It's pretty unlikely that Walgreens is included in the USDA's definition of a food desert. I believe the most nutritious things available for sale there are dry cereal and maybe bananas.
I'm sure it varies by area, but in NYC I've never seen vegetables in a Walgreens (or DR, or Rite-Aid, &c.). They sometimes have milk and eggs, but it's usually the smaller packages (half a gallon or less / half a dozen respectively) and the dry goods that aren't cereal tend to be smaller or "instant" varieties (pouched rice and pasta is what I've seen). I think you'd struggle to healthfully feed an individual with just a Walgreens, much less a family.
Bombarded with suffocating propaganda telling them that society considers them subhuman and they will never succeed on their own merits and their only option is to rely on the benevolence and generosity of the brave and wonderful allies who have taken pity on them. -> Demoralization and withdrawal from constructive participation in society. -> Crime, poverty. -> Poor disadvantaged people stay dependent, on the bottom. -> Self proclaimed allies pushing these policies remain on top and continue to allegedly be the only ones who will fix the problems.
I'm beginning to prefer that theory. Explains some motives a little better.
It's both. Propaganda can't tell you why you're poor if you're not poor.
Lots of things play into the situation. I don't think historic racism is the only factor, it's certainly not a useful point of intervention, but it is a factor. It's important we remember that when we're presented with options for intervention so we can approach them with a degree of empathy we otherwise would not afford them.
As I said I disagree. I think that's a relatively factor that is not nearly so important as the common discourse would lead you to believe. When you look at other peoples who have historically suffered racism, when you look at those in generational poverty, it just seems like there are too many counter examples for it to be an overwhelming factor.
I've never seen strong evidence or really good theories that fit the facts about this which aren't just pages of handwaving and waffling and speculation (or worse, veiled threats that you are a racist if you disagree with the theory).
What I think is that in fact it is a great tool for use by some unscrupulous people because it means they never have to actually be held to account for any of their policies or legislation or agenda. None of it is measurable. Somehow people have us convinced that they and only they are able to fix racism or improve the lot of disadvantaged minorities... without ever having to show a single scrap of evidence or results. Anything that goes wrong for them can be blamed on others who are racist, and any questioning of their methods or policies makes you a racist. They actually have an extremely strong incentive to never fix these problems at all.
That's why I prefer my theory. It fits reality and explains motives a lot better in my opinion.
Hopefully everyone here is grown up enough that I don't need to add the usual wall of disclaimers (racism existed and exists and people suffer from it, my theory is about social scale effects and not any person's individual experience, etc.).
I don't disagree with a lot of what you said, but I do disagree with historic racism not playing a significant part. Being born into poverty, as all newly freed slaves were, means you're very likely to stay in poverty. A significant degree of modern Black poverty can be attributed to the continuation of the poverty they were born into.
What I'm saying is: A large portion of modern Black poverty comes from historic racism and slavery. There are people alive today that couldn't use the same fountains as the white kids when they were younger. Poor people commit more crime.
What I'm not saying: People can't rise out of poverty (I managed it, I think others can to). People shouldn't be accountable for their actions (Moral hazard is a thing). Racism is the dominant factor in crime (Poverty and culture are more the issue now, but those have roots in a history that was not long ago).
> Propaganda can't tell you why you're poor if you're not poor.
Not true. You'd be surprised how many kids in comfortable middle class families think they are poor because they aren't living the luxury jetset lifestyle they see promoted by influencers on instagram.
It’s kinda weird that crime slumped as poverty skyrocketed in the 2008 recession. You would think crime would be higher in 2008 and 2009 than 2007 but instead it plummeted
That's fascinating. I grew up in an area - Appalachia, specifically an area among the poorest regions east of the Mississippi - with entrenched forever poverty, and vast underinvestment in pretty much every way you could name. It never occurred to anyone to put together organized retail crime gangs and endlessly plunder local stores until they were all forced to close.
> It never occurred to anyone to put together organized retail crime gangs and endlessly plunder local stores until they were all forced to close.
I'm not particularly invested in defending SF, but comparing shoplifting in a dense urban center to one of the least densely populated regions of the Eastern US doesn't make a ton of sense. It occurs to me that Appalachia has plenty of entrenched and even organized crime (moonshining being the historical one that comes to mind), but most of it doesn't involve hitting up the store you live a block from.
It was a little clumsy of me, but I was trying to hedge between the normal reactionary critiques of SF and something more constructive. NYC has plenty of problems, some of which are a lot worse than SF's, but we don't have anything really resembling this.
Why? Probably a lot of reasons. But it certainly doesn't hurt that we have a (mostly court-backed) housing mandate, and the country's largest youth employment program[1].
There's tons of factors that go into crime, culture is one of them, disenfranchisement is another. None of them cause all cases, that doesn't mean some of them don't cause some cases.