To the trained liberal mind, racism alone explains the higher arrest rates and incarceration rates among certain minority groups.
"Jail numbers skewed by race," deplores the Portland Tribune in fat, black letters (*). "Year after year, studies in Portland and elsewhere have shown African-Americans more likely to find themselves in handcuffs," froths a Nick Brudnick (rhymes with nudnick). Not only that; to Brudnick's and his editors' horror, "in Portland, minorities and especially blacks are stopped and arrested far more frequently than their white counterparts." To top off the poisoned chalice of the bien-pensant, a new sheriff’s study has found that "once defendants are in the jails, the lopsidedness of minority representation keeps growing – especially for black inmates."
The rest of this exercise in liberal onanism predictably agonizes over this shocking and most certainly racist and unjust calamity. A top aide to the county sheriff is queried, and responds that "the causes of the disparity are complex," and that further research "needs to be pursued." In a classic example of PC bureaucratese, she adds that, “One of the things we have to do is continually shine a light on the issue. It’s a hard problem to solve, but we have a responsibility to continually keep it at the forefront of our minds.”
Another sorry delegate of the madhouse into which we have turned our country soon chimes in. “I think the only thing that’s going to change it is a class-action lawsuit,” says a Jo Ann Bowman of the group Oregon Action. And then, nudnick unveils the deepest part of the horror: "(W)hereas blacks make up about 6 percent of Multnomah County’s population, they represent about 24 percent of those booked in 2006 and 2007. For felony bookings, that figure gets even higher, to more than 28 percent."
To one's presumed indignation, the article informs that a study with similar findings was conducted already eight years ago, and the (implied) unjust, unexplainable (except through "racism") disparity continues as though nothing has happened. Portland Mayor Tom Potter’s racial profiling committee "has begun debating the degree to which the disparities in arrest numbers are the product of racial stereotyping by police, versus other possible explanations such as historic inequities." The explanation that blacks commit a vastly disproportionate number of crimes will assuredly not be counted among the possibilities considered.
But even that is not enough for the aforementioned Ms. Bowman, who co-chairs the group. She argues, the article says, that, "while economic inequity may be an effect of the racial disparities in arrest numbers," it's not "the cause of why people were jailed."
“It’s their race that started the process,” Ms. Bowman and the article conclude, laden with meaning for the true initiates. We can now go to the closet where the hair shirt and the cat o'nine tails dangle from a hook, to indulge our penchant for self-flagellation.
I am just a sojourner here. In a few days I will up and leave this patch of white invertebrae holoplankton. But I am a co-citizen of these nauseating nudnicks. So I sit down and compose a Letter to the Editor, with a Brudnick cc:
* * *
To the Editor:
Re: "Jail numbers skewed by race"
If I may be so bold, I should like to give the Portland Tribune and Mr. Nick Brudnick a hint as to how to "shine a light" on the issue of jail numbers skewed by race.
Here are a few social facts from the US Department of Justice:
Between 1976 and 2005, blacks have been killing other people at a rate 6 to 9 times higher, every year, than the comparable homicide rates for whites. (Source.) Furthermore, these statistics are skewed in favor of blacks, because the "white" category includes also Hispanics who identify themselves as whites but whose crime rates are far higher than those of non-Hispanic whites.
For the same period, 1976-2005, homicide types break down as follows:
| White | Black | Other | |
| Felony murder | 39.1% | 59.3% | 1.6% |
| Sex related | 54.7% | 43.4% | 1.9% |
| Drug related | 33.9% | 65.0% | 1.1% |
| Gang related | 54.3% | 41.2% | 4.4% |
| Argument | 46.8% | 51.1% | 2.2% |
| Workplace | 70.5% | 26.7% | 2.8% |
Note that the same pro-black statistical bias is embedded here as explained above, because of the inclusion of Hispanics in the "white" category. Moreover, the figures hide their significance until one adjusts them for the demographic weight of the racial groups. Since blacks are 13% of the US population, and whites are 66% of the population, the respective felony murder rates of 59.3% and 39.1% signify that blacks commit felony murders at a rate 7.7 times that of whites. Lastly, since the US Census does separate the category of "non-Hispanic whites" whereas the USDJ does not, it skews the felony murder comparison even more. If the census included the non-Hispanics in the "white" category as the USDJ does, the percentage of whites would have been greater than 66%, further diminishing the ratio of white felony murders and increasing the disparity to a rate of more than 8 times as many felony murders committed by blacks as by whites.
You can continue this analysis with the other kinds of homicides listed here, and with all other types of felony crime. Copious relevant statistics exist, broken down by race and ethnicity both on the USDJ website and on the FBI's website. If primary research is not Mr. Brudnick's forte, there is a panoply of relevant articles by journalists of national reputation who have already done the spadework.
A cursory look at Heather Mac Donald's "Time for the Truth About Black Crime Rates", for instance, would have revealed that a given violent crime in New York is 13 times more likely to be perpetrated by a black than by a white. Mr. Brudnick should have just looked a little harder in his search for the reason of the "skewing in incarceration by race" – if he, and you, had not been gelded by the insane cult of spurious white guilt and PC.
It is the free press's responsibility to keep this shocking criminality of blacks, and to a lesser but still very high degree, Hispanics, at – to borrow a quote from you – "the forefront of our minds." I trust therefore that the Portland Tribune will revisit the issue of what really causes the jail numbers disparity, and perhaps shine a light on it for the benefit of Portland's apparently clueless mayor, the sheriff's office, and even the moonbat Jo Ann Bowman of Oregon Action.
Sincerely,
Tak Seiyo
* * *
I do not expect that the letter will be printed, let alone acted upon. Portland is reputed to be America's whitest city and feels so guilty about it that it does all it can to fill that whitebread void with the next best thing after authentic blacks: Hispanics.
The Arabs have a word for it: dhimmi. But how to call the groveling, self-tortured, self-brainwashed white man when there is no conqueror's scimitar on his neck?
* * *
(*) Also online at http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=121200836912082300.
taksei@gol.com
Read more articles by Takuan Seiyo
I'm trying to see your point. Are you saying black people are inherently more criminal? That seems to be a bold statement to make with data from only the USA and while discounting adjustments for socio-economic status. If you took that data and sliced it by poor, middle class and rich I bet there would be a much higher affinity for crime seen among those sharing economic status vs. those sharing race. Of course, the rate of poverty is so much higher in non-white populations in the USA that it's likely there would be more non-whites by numbers still. I guess I'm saying it seems hard to believe that with a thorough analysis of the data, which you certainly are attempting to do, you could conclude that it's all down to race.
Comment by jptxs | June 11, 2008
jptxs,
I appreciate your civil way of challenging the implications of my article. “Inherently” is a loaded word and should not be used until sociobiology has advanced far enough to link behavioral and cognitive traits to quantifiable genetics. What I am saying is that black people are statistically more criminal. That is a loaded statement per se, since the reigning liberal mantra is the opposite one: that whites are statistically more racist, hence they incarcerate blacks at a higher rate than whites, for no good reason.
That the latter is absurd is beyond the necessity of discussion, at least in this forum. You might want to read further points I have made here http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/08/24/enough-with-the-obfuscation-already/ and here http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/09/01/enough-with-the-obfuscation-already-part-two/ . Moreover, I am not a criminologist, and if I were I’d probably be under such PC pressure to fake race –related data that you couldn’t trust what I say. And the issue of minorities’ crime is not my chief interest in life, and I have not made a comprehensive study of it. You will find, for instance here http://inverted-world.com/index.php/articles/articles/the_reality_of_racial_differences/ , some well-researched points that exceed what I feel competent to comment on authoritatively.
Bu I live my life with open eyes, and those are the eyes of a multiracial, multiethnic and multilingual person. I have lived and worked and speak the languages of, many countries. I have reference points derived from close observations of societies as disparate as those of Japan and Egypt, Slovakia and Ecuador, Nigeria, Switzerland and Australia. And I will tell you without any hesitation that poverty cannot possibly account for violent crime rate differentials of 700% - 900%, such as exist between American blacks and whites, not to speak of the even more peaceful Orientals. Yes, you will find higher crime rates among poor Arabs or Thais or Poles than among the rich ones, but these are differences of a few dozen percentage points, not hundreds. And you will never, ever come across frequent crimes of the Wichita and Knoxville kind that you’ll find described in the links above.
Where I agree with you is that the issue merits a lot more study, to isolate variables such as income and level of exposure to hate propaganda, such as is rare among whites now but is pervasive across black America, starting with B. Obama’s church on down. However, we have made the research of race differences into a taboo. The few academics working in this unrewarding field and publish their impeccably impartial and data-based findings are reviled by the left and its multiculti acolytes with a venom normally reserved for violent pedophiles. Just Google names like J. Phillippe Rushton , Richard Lynn and Charles Murray, to learn more about this. Start from here http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/jpr_liberty.html .
As to your contention that the data’s origin in the USA alone undermines its conclusiveness; I don’t think so. South Africa’s humongous crime problem is completely out of proportion to the level of poverty of the population. You can walk in peace among poor Vietnamese or Cambodians in neighborhoods the equivalent of which in South Africa or Detroit would be your certain death sentence. You can find some truthful observations about Africa in the book of Gedaliah Braun, a white physician residing in Johannesburg, who has dissected the race shibboleth with the thorough precision of a scientist http://www.straighttalk.co.za/PDF/RDSD_TableOfContents.pdf .
We are blessed to enjoy more freedom in America than the Europeans do over there. Under EU laws, research and publication on issues such as discussed here is simply proscribed. So all you can have is anecdotal evidence. Try this, for good measure: http://tottenhamlad.blogspot.com/2008/03/savage-path-from-knoxville-to-tottenham.html. If you scan British, French and Italian crime news, heavily redacted though they are, you’ll discover more.
Comment by Takuan Seiyo | June 11, 2008
Mr. Seiyo,
I hope if nothing else a place where conservative thought can be discussed and analyzed would manage a higher level of civility than most places where the "scream until you win" method id employed. Just so my cards are on the table, I have a background in the philosophy of cognitive science and have also studied sociology. So claims about brain functioning and it's effects on a particular population are keenly interesting to me.
>> the reigning liberal mantra is the opposite one: that whites are statistically more racist, hence they incarcerate blacks at a higher rate than whites, for no good reason.
I cant say I've ever heard that espoused by anyone in a serious debate or discussion, but I'd certainly agree with you that it is absurd.
>> we have made the research of race differences into a taboo
Agreed again. I have seen people who want to add this dimension to studies pay the price, even so far as ripples in their personal life.
>> South Africa’s humongous crime problem is completely out of proportion to the level of poverty of the population. You can walk in peace among poor Vietnamese or Cambodians in neighborhoods the equivalent of which in South Africa or Detroit would be your certain death sentence.
While I can agree with the anecdotal strength of such an argument having walked through rural poor neighborhoods in Malaysia myself, I still find most data I've seen more convincing regarding the role of poverty & culture vs. the role of race. South Africa is a wonderful example of a nation where the western influence on the culture and the vast disparity of wealth has essentially passed on a European formula for criminality. I contend that Europe's cultural structure being spread around the world - and, by the way, welcomed with open arms in most places by people who want the benefits - is at the heart of much of the crime we see. (By the way, before the anti-Europe crew gets their hackles up, I'm talking about 17th century colonial Europe and not today's.) People of all races around the world have adopted the city-centered, capital enterprise based culture as a given. The subtle striations in society in such societies are easily crossed through effort and success - the same if not more applies in the US which is also a recipient of an essentially European cultural basis. The big interaction between race and this system is that the race issues conflate to make it much easier for black people to get stuck at the bottom of this system through both aspects of the system and aspects of the means through which the culture has evolved to deal with the system. As I type, I realize how futile it is to build an image of this sort of idea in just a few sentences. Drugs, education, crime, race, wealth and societal norms are all interwoven in a way that is very complex. And I don't mean to use "complexity" as a dodge to say "I don't want to talk about race".
My basic point is that genetic and other "physical" differences between the races are so small as to be negligible in any serious study. But, as many of the sources you point to correctly point out, the gap in the things like tested IQ and crime rates point to a large difference along race lines. With the biological cause being statistically ruled out, we must look to others and I think there are plenty of others which could be brought to task here. I agree completely that the statistics allow your conclusion. I simply think that the real question is: what causes such a disparity? And to get that answer, the subject must take in data of all kinds, including what would be considered taboo in many studies today.
As for the much larger disparities in the USA vs. elsewhere, doesn't the USA do everything big? =] My own personal opinion is that the most likely culprit is the isolationist culture feedback loop that effects a huge number of urban, mostly black and hispanic, kids today. I've seen how everything from the music to the educators in schools all program these kids to see themselves as a subclass set in a battle against the rest of the society. It's a gross and distorted world view that a very small slice of that same demographic makes a decent living from and therefore it thrives. It's the proverbial "crabs in the bucket". I tutored in a very rough school in the south bronx for a bit back in college. The real shame to me is that when I dealt with the kids who were very young, I could see vast potential. But the older the kid, the more this anti-life, anti-participation attitude was set in. And since it bases itself solely on fear and loathing, opposition is almost impossible for a little kid. I see the source of that as a perversion of the struggles from the 60's, it's the revolution mindset but without any of the intellectual power to back it up. It's all the trappings and excitement of oppositional mindsets without any real clue of what they are opposing. It serves as a factory of criminality and at its worst glorifies being a criminal as being the only way to be a "true believer". It germinates so well in poverty because it positions money as the sole form of power and then makes the simple proclamation that any way to get money is justified, period - end of story.
It's all so very complex. But thank you for opening up this line of discussion. It's very interesting to me to think about the role of race openly. As much as I may feel this conversation needs to take into account many other factors, I agree even more strongly that the "official" channels for such study need to allow race to be a real factor in their studies.
Comment by jptxs | June 12, 2008
I would say not race but culture: the culture of the hustle, of violence, of blame. As Thomas Sowell says in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, yesterday's backward, ignorant redneck white trash has become today's backward ignorant thuggish black trash. Sowell traces the crossing of the color line by most of the alleged traditions of blackness–traditions which can only be found in Africa among recent victims of the hegemony of American popular culture– entitlement based on existence alone and not on production/results, substance abuse, violence, incest, absent fathers, mothers prostituting themselves and their daughters for material goods, proliferating unwanted sons and daughters to raise themselves while bringing in the checks, etc. Integration was supposed to help us all rise by association with the best, but we have all sunk and it has become taboo to try to figure out why. I blame my generation for our refusal to grow us, to be absorbed as much by instilling duty, honor, and grace as we are by instilling selfishness, instant gratification, and self-aggrandizement through falsification (hair, nails, teeth, shape …).
Comment by lyssa1961 | June 12, 2008
jptxs ,
Once again, I must say it’s a joy to discuss these issues in a rational and civil way. There is little more important in a multiracial society where the constituent groups’ different levels of ability, socialization and criminality are a source of constant friction. Moreover, in the liberal West, these different levels engender endless hang wringing, spurious self-blame by whites, and uncountable trillions of dollars misspent to “correct” what’s uncorrectable, instead of treating everyone equally and letting nature play itself out. After all, I am not aware of a US Federal Commission investigating whether the paucity of Semites (of all kinds) in the NBA is the result of racial discrimination, nor of NBA’s faking its ability tests so that more whites and mestizos can bring in the blessings of diversity.
As to the “reigning liberal mantra,” that you can’t find anywhere, you can just reread the PT article that I comment on above, and you will find it. One week or reading The New York Times, attentive to its absurdities, will unveil to you the reigning status of this mantra, what with headlines on the order of “Black incarceration rates are up despite a drop in crime rates.” And the field where the mantra is most operative is, of course, education, where you will find an inexhaustible font of our denial of the reality that’s in plain view; an elaborate web of lies constructed to mask that reality; the blaming of white “racism” for endemic black and brown failure; and, not the least, trillions of dollars misspent in the pursuit of fictitious “solutions.” Education is too big a subject to tack on here, so I leave it at this juncture. You will find that Steve Sailer writes about this with much fact-based insight.
Your mention of Malaysia is not a good way of supporting an argument that it’s poverty rather than race that accounts for behavioral and ability differences. I happen to know Malaysia well; if it weren’t for the overt racial discrimination and set-asides for Malays, the Chinese and Indians would own and run that country entirely. The differences are stark, regardless of income levels.
However, when you mention culture as the reason for racial groups’ mean differences, I cannot knock it down easily, nor am emotionally invested in so doing. Culture is, without a doubt, enormously important. But at what point does culture, bred in the bone for a couple thousand years, turn into DNA?
Take the 110-115 mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, and the famously outsize ratio of Jews at the top of the most intellectually demanding fields. IQ, particularly the g-factor, is not culture, that’s for sure. But for an ethny’s entire male population to spends all day, six days a week, in the study and argument of Biblical exegesis, and for the best in this endeavor to be married off to the daughters of the richest man in the community, for some 1800 years, can eventually produce quite a number of Jewish lawyers, surgeons and Nobel laureates, even if they have never seen the inside of a shul.
Despite your background in cognitive sciences and my lack thereof, I challenge your statement that genetic differences between the races are “so small as to be negligible” or that biological causes may be statistically ruled out relative to racial groups IQ and crime rates differences . Those are the politicized views of the liberal mainstream of academia that prefers to ignore valid research negating the fiction that our bien-pensant ardently wish to will as reality. But reality will not be traduced; it always takes its revenge at the end.
Genetic research is actually quite close to concluding that IQ is biology. You can detect a whiff of that in the interview that the much-celebrated (you will guess why) mediocrity, Henry Louis Gates, PhD, conducted with the brilliant and typical-for-his-ethny coward, James Watson, PhD, here: http://www.theroot.com/id/46667/page/4
This is Dr. Gates’ question that tells you all you need to know both about what science is about to find and what the liberal elite will try to do with the findings:
“HLG: Let me ask a moral question. If we found out 10 years from now, I come back and I interview you, and geneticists have found a biological basis of intelligence. And the worst of all nightmares is that some people in the human community are genetically different in terms of their intelligence and thoughts. Should we prevent that kind of discovery, given it's—“
There are, as well, hundreds of studies proving a hereditary component of 60% - 80% in IQ, and Steven Pinker has effectively debunked the tabula-rasa view of the infant human brain, so beloved by liberals.
As to crime, I am not aware how far gnome research is on that, but a well founded hypothesis of a biogenic basis has existed for a long time. You will find in Rushton et al. that black males have a much higher testosterone reading than whites, who in turn have a higher reading than Orientals. It’s not difficult to see the probability of a link between testosterone and violence, but I am not going to jump to conclusions until science itself does. But the point is, neither should you.
Ultimately, when you are walking your dog at 8 pm and three 19-yr-old blacks block your path, it’s not important you know the precise ontological basis of what is about to happen. What’s important is to know the odds, and to act accordingly. And that’s why it’s outrageous that our MSM and the ruling elite do so much to prevent you from knowing the odds.
Take the issue of the open season on whites, invisible to MSM and to our political elite, but very much a part of everyday reality, e.g. here: http://spartanspectator.blogspot.com/2008/06/hunting-season-for-whites.html . Have you any idea how many daily reports of violent crime in thousands of American newspapers omit the overwhelmingly nonwhite racial aspect of those crimes? That is a betrayal: throwing sand in the peoples’ eyes instead of throwing light on facts.
Comment by Takuan Seiyo | June 12, 2008
Thank you Mr. Seiyo for a fascinating article. I've often wondered, from a statistical standpoint, if the crime rate increased among all races when LBJ's welfare program was introduced in the 60's? Since we live in such an "entitlement" world now is there a correlation between welfare and crime? I'd be interested to see what you have on that angle.
Thanks.
Comment by david58 | June 12, 2008
Many blacks who commit crime clearly explain their motive: They are taking respect.
It also is a problem among young whites and hispanics. While respect used to be something earned, like a lot of other "shortcuts" taken by people of poor character these days, no one bothers to work for genuine respect.
Respect via fear is not only not hollow to many of today's youths, it is prized over earned respect, which often is seen as a sign of weakness achieved through conformity.
"Keepin' it real" demands taking what you want and need, not earning it. It's the gangsta life.
Comment by nick adams | June 12, 2008
Having taught in prison, I can tell you that my Asian students were some bad MF's, based on what they were in for, and the black students as well the white and Hispanic students, though much larger, cut a wide swath around them. The martial heritage of east Asia can hardly be denied–why do you think they call them warlords–what major city doesn't have seeral triad-type gangs involved in drugs and prostitution? Fighting is even known as an "art." Please spare us the peaceful Asian thing!
Comment by lyssa1961 | June 12, 2008
Lyssa,
You are committing the very fallacy that I warned against here. You are extrapolating from personal experience to render judgment on wide societal phenomena. You are also imputing to me, it seems, partiality, since my name is Asian and I often write about things Asian.
An informed citizen must become familiar with basic statistical concepts, such as distribution, Gaussian (bell curve) and non-Gaussian distribution, mean, median and standard deviation. You cannot understand what’s going on unless you understand these concepts and become adept at detecting when they are used to illuminate reality or, conversely, to lie about it.
When I write, when any scrupulous social scientist or journalist attributes traits to groups of people, it can only be with respect to the mean (average) and never the total group. Thus, your personal experience with Asian gang members in no way belies the statement that (East) Asians are the most peace and law-abiding people on earth. And when I make such a statement, even in an informal forum like here, as I have no specific related expertise I rely on expert opinion. In this case it’s the writings of J. Philippe Rushton that I referenced above. You should not automatically assume that I am trying to push a particular ethnocentric point of vies.
And, absolutely, Asian criminal gangs are full of evil spawns of hell, and there are many Christian qualities such as mercy, pity, altruism that are in short supply in the East. But to clarify how this relates to the mean qualities people like Rushton research, you should think about this factoid: The three tallest men in the world are Chinese. But the Chinese are a far shorter people than whites; their mean height is 5’5” – 5’6”.
The same principle, by the way applies to my statements about blacks discussed above. I am a great admirer of Thomas Sowell, and of various other blacks who are a living contradiction of everything I have written here. And yet, that does not invalidate in any way what I have written.
Comment by Takuan Seiyo | June 12, 2008
[…] if you will, Seiyo's "Brain Functioning Skewed by Race" blog post, in which Tribune scribe Nick Budnick feels the wrath of The Tak. […]
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