Q for law enforcement personnel

I guess my question would be, should the officer be thinking non-lethal weapons first? In other words–tase a guy? I know that doesn’t always work–I get that. But in the case of Castille or Sterling wouldn’t that have been a preferred option if the cop thought he was in danger? Is it always–go for the gun first?

Hey–I want no part of being a cop. I would be terrible at making a split second decision. And yes–there is the argument that a cop can’t take a chance on something non-lethal that doesn’t work and then he loses his life. And yes–non-lethal CAN be lethal. I’ve heard the argument that the non-lethal mindset gets more people tased too.

Maybe technology will eventually solve this: a non-lethal weapon that is disabling(safe for the person shot),reliable and cost effective. I don’t know how you take the edge off of police confrontations. One thing is sure. Stopping a guy because he’s black or Hispanic is just bad behavior. That’s a bad cop or bad police procedure.

Stop that sort of profiling first. The less confrontations the less these things will happen. I’ve heard stories before of quotas for writing tickets and so forth but when you stop someone for a bullshit reason the numbers of real violations are inflated and next month those numbers will be expected again. That leads to more bullshit stops.

Maybe some fundamental things need to be fixed.

But this isn’t working–for anyone.

I do appreciate the police though–the good ones. Society could not work without them.

But we have to solve this.

PA Ram wrote:

I know that doesn’t always work–I get that. But in the case of Castille or Sterling wouldn’t that have been a preferred option if the cop thought he was in danger?

Sterling WAS tased. They then interpreted his post-tased jerking on the ground as “threatening.”

Castille was not doing anything. In that case the officer was a freak out artist. He asked the Castille for his license and when he reached for it the officer shot him.

I don’t care if these are “difficult decisions.” You’re not supposed to have poorly trained freak out artists blowing innocent guys away because you asked him for his license.

Plus of course ignoring race in this is just failing to come to terms with the biggest issue here. These things, by measurable percentages, are just far more likely to happen to black men. That doesn’t mean the cop doing it is a ranting bigot, it means he has absorbed a lot of cultural biases and assumptions and sees danger where there is none with the black man, more often than not.

The only way to handle THAT is to make it part of a discussion we all share.

And we can’t do THAT if there are people busily trying to get race out of the discussion.

snowman wrote:

Listened to the news this morning, the Fresno kid had said he did not want to live, for whatever reason. This could be considered “suicide by cop”.

Yes.

That’s how I took that story from the get-go.

.
.

wv wrote:

PA Ram wrote:

I do appreciate the police though–the good ones. Society could not work without them.

———————-

Well, i appreciate plumbers. And teachers. And social workers. And used-book-store operators. And oceanographers. …and cops, too. But the thing is…there is an ‘element’ in police-world that annoys the hell out of me. Usually part of that element involves the F.O.P. spokespeople. Its the element that demands Unconditional support. They whine way too much for my taste. I mean, if you became a cop you wanted the job. You know its dangerous at times, and you know its thankless at times….blah blah blah. But you wanted it. So, dont be whining for Unconditional Support. Sometimes it just seems like a lot of cops seem like big babies if cop-world gets any serious criticism. Bnw would say, “buck up”… Yada yada yada…

I mean, I’m a lawyer, but i dont run around asking/demanding everyone love lawyers.
Hell, i dont like’em myself. …what was my point? I forget.

w
v

I disagree.

It’s a thankless job. I don’t recall ever thanking a cop personally. And if they don’t have support they can’t do their jobs. Now the term “unconditional” support isn’t something I’ve heard any spokesperson say. Having said that–I’ve run into idiot cops. Just like I won’t throw a blanket over any race and stereotype them one way or the other, I won’t do it with a profession. Military, cops, you name it.

There is good and bad in everything. I’ll judge everyone individually.

But surely cops must be held accountable for their actions. Bad cops should be punished. Murder is murder. Don’t put a badge on and tell me it’s “different”. At the same time, when an active shooter is firing bullets I’m not the one stepping up to make sure he doesn’t harm someone innocent. I’m not the guy trying to save someone in a crumbling tower.

Thankfully there are men and women who do that.

I just have a problem with your use of the word “unconditional”. If the police expect that–they shouldn’t. Of course they may say that on Fox news. I don’t watch that.

zn wrote:

PA Ram wrote:

But who is ignoring race? Turn on CNN. Turn on MSNBC.

We are, in this discussion so far. That’s what I meant. I am aware that the mainstream media is mishandling the race issue, which means they’re talking about it.

But we would not be discussing cops at all in this thread if race (in all its complexity) had not made that the driving issue behind the entire “police” discussion.

So I was just saying that OUR discussion, right here in this thread, is leaving it out.

,

I for one am concerned about racial justice. The future of our nation is more diversity. There must be some coming together–some unity if we don’t want just a different version of what they have in Iraq and Syria(tribal conflicts where people die). Trump is the face of a white power movement–a push against things that are diverse. It is one reason I find him so horrible.

It is enough for me to vote for Hillary. Will she solve all the issues? Of course not–but I can’t stomach Trump and his rabid hate for one second. He is exactly the wrong man to lead this country.

I live in a city where I, as a white male, am a minority. My kids grew up here–they went to school here–they have grown up to appreciate diversity. I think it is something valuable they have gained by living in this community. My son has a few white acquaintances but his FRIENDS are black or Hispanic. He was with them when they were out late at night hanging in a park and the cops showed up. He saw how differently he was treated from them. He noticed. He knows what it’s like to have a black girlfriend and face racism from both sides. Yes–some of her family don’t like the idea of her being with a white guy. And he can tell when he’s being treated differently in a restaurant(he has a Virginia story on that one)because they are a mixed race couple.

I grew up right next to black and Hispanics, went to the same schools, hung out together, played together–and still–I had the fortune of growing up white. Economically I’m not so different from many in this community. But my skin color has given me advantages. I get that. There are others with my skin color who have failed. They aren’t doing so great. Most of the white guys I know who were in trouble with the police were in trouble for doing very stupid things. I know of no one personally–of either color–shot by the police. I did have one friend die by getting shot and the story there has been a bit vague over the years.

But I have not isolated myself into an all-white community. I have embraced the diversity and brought my kids up that way.

THIS is the future.

The police force MUST become more diverse. That IS important.

All races must accept that the future is one where we won’t all look alike. Segregating ourselves will only work so long. We do need unity. We especially need it because most of us share the lower economic class. Our interests overlap on many issues. We should not be each other’s enemy.

Those are some of my feelings on race.

How we relate to each other and move forward is of vital importance to this country.

My concern with the police is how we stop these deaths today. What can we do now so that we can move forward? Because we can’t move forward like this.

I have “handsome guy” privilege. This is a real thing, too. It’s gotten my foot in the door more than once. I accept it and I rather like it. You should have seen how many hits I got on my Match.com profile from chicks who want me to take(treat) them to a European holiday. Of course, then I open my mouth and it’s all over.

Seriously, how do we move forward, as PA said? I can see both sides…Blacks do get profiled. As do Hispanics. By the same token, these groups commit crimes disproportionate to their population so I think its human nature for the cops to give disproportionate attention to same.

I don’t know. Bit for starters it would help a lot if one didn’t carry a gun around. And follow the commands of the cops when ordered.

This is a big fucking problem and it’s getting worse. I’m at a loss.

(Edit- as an aside, I’ve been on the wrong end of police brutality. At 19, I didn’t follow the commands of two very large SFPD officers and they beat my skinny ass pretty good after I told them to fuck off.)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by Ozoneranger.

PA Ram wrote:

The police force MUST become more diverse. That IS important.

[/quote]

Ah something I know. Blacks are heavily recruited into local law enforcement. Problem is few blacks want that career and when one is hired and gets a couple years of experience they are recruited by much larger or wealthier departments for much better pay among other things. I can hear Billy already, Capitalism!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by bnw.

Ozoneranger wrote:

“See these things are double-edged. You do know, for example, that blacks are more likely to be pulled over by police and LESS likely to be breaking the law than the whites police pull over.

-I thought I addressed this. This isn’t even debatable.

Also, about the gun…open carry states are okay for whites, not blacks, right?”

Of course not. I think you’re having a bad context day, Zack.

By the way- Blacks do commit crime disproportionate to their population. That’s a generally accepted premise on both the left and right. That’s not conservative or racist.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime/19439

The claim

“It’s important to note that black men commit nearly half of all murders in this country, which is astounding when you take into consideration the fact that they only make up 12-13 per cent of the population.”
“James”, 26 November 2014

The analysis

There were angry protests across America this week after a grand jury decided a white police officer should not stand trial for the killing of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

FactCheck has already looked at the statistics on killings by law enforcement officials. Though imperfect, the official figures suggest blacks are disproportionately likely to die at the hands of police.

Several people have left comments pointing out that this is not necessarily surprising or unfair, since blacks are also disproportionately likely to be involved in violent crime in the US, thereby putting themselves in the firing line.

One reader, “James”, wrote: “It’s important to note that black men commit nearly half of all murders in this country, which is astounding when you take into consideration the fact that they only make up 12-13 per cent of the population.

“So, given this fact, does it make sense that black men are disproportionately involved in shootings with the police? Your graph is appropriately proportionate, when you take into consideration the role that the black population plays in, not just murder, but crime in general.”

“Sean” said: “If one group is more likely to be involved in that then they are more likely to be killed by the police – so they have nothing to complain about if that is the case.”

We thought we’d check these claims out.

The analysis

It’s true that around 13 per cent of Americans are black, according to the latest estimates from the US Census Bureau.

And yes, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 per cent of the offenders were white. Homicide is a broader category than “murder” but let’s not split hairs.

27_bjs_use

Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimisation rate was six times higher.

As we found yesterday, 93 per cent of black victims were killed by blacks and 84 per cent of white victims were killed by whites.

Alternative statistics from the FBI are more up to date but include many crimes where the killer’s race is not recorded. These numbers tell a similar story.

In 2013, the FBI has black criminals carrying out 38 per cent of murders, compared to 31.1 per cent for whites. The offender’s race was “unknown” in 29.1 per cent of cases.

What about violent crime more generally? FBI arrest rates are one way into this. Over the last three years of data – 2011 to 2013 – 38.5 per cent of people arrested for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault were black.

Clearly, these figures are problematic. We’re talking about arrests not convictions, and high black arrest rates could be taken as evidence that the police are racist.

Police corral protesters before making mass arrests in Los Angeles, following Monday’s grand jury decision in the shooting of Brown

But academics have noted that the proportion of black suspects arrested by the police tends to match closely the proportion of offenders identified as black by victims in the National Crime Victimization Survey.

This doesn’t support the idea that the police are unfairly discriminating against the black population when they make arrests.

So why are black offenders – and young black men in particular – over-represented in America’s crime statistics?

Judging from online comments, there is a wide spectrum of views on this, from unapologetic racism to militant refusal to blame the problem on anything but historic white racism.

Some criminologists think we could be simply confusing race for poverty or inequality: black people tend to offend more because they tend to be more disadvantaged, living in poorer urban areas with less access to public services, and so on.

If you control for deprivation, people of different races ought to be similarly predisposed to commit crime. Or that’s the theory, at least.

There is a lot of research in this area, but a lot of it is contradictory.

This study of violent crime in deprived neighbourhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, found that reductions in poverty led to reductions in the crime rate in exactly the same way in predominantly black and white areas, suggesting poverty, not race, is the biggest factor.

Other studies get different results.

All sociologists have suffered from the same basic problem: finding urban white communities that are as disadvantaged as the poorest black neighbourhoods, so that you can get a fair comparison.

Some thinkers play down the importance of poverty in favour of the “violent subculture theory”.

This is the idea that some black communities, for some reason, have developed cultural values that are more tolerant of crime and violence.

Some commentators on the unrest in Ferguson – mostly right-wing, though not all white – seem to favour this idea, but naturally it remains highly controversial.

The verdict

There is evidence in the official police-recorded figures that black Americans are more likely to commit certain types of crime than people of other races.

While it would be naïve to suggest that there is no racism in the US criminal justice system, victim reports don’t support the idea that this is because of mass discrimination.

Higher poverty rates among various urban black communities might explain the difference in crime rates, although the evidence is mixed.

There are few simple answers and links between crime and race are likely to remain the subject of bitter argument.

Related posts:
1.FactCheck: can we trust crime figures?
2.FactCheck Q&A: are we really getting less violent?
3.FactCheck: how many black Americans are killed by the police?
4.FactCheck: how much would a 50p top rate of tax bring in?

Black Crime Rates: What Happens When Numbers Aren’t Neutral

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-farbota/black-crime-rates-your-st_b_8078586.html

There is a common conservative narrative that indicates the disproportionate incarceration of black people is not the result of systemic racism, but rather of shortcomings within the black community.

It is also common to hear the supposedly neutral statement that “black people commit more crimes than white people.” This “fact” is used to justify a belief that black people have a natural criminal propensity, or that a “culture of violence” is to blame for problems faced by black people in America.

Black people make up roughly 13% of the United States population, and white people make up 64%. Black people make up 40% of the prison population, and white people 39%. Therefore, even though there are roughly five times as many white people as black people in this country, blacks and whites are incarcerated in equal numbers. But the fact that black people are incarcerated five times as frequently as white people does not mean black people commit five times as many crimes. Here’s why:

(1) If a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person is more likely to be arrested.

This is due in part to the fact that black people are more heavily policed.
Black people, more often than white people, live in dense urban areas. Dense urban areas are more heavily policed than suburban or rural areas. When people live in close proximity to one another, police can monitor more people more often. In more heavily policed areas, people committing crimes are caught more frequently. This could help explain why, for example, black people and white people smoke marijuana at similar rates, yet black people are 3.7 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. (The discrepancy could also be driven by overt racism, more frequent illegal searches of black people, or an increased willingness to let non-blacks off with a warning.)

(2) When black people are arrested for a crime, they are convicted more often than white people arrested for the same crime.

An arrest and charge does not always lead to a conviction. A charge may be dismissed or a defendant may be declared not guilty at trial. Whether or not an arrestee is convicted is often determined by whether or not a defendant can afford a reputable attorney. The interaction of poverty and trial outcomes could help explain why, for example, while black defendants represent about 35% of drug arrests, 46% of those convicted of drug crimes are black. (This discrepancy could also be due to racial bias on the part of judges and jurors.)

(3) When black people are convicted of a crime, they are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration compared to whites convicted of the same crime.

When a person is convicted of a crime, a judge often has discretion in determining whether the defendant will be incarcerated or given a less severe punishment such as probation, community service, or fines. One study found that in a particular region blacks were incarcerated for convicted felony offenses 51% of the time while whites convicted of felonies were incarcerated 38% of the time. The same study also used an empirical approach to determine that race, not confounded with any other factor, was a key determinant in judges’ decisions to incarcerate.

***

Racial disparities at every stage of the criminal justice process build upon one another. So, if 1,000 white people and 200 black people (a ratio of 5:1 to reflect the U.S. population) commit the same crime, here is what the eventual prison population could look like:

100 white people and 74 black people might be arrested.

It is impossible to determine what percentage of crimes committed result in arrests because there can be no data on un-observed crimes. As noted above, however, it has been found that while black and white Americans smoke marijuana at similar rates, blacks are arrested 3.7 times as frequently for marijuana possession. These numbers were picked to reflect the 3.7:1 ratio of black to white arrests for marijuana possession. 100 is 10% of 1,000 and 74 is 37% of 200, so these numbers would represent an arrest disparity equivalent to that noted in the example above.

50 white people and 48 black people might be convicted.

If black people account for 35% of drug arrests and 46% of convictions, this indicates a conviction rate that is approximately 1.3 times higher than it should be based on the black arrest rate. So, if 50% of white arrestees were convicted we would expect to see 65% (.5 x 1.3) of black arrestees convicted: 50 is 50% of 100 and 48 is about 65% of 74. (50% was picked at random; the important factor here is the comparative proportion.)

19 white people and 24 black people might be sentenced to prison.

Using the example felony incarceration rates cited above, we might expect to see 38% of the 50 convicted white defendants (19) and 51% of the 48 convicted black defendants (24) incarcerated for their crimes. In this scenario, 12% of black people who commit a crime and less than 2% of white people who commit the same crime might eventually go to prison.

This example demonstrates that there are systemic differences in how blacks and whites are treated by the law. These differences, which are compounded in each successive phase of the criminal justice process, increase the percentage of black people incarcerated for committing a particular crime.

This example is NOT meant to be a conclusive analysis explaining the incarceration gap. The statistics presented above and applied to the illustrative example come from different contexts and refer to different crimes. Racial disparities in the application of criminal justice are not the only source of differential incarceration rates. Poverty, geography, and lacking educational and career opportunities all likely play a role. These factors exacerbate the effects of systemic racism and feed the cycle of incarceration, joblessness, and poverty that plagues some segments of the black population.

Regardless of the exact factors behind the incarceration gap, it is not some neutral, statistical fact that black people commit more crime. The gap is the result of numerous interacting factors, not the least of which is racism. Explanations of the incarceration gap as a result of black criminal propensity or insular cultural deficiencies are critically flawed, and by definition racist.

[/quote]

InvaderRam wrote:

i would think socioeconomic status would play a big part in these disparities. and not just being poor but how many come from broken families? single parent. no parent. parents addicted to drugs. etc… does that make a difference?

An interesting thing.

According to good sociology, one of the prime indicators of a child’s potential success in school and employment is the parents’s total assets. Homeownership is part of this, and many other things too. That is, the stability and resources that come from parents having those kinds of accumulated assets make a huge difference. (And it’s not necessarily money…you can, as many know, be house-poor and living on ramen but still own the house.)

In fact…

If you compare kids from the SAME general categories when it comes to this kind of asset wealth, they do equally well (or badly), regardless of race.

Kids whose parents (or parent actually) have asset wealth all do equally well, regardless of race.

Kids whose parents lack this do equally poorly, regardless of race.

————-
————

From Interview With Dalton Conley

PBS: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-03-03.htm

Dalton Conley is director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research (CASSR) and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America.

What does the wealth gap have to do with race?

The one statistic that best captures the state of racial inequality in America today is wealth, or net worth. If you want to know your net worth, just add up everything you own, subtract all your debts and that’s your net worth.

Today, the average Black family has only one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family. That difference has seemingly grown since the 1960s, since the Civil Rights triumphs, and is not explained by other factors like education, earnings rates or savings rates. It is really the legacy of racial inequality from generations past. No other measure captures the legacy – the cumulative disadvantage of race for minorities or cumulative advantage of race for whites – than net worth or wealth.

The wealth gaps between blacks and whites aren’t explained by income. In fact, if you compare people at the bottom of the income distribution – say, a family that makes around $15,000 a year, you’ll find that the average black family that earns $15,000 year in income has $0 net worth, or is in debt actually. Compare that with the average white family that earns $15,000 a year, and they have a good $10,000 to $15,000 in equity. That means being poor, being at the bottom of the income distribution, really means two different things depending on whether you are black or white.

That white family has a little bit of a cushion. If unemployment strikes, as it does so often to people at the bottom of the economic distribution, they’ve got some means to ride out the storm. They might have a car that will increase the radius of their job search. They might have this money that they can spend in case of a medical emergency, even if they don’t have health insurance. But compare that to the situation for a poor black family with $0 or negative net worth. There is no cushion. There is nothing in between the paycheck and homelessness, so to speak.

The same kind of disparity emerges at the upper end of the income distribution. If you compare, say, a white family that earns $50,000 with an African American family that earns $50,000, you’ll find that the white family has about double the net worth – about $80,000 to $100,000 of net worth compared to about $40,000 to $50,000 of net worth for the African American family at that income level. So when you are talking about the difference between financing their kid’s college education, starting a new business, moving if they need to move for a better job opportunity – having $100,000 versus $50,000 in net worth might make the difference between upward mobility and stagnation.

How does wealth affect life outcomes?

The single largest item in most people’s nest egg is the family home. That has enormous consequences for the next generation. It means, for example, that if you own your home and have significant equity, you’re in a high-property tax district, and you’re going to a good, well-funded public school.

It means that when it’s time to go to college, if you don’t have money in the bank, you can always take a second mortgage and draw off the equity in your home to finance your kids’ college education. It means that you’re in a neighborhood, most likely in the suburbs, where jobs are on the increase, and not in the inner city where jobs are on the decrease.

It means that you’re in a neighborhood where your neighbors control information and access to jobs. So you’re getting the cultural aspects by virtue of living in a high property value area and you can get your kids better job connections. It means that if you want to finance your kids’ job search after school, you’ll have equity to support them for a while.

These are just a few of the ways that having wealth, or owning a home, has enormous consequences for the next generation, not to mention one’s own old age.

How does home ownership help you accumulate wealth?

There is this tendency for white Americans to see the structure of their aid in the form of tax credits and not as aid, or government assistance, or welfare. But they see other forms of assistance, like reduced rents or welfare benefits, as a direct handout from Big Brother.

Owning your home, first of all, gets you a big mortgage deduction. That means you pay less income tax than you would be paying if you were renting and making similar monthly payments. Second, it probably places you in a community that has higher property values than one where you were just renting. Owner-occupied communities tend to be valued more, and that means that the property tax base is higher. That means that local services, everything from garbage services on up to the public school system, most importantly, are going to be better off in that community. So, without even having to spend your equity in your home, you are getting benefits from it.

Third, there is the ability to borrow off that equity. You can finance starting up a business by taking a second mortgage. You can pay for your kids to go to college through a second mortgage. You can finance your retirement by selling your home. Since homes have increased so much in value over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, people can finance their retirements through the sale of their home and the capital gains they get from it. The home has been a central part of savings for most American families in the latter half of the 20th century. White Americans that is.

What role did the government play in shaping housing and wealth?

The American government provided low-interest loans to returning veterans and other white Americans after World War II. This created a boom in home ownership and helped suburbanize America, but blacks were excluded from participating. At this same time, the government was building high-rise public housing for minorities in inner cities. The segregation in America between a largely dark inner city and a largely white suburban community is not something that just magically happened from market forces. It is part and parcel government policy.

When the government instituted rental housing in inner cities, in the form of public housing projects, for poor minorities, and then developed home ownership in low-cost, suburban communities for low-income whites, where you could put almost nothing down, they created this incredible wealth gap.

What does housing have to do with wealth?

Where one’s family lives in America is not just a matter of taste and preference. It has important consequences for the perpetuation of advantage or disadvantage across generations for a lot of reasons. First, you have the issue of housing and wealth. The majority of Americans hold most of their wealth in the form of home equity. So, that is their nest egg. It is their savings bank. They are living in their savings bank.

To make matters worse, the way that we finance education in America public schools is based on local property taxes. This means even if you never cash in the value of your home, just living in a high property value district or a rental and low property value district is going to affect what kind of school your kids go to.

Increasingly, there are lawsuits in various states against this way of financing, where school funding is based on local property taxes. But still, it’s the dominant form. We pay for our schools locally based on property taxes. So, in high value neighborhoods, which are predominantly white, you are getting well-funded schools. And in low-value neighborhoods, which tend to be predominantly minority, you are getting inadequately funded schools.

The constraints that minorities face in the housing market doesn’t just affect quality of life issues, you know, and the selection of homes and styles that people can live in. It really has enormous consequences for economic stability and upward mobility and the life chances of the next generation.

Because minorities have faced limited housing options in the past, now they are usually confined to areas that have worse environment conditions, have poor school funding, have increased risk of violent crime, have worse tax bases. Plus their homes have less equity value, so even if they want to move, they are less able to afford to. Therefore the whole economic structure of the next generation can be really readily viewed in the limited housing selections of the previous generation.

Didn’t the civil rights era fix everything?

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s really marks both an opportunity and a new danger in terms of racial relations in America. On the one hand, the Civil Rights era officially ended inequality of opportunity. It officially ended de jure legal inequality, so it was no longer legal for employers, for landlords, or for any public institution or accommodations to discriminate based on race. At the same time, those civil rights triumphs did nothing to address the underlying economic and social inequalities that had already been in place because of hundreds of years of inequality.

The danger lies in the fact that many white Americans see the civil rights changes as having solved or addressed the racial problem, because it addresses the rules of the game. And many minorities recognize that because the starting line is so different for whites and blacks, it is almost irrelevant that the rules of the game were altered to be more fair. You really have this danger, where there is a complacency about issues of inequality, because we have addressed the official forms of segregation and discrimination.

How did the wealth gap come about?

There’s a lot of reasons why there are enormous wealth gaps between minorities and whites in America. The most simple answer is, it takes money to make money. Part of the reason that there’s this enormous gap is because whites have long had higher wages and wealth to pass on from generation to generation. And it’s like a snowball – it gets bigger and bigger as it gets passed on, and the interest gets compounded. That’s partly the reason why the wealth gap has actually increased since the 1960s, since the civil rights times.

But that’s not the whole story. There’s a long history of exclusion of minorities from wealth accumulation in America, going back to right after the Civil War.

First of all, during slavery, slaves were forbidden legally in most cases from owning anything, including their own bodies. After the Civil War, Jim Crow laws instituted policies such as the Black Codes, which required black entrepreneurs to pay, for example, a $100 licensing fee but required whites to pay nothing. Back in 1870, $100 was basically like a million dollars today. It would shut people out of business. So blacks in the 19th century through that mechanism, and through pure terror, threats of lynching, were precluded from becoming business owners, as one example.

By the 20th century, you had the institution of redlining as a policy in which banks rated neighborhoods for loans based on a four-tier system, red being the lowest ranking that a neighborhood could get. And African American neighborhoods were invariably given this red circle around them, and no loans from private banks would go into that system. That was a policy that was initiated by the federal government and adopted by private lenders.

Fast forward to the New Deal, when Roosevelt really cut a devil’s deal with white southern senators. He didn’t overtly exclude blacks from Social Security, but subtly did it by excluding agricultural workers and domestic workers, who were predominantly minorities, from receiving Social Security benefits. This was done explicitly to appease southern Senators, to exclude African Americans, who were disproportionately employed in those two sectors. It wasn’t until the Truman Administration that that got corrected. But there’s a whole generation of elderly African Americans that didn’t receive Social Security benefits, when in fact, it was the biggest giveaway of all, because no one had paid into the system yet.

So you had whites receiving this sort of windfall, and blacks not getting it. More poor black elderly not receiving Social Security means that working families in the African American community have to support them and pay for it. So it’s not only an issue of that generation. It trickles down through issues of inheritance and having to support the aged.

Fast forward again to after World War II when you have two separate American housing policies. You have this really pro home ownership policy where the government guaranteed low-interest loans for whites in suburban America and helped them obtain wealth. And for minorities you get rental, large-scale, inner-city public housing, which of course is a wealth destruction policy.

In the 1960s there were occasional efforts to foster minority asset accumulation, but they really focused on things like financial skills, and community benefit which was, by definition, nonprofit. These efforts really didn’t focus on rectifying the enormous wealth inequalities that had grown up to that point.

Until we correct the fundamental wealth inequalities, these little programs of financial education and other sorts of cultural issues aren’t going to make much of a difference, because the underlying economic structure is still unequal.

I also would like to mention, by the way, that savings rates are the same for blacks and whites. That’s a common stereotype, you know, of why these gaps exist – the idea that white people save more. And the data show that’s simply not true.

But aren’t there cultural factors that affect performance and have nothing to do with wealth?

Many social observers point to outcome differences between blacks and whites, say in education, where the college graduation rate for whites is double that of blacks. Or in occupational achievement, where whites are twice as likely to have a white collar or managerial job as blacks. Or in income, where white family income is on average about double that of the African-American unit. Or family structure, where whites are much more likely than African Americans to delay childbearing past their teenage years and until marriage. In almost any realm of life you can think of, there are racial disparities.

Often when policymakers or social scientists want to compare the outcomes between black and white kids, they’ll look at kids who come from families with the same income level. And when you make that comparison, you’ll find that there’s still a racial gap. People often point to this as something cultural or innate.

But often when we’re talking about these racial disparities, we’re comparing apples and oranges, because there’s still an enormous wealth gap between those families with the same income level.

And I find that when you make the right comparison – when you compare a black kid from a family with the same income and wealth level as the white kid from the similar economic situation – rates of college graduation are the same; rates of employment and work hours are the same; rates of welfare usage are the same.

So when we’re talking about race in terms of a cultural accounting of these differences or a genetic accounting of these differences, we’re really missing the picture, because we’re making the wrong comparison. We’re not comparing blacks and whites on an equal footing if we don’t take into consideration these wealth differences in addition to the income differences.

So a lot of times when we’re talking about race it’s really indirectly race. It’s that race is associated with these vast income and wealth differences. And that’s what’s driving these seemingly cultural or behavioral differences in the next generation. The real issue is inequality.

Why don’t we just replace race with class then?

In the post Civil Rights era it’s very difficult to talk about race and class as two separate entities, because they overlap so much in our society. Many things that we associate with race on the surface, like differences in savings rates or differences in education and performance, are really class differences when you get the data and compare individuals coming from similar economic circumstances.

But the complicating factor is that those very economic circumstances are determined by race, through historical inequalities; through contemporary dynamics where whites get jobs disproportionately more than blacks do and other minority groups. So race matters, but it often matters indirectly through the class position, the economic situation of a family.

How does past wealth help the future generation?

As individuals, we like to think that our property is a result of our talent, hard work or even luck – that it’s our individual fruits of labor. But economists have shown that about 50-80% of our lifetime wealth accumulation is really attributable, in one way or another, to past generations.

Inheritance actually plays a small role in that. What’s more common is something like your parents financing your college education, supporting you while you’re in school or taking care of you, letting you live with them, while you’re looking for a job. It’s also little gifts along the way, co-signing the loan for a mortgage, that sort of thing.

All those kind of things lead to lifetime wealth accumulation. And it’s this enormous debt we have to our ancestors’ wealth that largely explains the perpetuation – in addition to discrimination and government policies – of racial equality in wealth over generations.

So a lot of our wealth comes from our ancestors. Since whites have wealth in their family histories to a disproportionate amount, they’re able to confer wealth upon their descendants, and this reproduces racial inequality.

Blacks, on the other hand, tend to have not had wealth accumulation in the past generations for a variety of reasons. But whatever those reasons, even if the current generation makes a lot of money – because there’s not also the past wealth to pass on, this racial inequity in wealth gets reproduced generation after generation, and maybe in fact gets worse.

How does the housing market continue to perpetuate disparity?

The housing market is a place where culture meets economics – where values about what people want and where they want to live actually influence prices. Whites control the market by virtue of pure numbers, being the largest group. So when whites want to live somewhere, prices go up, and when whites don’t want to live somewhere, prices go down.

If you compare housing in black and white neighborhoods that’s otherwise exactly equal – the quality of the housing is the same, the income level of the residents is the same, education system is the same, almost everything is the same – you’ll find that the white housing will be worth more precisely because it’s white. Because whites are the biggest group in the marketplace, their preferences count the most in terms of supply and demand. So wherever whites want to live, housing values will be high.

The flip side is that if whites don’t want to live somewhere, the value of houses in that neighborhood will be less. Think about it: if you have a group that makes up 12-14% of the population like African Americans do – or even 25% of the population if you take the entire non-white population of the United States – they can’t compare with the demand created by the other 75-80% of the population, so houses in neighborhoods where whites don’t want to live will be depressed by virtue of supply and demand.

The evidence shows that even if a house is in exactly the same condition – it’s been kept up at the same rate, the neighborhood is almost exactly the same, but it’s black racially – it’s going to be worth less money than a similar situated white neighborhood.

At one time we had explicit legal racial covenants and/or redlining policies on the part of banks. Today we don’t need those anymore, because once we’ve segregated the market, it becomes in whites’ interest to perpetuate the divisions. Whites get a boost in their property values by maintaining a segregation of the marketplace, maintaining their position as the dominant group in the housing market. So once you sort of have the initial push of racial covenants or redlining or any other policy that segregated the housing market, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy after that.

And in fact, there’s a vicious cycle here. Because when a neighborhood, a previously white neighborhood starts to integrate, even if individual whites don’t have personal or psychological animosity or racial hatred, they still have an economic incentive to leave. Because they recognize that others might make the same calculation and leave first.

And therefore, if there’s a rash of selling by whites, which are the biggest group in the marketplace, prices will go down, by virtue of the laws of supply and demand. So you get a vicious circle where whites calculate that other whites are going to sell when the neighborhood integrates. Therefore, they want to sell first to avoid losses, and they actually make it happen – they make white flight happen and drive down property values when the neighborhood becomes more integrated.

It’s obviously disadvantageous to African Americans who want to accumulate equity in integrated or in predominantly black neighborhoods. But people don’t talk about how it’s advantageous to whites.

What’s in it for whites?

The strongest argument you can make to white people is that the current system is not in their own interest, in the long run. The fact is that homeowners and people who have a stake in the American dream are better citizens. So when you systematically shut out a group from wealth ownership, from their slice of the American pie, you’re creating an unstable and dangerous situation. You’re inviting civil unrest. You’re inviting crime. You’re inviting a situation where there’s incredible tension.

When you have an inclusive society, a republic of property owners where everyone has the opportunity and reality of owning, then you create a stable society where people care about their communities and have a stake in their future. And it’s in everybody’s interest for everybody in America to have a stake in the future in terms of asset accumulation and economic self-sufficiency.

What about affirmative action?

A lot of people say that affirmative action is problematic because it’s giving preference to a single group, but we’re doing that already all the time in our “colorblind” society. Take the example of college admissions. Sure, there are racial preferences, but those are only meant to countervail some of the more subtle preferences that tend to benefit whites. For example, look at legacies. Kids who have a parent who went to that college have an increased chance of getting into the college. It’s an explicit policy among admissions officers. Since whites, in the past, were more likely to have gone to college, especially elite colleges, that’s conferring racial advantage, without ever being an explicit racial policy. Affirmative action is one way to counteract that.

Another criticism of affirmative action is that it stigmatizes the group that’s receiving the aid. So if a white sees a minority kid in the hallways of Yale or Harvard, they always think, well, did he get in because of affirmative action or does he really “deserve” to be here? No one says the same thing about legacies, who get in at a much higher rate. Now, that’s because race is something that we can clearly mark or identify, in a way that you can’t see whether someone’s parent went to Yale or Harvard on their lapel when they’re walking down the hallway, as well.

So, it is true that affirmative action as it’s currently designed has some stigmatizing aspects, but it can be mended. I think it shouldn’t be eliminated, because the absence of it would mean that we’re doing nothing at all to level the playing field, when we recognize there’s enormous disparities.

also within single parent families who are more likely to be poor than 2 parent families.

single mother families are more like to be poor than single father families. and a disproportionate amount of those single mother families are single black mothers? why is that?

but yeah. having equal access to education. not being saddled with debt. those would seem to make a huge difference in equaling things out for everyone.

zn wrote:

The American government provided low-interest loans to returning veterans and other white Americans after World War II. This created a boom in home ownership and helped suburbanize America, but blacks were excluded from participating….When the government instituted rental housing in inner cities, in the form of public housing projects, for poor minorities, and then developed home ownership in low-cost, suburban communities for low-income whites, where you could put almost nothing down, they created this incredible wealth gap.

———————

Yeah, see that is what interests ‘me’. That part of the ‘racism’ conversation.
I’m just not, personally interested in the ‘why do white cops do this or that to black people’ part of it.

Personally, I’m way more interested in the history of ‘economic racism’. Cause i think
thats the most fruitful place to ‘start’. Things flow from there. White people think this or that group of blacks is poor because the are ‘lazy’ or inferior etc. Well no. Study the actual history of wealth-class in America…..know the history.

Do people know the history? No. So that then leads to the conversation about ‘education’ in this corporotacracy. Why isn’t that history taught in grade school? What is taught instead? Etc.

w
v

I would guess most Americans view the “Protestant work ethic” as beyond reproach or criticism. That this is what “made America great.” I would also guess they find it entirely innocent as a concept. In reality, it’s all based upon very wealthy people, who themselves enjoyed tremendous amounts of leisure time — scolding and chiding the poor, small farmers, self-providers, artisans and the like who chose not to go to work for the capitalists in their factories. They chose, instead, to provide for themselves, with their own two hands, to control their own production, hours they worked, when and where and so on. Getting “the church” to go along with this work-shaming was a major stroke of genius, of course, and much more effective than the original attempts at work-shaming.

The rising capitalists also managed to get the state to help them move reluctant workers (formerly self-employed) into those factories by enclosing their lands, kicking them off them, passing laws that prevented certain kinds of hunting and fishing — extending ancient feudal prohibitions even more, etc. etc. These measures, along with the forced and violent unification of markets, and the destruction of local markets via the process of mass production itself, eventually did force the self-employed to work for others. They had no other choice. Their own ability to provide for themselves and their families had been destroyed.

Billy_T wrote:

I Getting “the church” to go along with this work-shaming was a major stroke of genius, of course, and much more effective than the original attempts at work-shaming.

—————
Yeah, the Major-Superstition, and the Education-indoctrination systems
work hand in hand. As well as the other corporotacracy-sub-systems.

…there’s a reason the anarchists and commies burned the churches
during the Spanish civil war. Turned out to be bad strategy though.
I think Cornell West knows that. He brings the anti-capitalist message
along with a liberation-theology… Thats probly necessary given the
religious-facts-on-the-ground…

I heard Obama on my car radio saying “there are no black Americans or white Americans..there’s only Americunz…”
I thot to myself, well he’s sellin that to white people. Cuz, thats
a hard sell to non-whites, given the history of racism…

w
v

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by wv.

but how does one increase one’s net assets?

the article points out that letting a kid get am education without needing to lean on those net assets would be a way to counteract that. otherwise the kid either cannot afford school or is forced to pay off debt for the rest of his life. not having debt can allow him or her to concentrate on things such as home ownership or increasing wealth rather than having to crawl out of the red.

What that research points out is that poor in terms of income isn’t really the issue…it’s net worth or assets.

yes. but that is also controlling for income.

so it’s one issue but not the whole issue.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by InvaderRam.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by InvaderRam.