[tman]

You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.

There are still things to be done about crime. Concentrating poverty (the projects) turns out to have been one of those really stupid progressive ideas. Crime rates for blacks in the south tend to be lower than in the north (I'll pass on that one). The post-1950s destruction of the black family (eclipsing slavery's destruction of it) seems to have been a bad thing. There are things you can fix. Just don't expect the effect to be huge.

[alextp]

> But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere

I don't understand why this rules out cultural reasons. In most of the places where black people live today outside africa their immigration was mainly based on slavery and subjugation, and this comes with a really heavy cultural baggage both for the black people themselves and for the rest of the local society. And racial slavery took a few centuries to fade away, which helped build a lot of other sociological prejudices and rituals around it. At least here in brazil this is pretty obvious. That's very different from jewish immigration worldwide (based on commerce and a looser form of persecution), mexican immigration in the united states (also marginalized, but far less), asian immigration, etc. You can't discount these factors.

I've never been to africa, so I can't say why (and if) this phenomenon happens there, but I think european imperialism and colonialsm might be a good place to start looking for a reason. Before you think I'm a liberal nut, if the structure of a society was built for a long time around foreign domination, most people living in it will adapt to it. Inferiority complexes are hard to overcome, even discounting factors such as ghetto areas, bad infrastructure, and the "social inertia" that makes it easier to raise traumatized kids if you've been traumatized yourself.

[Locke1689]

You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties.

What are you talking about? It's not race. That is, genetics means shit here. It's all socioeconomic. The incidence rate of poverty is also a lot higher in blacks than whites.

The blank slate is dead. Science killed it. If you want to have a nature vs. nurture debate you need to actually post some science. Until then you've simply violated a fundamental law of statistics: correlation is not causation.

[sethg]

With respect to the US, the “(~ 10x)” estimate is wrong; please stop throwing it around as a given.

I refer you to this table from the Uniform Crime Reports:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_43.html

African-Americans make up about 12% of the US population and, for all crimes, about 28% of arrests. This is out of proportion to their population (and other subthreads can pick up the argument about why that disparity exists), but if black crime were ten times the rate of white crime, and if the racial proportions of who got arrested reflected this (which is of course another issue), then African-Americans would make up about 58% of arrests.

[hugh3]

You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.

It's very plausible, and indeed pretty much undeniable, that male behaviour is different to female behaviour (eg higher aggression) for biological reasons. Males and females have been under vastly different selection pressures for millions of years, so it makes sense that the survival/reproduction strategy for males should be different to that for females.

However, it's only been <100,000 years since the various ancestral lineages of modern humans split off from one another, and only in the last few thousand years that life in Europe or China has been significantly different to life in Africa (apart from the climate). Huge differences in behaviour between the different lineages are very unlikely.

[nl]

If you are going stereotype offensively for shock value, then you damn well better have the statistics to back yourself up.

In 2005 in the US, there were 7 times more black homicide offenders than whites: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/tables/oracetab.cf...

At first glance, that may provide some evidence for your theory.

However, an alternate theory that I prefer could be stated something there is an inverse relationship between income and likelyhood of committing violent crime.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0699.p... shows that Black families are about 3 times as likely as whites to be below the poverty line. An average black household size is 2.7 (http://www.housingbubblebust.com/PopHsgRates/AllStatesHouseH...).

2.7 * 3 = 8.1, which is actually less than the 7 times offending rate cited above. (Yeah, I know there are some pretty big assumptions in that big of math. Still, the point remains that there is a real relationship between poverty and crime rates)

[jauer]

"But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America?"

That's a bit incendiary without a citation. Got one?

[tman]

Sure, in America there are at least three independent lines of evidence for the 10x figures. DOJ arrest rates, DOJ violent crime victim surveys, and simply by looking at the race of murder victims (50% are black -- most murder in the US seems to be intraracial).

Globally, you can look here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/13/homicide...

The numbers in Africa look bad, but South Africa is really the only place in Africa together enough to do statistics on this stuff. Of course, they also have the highest murder rate in the world (one assumes that other parts would have them beat handily if they could count it all). Jamaica also tops the list in our Hemisphere. The rate cited there for Haiti is half as high as I've seen it elsewhere, but Haiti isn't a great place for accurate data collection, of course.

I've got some estimates for crime rates of African populations in places where they are severe minorities (there's a figure on the internet that claim 80% of London gun crime is African/Caribbean), but it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing.

It's a mess of numbers, but there just doesn't seem to be much room for the case that America's problems are special (Brazil, for example, has somewhat similar population demographics, and broadly similar problems).

[hugh3]

So your data are limited to the few places on Earth that there's a significant population of Africans; being the US, the Carribbean, Europe and (of course) Africa.

Now, it's also true that in all of these places, people of African descent are poor, and it's also well-observed that poverty is correlated with crime, so I'm not really convinced that your "black people commit more crimes because of a biological tendency to do so" hypothesis is any better than the more conventional "black people are poor for historical and cultural reasons, and poor people commit more crimes" hypothesis.

[gruseom]

I wonder, where are people of African descent least poor? That is, if one made a list of countries sorted by wealth of their African-descent populations, what would be the first few items?

[gruseom]

A table of homicide rates per country hardly counts as a "citation" for the statement, "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America", let alone, "The answer has everything to do with race."

No doubt political correctness is a distorting factor in the discourse; so is garden-variety racism. Therefore it's important for honest inquirers to be careful about how they put things. As you said, "it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing".

[tman]

Did you Google for the DOJ stats I mentioned? Regardless, here's what we know:

1) Blacks commit on the order of 10x the violent crime of non-Hispanic whites and Asians in the US. This is well documented.

2) Africa has tremendous murder rates compared to almost everywhere else in the world. Again, well documented.

3) In this hemisphere, the majority black countries all have very high murder rates (Jamaica, Haiti) and the one major country with similar demographics to America has a similar problem with their black murder rate. Again, very well documented.

If you need Googling help on any of this, you can ask. But, really? Come on.

As far as this "racism" bugaboo you bring up...I know you didn't directly call me a racist, but that's just so tired. The Hap-map alone destroys any contention that we're all the same. We're different in countless ways. To me, that makes for a much more interesting world than one where everybody is a WASP under the skin. In fact, it's the race-deniers, not the realists, that I find to be the ones with the really dangerous and bigoted ideas.

Different peoples have different criminal tendencies? Well yeah. Let's admit it and do what we can to alleviate it rather than pretending it isn't there and building huge "great society" projects (The Projects) that make lives worse for the very people we're trying to help. Hurting black people with your verified non-racist good intentions is a really lousy way of helping black people.

[sethg]

There is more genetic diversity among the different African native groups than there is among the rest of the world. The majority of “black” Americans have the genetic equivalent of at least one white great-grandparent. So what were you trying to prove about genetics, again?

[gruseom]

You made a very strong claim: "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America". (In fact, that claim is so over the top that it suggests 'troll', but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.) DOJ statistics do nothing to back up the "everywhere" part. And citing a summary table of countries with black populations does next to nothing.

As for the rest, you're projecting (I don't believe the things you're objecting to) and resorting to rudeness. It would be better to shrink the scope of your claims to what you can actually back up, and tone things considerably down. That doesn't mean not saying controversial things. It means saying them in a way that's cognizant of the context, makes respect a high priority, and resists venting.

[Locke1689]

When people calling you a "racist" becomes tired, maybe you should consider that some of the views you hold are actually racist.

[Qz]

Has nothing to do with race inherently, and everything to do with history. Let's see the countries you listed:

  USA
  South Africa
  Jamaica
  Haiti
  Brazil

Now, what do all five of those countries have in common, historically?

[bluedanieru]

I didn't suggest it was cultural. I don't think it is cultural. I can't imagine how you inferred that from my post. I didn't even use the word "culture" in it.

[tman]

Other than linking to culture and cognition...

Maybe I am still misreading, what did you mean by "The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race. America is simply not an egalitarian society."

To me that looks like you're blaming the crime rate on our non-egalitarian social structure. Is that separate from culture in your book?

[madair]

Most people on HN belong to another ~10x crime group: Americans, all those bombs and guns blowing up stuff all over the world to 'protect' capitalism...50% of American's taxes makes us individually responsible