderate racial comment among Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales is generally accepted. Typically, it follows success or failure in sporting events, so for the next year everyone can slag the leek munchers and there's nothing they can do about it. Apart from anything else, the British and Irish are the first to insult themselves and for all the anti-English sentiment, when in another continent the Irish and British tend to huddle together.

I suppose the general rule is keep going until someone tells you to stop, then stop. I would hate to see us go the way of the Yanks where even describing someone as being of a different race can be a social faux pas.

I can't imagine that comments such as "father from fermannagh, mother from figi, neither place known for it's hurling" could be made on us television, and that leads to a form of repressed racism that is more serious.

RDM_83 again

Chuck Stone wrote: »

There are no 'simple statistics' when it comes to issues of race and crime. We're not counting the amount of red cars that go through a junction here.



What exactly is 'crime against whites'? Why is 'black' the identifier of the perpetrator and not socio-economic status? Are mixed race people black? These are some of the problems with using these woolly terms.



Here's another (I'm presuming black person's) view of these 'simple statistics'

To be honest though that blog post was interesting and shows how the stats with this source of study should be examined closely, the data still supports the extrapulation (though we can't be sure of the confidence interval).
What is most interesting about that blog and some of the replies on here is nobodies pointed that it makes sense for the rate of black M to White F sexual assualt to be 3 times higher as most sex crimes are commited by somebody known to the victim and we can make a guess at interracial relationships from the marriage rates. However the disjunct between these relationship rates probably doesn't fit the bloggers agenda (though it could be argued that white men just find black woman less attractive).

QUOTE=LostinKildare;78048182]

* Although whites and blacks engage in drug offenses (possession and sales) at roughly the same rate, blacks account for 37% of the drug arrests (though they are only 13% of the total pop, and only 14% of monthly drug users). Blacks are arrested for drugs offences at rates 2-11 times higher than whites.

* Police are much much more likely to stop and frisk a black person than a white person. Only about 10% of stops resulted in arrests. Most people stopped are youths, males, and black. Check out the stop and frisk stats for the NYPD here:
http://www.nyclu.org/node/1598
89% of those stopped were people of color (55% black, 30% Latino). The number of blacks stopped represents 21% of the city's population, whereas the number of whites stopped represents just 2% of the pop.
In these stops, police used force 50% more often on blacks than on whites.
Here's the kicker: "Cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspects," and more stops of whites result in arrests.
So if stops of whites are more likely to produce arrests, why do they so disproportionately stop blacks? Note that 15% of the police officers who filed the majority of the stop/frisk reports never stopped any whites at all.

When you say



that's incorrect -- it's not similar. You do not have to be doing anything illegal to attract the attention of the police in the US -- 90% of the stops by the NYPD result in no arrest (which is surprising, since stopping an innocent person and using force on them may cause them to commit an arrestable offence!). To attract police attention, you need only be "suspicious," and apparently NY cops are many times more suspicious of blacks than whites, even though whites are more likely to have committed a crime.


So, "African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses."

Hatefacts.[/quote]

Hmmmm a lot of this is fairly meaningless unless we know the amount and type of drugs they were carrying, there's a fairly big difference between holding a dimebag of weed and a bag of coke, also holding a small amount of drugs in a dealing hotspot (watched to much of the Wire :rolleyes: ) is probably treated differently.

"Cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspects," and more stops of whites result in arrests.
So if stops of whites are more likely to produce arrests, why do they so disproportionately stop blacks?"

Now I'm not saying these figures aren't an indication of a biased and racist police force (it is!) , BUT since the proportion of whites stopped is so low they must be exibiting some really suspicious behaviour or be known to the officer or something to be stopped, it could be argued that the rate of finds/convictions should be even higher rather than just 50% as only the most suspicious 2% of the (white) population is being targetted

LostinKildare

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

I think there are circumstances where it is acceptable and circumstances where it is not. In America, any mention of race good or bad is a hot topic, and negative comment on race is utterly verboten.

However, mild to moderate racial comment among Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales is generally accepted. Typically, it follows success or failure in sporting events, so for the next year everyone can slag the leek munchers and there's nothing they can do about it. Apart from anything else, the British and Irish are the first to insult themselves and for all the anti-English sentiment, when in another continent the Irish and British tend to huddle together.

I suppose the general rule is keep going until someone tells you to stop, then stop. I would hate to see us go the way of the Yanks where even describing someone as being of a different race can be a social faux pas.

I can't imagine that comments such as "father from fermannagh, mother from figi, neither place known for it's hurling" could be made on us television, and that leads to a form of repressed racism that is more serious.

I completely disagree!

Americans talk about race incessantly. And a lot of it is quite a lot edgier than your example of intra-national slagging (e.g., calling Welsh players "leek munchers"). If you cannot imagine that US television would permit comments identifying someone's place of origin and slighting the sporting skills of that region, then I guess that you aren't very familiar with US television (and radio and print media).

Americans are actually much freer than the Irish or British to air ugly racist opinions because "hate speech" is not an offence in the US (only obscenity, defamation, incitement to riot -- where violence is imminent, and fighting words).

In Ireland, in contrast, the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989 outlaws words or behaviours which are "threatening, abusive or insulting and are intended or, having regard to all the circumstances, are likely to stir up hatred" against "a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their race, colour, nationality, religion, ethnic or national origins, membership of the travelling community or sexual orientation." Recently the mayor of Naas was reported to gardai for his comments about African constituents, which were certainly insulting, at the least.

Similarly, UK laws prohibit speech that is hateful, threatening, abusive, or insulting and which targets a person on account of skin colour, race, disability, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation. The penalties for hate speech include fines, imprisonment, or both.

In the US, the thinking is that racist speech should be lawful for the reason you gave above: that forcing it underground makes it more dangerous. Instead of prosecuting hate speech -- as the UK or Ireland would do -- they rely on the force of public opinion to keep it in check.

Which is what happened in this case. For years Derbyshire has been writing articles with ugly little nuggets of racism, homophobia, and misogyny (he thinks women shouldn't be allowed to vote, and that only girls aged 15-20 are really sexually attractive). It's just now that he's written something so over the top that it's gotten a lot of attention, the public is repulsed, and the National Review cut him loose because they recognised that this hurts its brand (dog-whistle, plausible-deniability racism okay; blatant racism not okay).

Nodin

RDM_83 again wrote: »

"Cops found guns, drugs, or stolen property on whites about twice as often as they did on black suspects," and more stops of whites result in arrests.
So if stops of whites are more likely to produce arrests, why do they so disproportionately stop blacks?"

One word. Begins with R. Or if you prefer two words - R & P.

Permabear

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RDM_83 again

Nodin wrote: »

One word. Begins with R. Or if you prefer two words - R & P.

I was making the point that though the police are acting in a racist manner the figures for a higher arrest rate among stopped whites don't indicate a higher rate of criminality among whites in fact since its such a restricted group of whites being stopped e.g the most obviously criminal (they probably spot them due to their sloping foreheads :P ).

LostinKildare

RandolphEsq wrote: »

He is settled enough in the U.S. to be a product of their unjust society which clearly favours white people. The very foundations of their country were flawed; black people were brought over as slaves, this superiority mentality by white people over black people is still strong over there.

He's not a product of the racist US society, he's a product of the racist British society.

He didn't settle in the US until he was 40 years old.
http://johnderbyshire.com/FamilyHistoryJD/People/Self/page.html

The US is to blame for enough **** in this world; we're not taking the blame for every racist foreigner who comes to live in the US.

Nodin

RDM_83 again wrote: »

I was making the point that though the police are acting in a racist manner the figures for a higher arrest rate among stopped whites don't indicate a higher rate of criminality among whites in fact since its such a restricted group of whites being stopped e.g the most obviously criminal (they probably spot them due to their sloping foreheads :P ).

Soz. Read it wrong.

<---Big eejit etc

Victor

Is 'black' a proxy word for 'poor'?

Worldwide, justice systems focus on poor people's crimes, not rich people's crimes.

Cavehill Red

Victor wrote: »

Is 'black' a proxy word for 'poor'?

Worldwide, justice systems focus on poor people's crimes, not rich people's crimes.

I'd be interested to see correlated crime figures for primarily black residency areas of America in comparison with, for example, Cambodia or Malaysia. I wonder what that might say about poverty and crime.

Of course, one might argue that comparing different nations is like comparing apples and oranges. However, that raises the spectre of a cultural, if not exactly racial, component to criminality.

Equally, one might call into question the veracity of SE Asian crime figures. Then again, some are calling the veracity of US crime figures into question anyway.

Even if it's argued that it is relative poverty which causes crime - an argument I am intensely unsympathetic towards, having come from a poor background where little criminality apart from that deemed terrorism occurred, and having travelled to many very poor places where criminality was negligible (rural China, for one), and other relatively well-off places where crime was significant (South Africa, much of London, Washington DC) - then, for America one would have to examine closely the crime rates of comparably poor black and white regions to see if that correlated with or against a racial component. But on anecdotal evidence, the Ozarks don't have drive-bys. Just saying.

Dannyboy83

southsiderosie wrote: »

Just a point of clarification - the magazine he was fired from, National Review, is itself a conservative publication, and has gotten some heat in the past for what were considered racially insensitive comments. So given that Derbyshire was fired by a conservative publication - and considering the state of American conservatism in 2012 - I think that says something about how far beyond the pale his comments were.

I thought this would have to be proof-read and reviewed by the editor prior to publication?

Dannyboy83

southsiderosie wrote: »

To be quite honest, I find the whole 'avoid black people' thing to be both lazy and dehumanizing. It teaches kids that all members of a group are bad, and the only people that they can trust are people who are like them. It also contributes to the seething anger that many professional blacks feel when, despite their fancy degrees and good jobs, they still can't get a taxi at night, despite the fact that they are standing in front of an office building in a suit. The flip side of that is when middle and upper-class blacks hear 'we you aren't like other black people' - as if that is some kind of complement.

Maybe my experience is unusual because I grew up in a mixed-race household, in an integrated neighborhood, and I have lived in cities which have large black middile and upper-class neighborhoods. This isn't actually unusual; not every black neighborhood is like Beirut. But the very idea seems to cause cognitive dissonance for a lot of people whose views of blacks were shaped by the 10 o'clock news and the warnings of ill-informed and 'mildly racist' folks like the author in question.

Granted it's impossible and meaningless to make a statement about 40 million+ people (the population of Spain) & I find myself agreeing with you strongly, but I have to admit; I am a bit of a hypocrite...if you substitute the word 'traveller' for 'black' *, I would be the the first to admit I would unquestionably warn children to steer clear of them.

*-no offence intended to any black american who may be reading - I'm making an analogy, not a comparison.

Cavehill Red

Dannyboy83 wrote: »

.if you substitute the word 'traveller' for 'black' *, I would be the the first to admit I would unquestionably warn children to steer clear of them.

*-no offence intended to any black american who may be reading - I'm making an analogy, not a comparison.

But offence to travellers intended? Well, I admire your honesty. It's a commodity in ever-decreasing supply in this world. Your prejudice is not pleasant, but you admit your hypocrisy, and I understand it in the same way I understand the original article I referenced in the OP.

It's a pity that the discussion has become so focused on one small aspect of what I hoped to open up to debate, but perhaps given the radioactive nature of race-related issues, and the strong compulsion to orthodoxy in many quarters, that was inevitable.

What I'd really hoped for was a discussion on the wider concept of hatefacts, and whether they exist, and if so, whether there are localised Irish ones. Because the idea underpinning the concept of hatefacts is a kind of hypocrisy too, one that a society rather than an individual engages in.

It seems to me that if hatefacts exist, they are located in the factuality residing within iconoclastic thinking. Hence in Ireland today, we would have to look at areas which are actually contradictory to the way Ireland thought in the past. For example, the role and existence of the Catholic Church was for a long time widely seen as a good and valued, indeed essential, thing. Now it's pretty much the opposite.

So perhaps a current Irish hatefact would be that the Catholic Church is still a valuable component of Irish life doing good work. Of course, to be a hatefact, that statement would need to be factual. As an atheist, I think it largely is. Another possible one I'm more uncomfortable with is the idea that Fianna Fail might likewise be considered. Is Martin's FF doing a valuable job in opposition? Maybe so, but it upsets my orthodoxical thinking to consider that possibility.

Considering these examples, and perhaps those offered in the original Taki's articles, I wonder is it inevitable that hatefacts must be essentially conservative or regressive in their politics? If they exist, are they the product of either a conservative backlash to progression, or are they the locus of the overspill, where the pendulum has swung too far? Or are there progressive hatefacts too?

Anyway, this was the sort of area I hoped the discussion would originally go. I'm not trying to reboot the discussion, but I think race issues get discussed to death sometimes and this concept of hatefacts seemed like a more intriguing and novel area of inquiry.

RichieC

This is the first forum I've read about this on where the actual merits of the article were discussed.

Poor.

Cavehill Red

Poor why?

RichieC

Cavehill Red wrote: »

Poor why?

Because the contents of the article are odious beyond the pale and do not warrant anything beyond strong condemnation. Anyone taking up the argument like it has merit is imo odious beyond the pale too.

:rolleyes:

Cavehill Red

RichieC wrote: »

Because the contents of the article are odious beyond the pale and do not warrant anything beyond strong condemnation. Anyone taking up the argument like it has merit is imo odious beyond the pale too.

:rolleyes:

So not discussing something is preferable to discussing it? I must admit, I'm not sure if you're being serious.

RichieC

I'm being totally serious.

eta, I just don't think a disgraceful article like that should be a springboard for what is a very sensitive issue.

Cavehill Red

RichieC wrote: »

I'm being totally serious.

eta, I just don't think a disgraceful article like that should be a springboard for what is a very sensitive issue.

The kind of censorship of thought you're advocating is a form of fascism. Orwell warned about people of your mentality.

SamHarris

People ignoring or not wanting to discuss uncomfortable information seems to be par for course these days. Sad.

dannyboy exactly proved my point. Pointing out a cultural based crime rate, or negative qualities that are statistically associated with races, is fine when you keep it to certain groups, others are protected by cultural mores.

The same can be said for religion, where some are vilified to massive degrees, see scientology, others are protected from all criticism regarldess of what they cause or push.

Im sure there are plenty of other groups where prejudice is almost unchallenged for some group, borderline encouraged in others and in others vilified.

The fact that its RichieC - who if I remember correctly is entirelly comfortable with his attidue to the "stupid" americans - who does not like people even discussing actual statistics to do with another large group is telling of the partisan mindset that encourages this.

Unfortunatly he is not the only person that believes any statistics or facts that are challenging are best swept under the carpet.