Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
Everybody is scared to talk about being tough on crime because you can’t do so without treading very close to territory where you get labeled as racist, or racially profiling.
The race baiters in our society and their elected representatives (who often behave as if they are in office for only one purpose) have made it nearly impossible to stop violent crime. Ethics and personal responsibility are banned from the discussion.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by moorhosj
This is such a tired line of reasoning. People calling out racism isn't the problem, it's a distraction from the actual discussion that you claim to seek. If you want to focus on problems and solutions, then target those things. Complaining about what other people are complaining about is a good way to make zero progress.
Obama created a program to promote personal responsibility (My Brother's Keeper), Rahm has promoted it hard as Mayor. These are concrete things being done to improve ethics and personal responsibility among at-risk youth. If those lamenting how things are "banned from the discussion" would instead focus on supporting existing efforts, we could make actual progress.
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I agree more with moorhosj.
Where people get in trouble when talking about race and crime is when they jump from the specifics of an individual case into population-level generalities way too quickly, or if they start assigning population-level trends to race in a causal fashion, even if there seems to be strong causal links.
A racist is someone who believes that there are significant differences between "races" in humans that cause population-level differences in behavior that are inherent to the genetics of that population. Which means that no matter how strongly statistics seem to point out a relationship between behavior and race, stopping at that point and assigning that relationship as causal is inherently racist, by definition. Avoiding racist thoughts is pushing beyond that to uncover as much as possible about other linkages either because you believe that assigning the differences to physical race is lazy, or because you believe that finding other components in the line of causality helps society function better by allowing self-determinism to continue as the dominant ethos.
The most peculiar thing about American race relations is when racists call for greater personal responsibility while declaring that race determines behavior instead of there being individual agency, and when people who declare themselves as anti-racists declare that race isn't deterministic while pointing out all the ways in which personal agency is subverted in our society. It's just an odd juxtaposition between ideas.
Ultimately, for society to function, two things are required: 1) People need to want to behave deterministically, and 2) behaving deterministically has to be mostly effective at what might be called "rewards sorting." Nothing is 100% effective in human society, but if you work hard, it needs to usually have better results than not working hard. If you take steps society promotes, those need to mostly result in better outcomes that people who don't take those steps experience. Etc, etc. So racism destroys those when it limits success by individuals for reasons unrelated to their actions. If society says, "Work hard and you can move to a safer/nicer/more convenient neighborhood," but then even if you work hard and even if that hard work actual results in better financial outcomes but you can't move to the neighborhood of your choice, the social contract is broken. If the law says to you, if you follow the rules and don't hurt other people, even if you break some minor rules you'll still be able to function in society but then get thrown in prison for five years because you had a couple ounces of a plant on you, a plant that has never caused an overdose and, at worst, maybe makes users a little lazier during use, the social contract is broken.
So, this has gotten way too long, but I strongly encourage anyone looking at racial demographics in relation to crime or other population outcome statistics to avoid making the jump between association and causality no matter how strong the relationship seems to be in your opinion. It not only will get you called a racist, but it, ultimately, is too often a convenient excuse to avoid addressing real, underlying issues.
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Ok, am I supposed to be surprised--did you start with that statement to appear that you are somehow objective, but ultimately more swayed by one argument than the other?
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