Wow, this thread sure blew up.
Sticking to just page 5 for now; may catch up with the others later. Sorry if any of this is redundant.
I don't disagree, but the fact remains that more minority offenders are arrested and convicted for violent crime.
Okay, but that's not what you SAID.
A United States Department of Justice report which surveyed homicide statistics between 1974 and 2004 stated that of the crimes surveyed, 52.2% of the offenders were Black, 45.8% were White, and 2% were Other Races. Of the victims in those same crimes, 50.9% were White, 46.9% were Black, and 2.1% were Other Races. The report further stated that "most murders are intraracial" with 86% of White murders committed by Whites, and 94% of Black murders committed by Blacks.[21] However, the document does not provide any details concerning what races or ethnicities are included in the designations "White", "Black", or "Other Races".
Okay, those are good stats for what they are, and they do indeed support "most" rather than merely "a disproportionate number". Thanks for the link.
But what you ORIGINALLY said was indeed "commit", not "are arrested and convicted for". The stats are not necessarily indicative of actual commission of crimes, for reasons TA has pointed out and the Wikipedia article itself points out.
I'm not saying the law does not set up situations like these, I am saying the law is not (as you are implying) inherently racist and is not directly furthering the pervasive racism in our society.
Well, I disagree utterly.
The definition of "threatening" is so vague that it must, perforce, take the ground-standerer's own biases into account.
I will not deny that, as a symptom of other factors, it has managed to for lack of a better term, put a racial group in it's sights. Get rid of SYG because it let an idiot like George Zimmerman with extremely poor judgement murder a child, not because of some perception that it's making racism worse in this country.
I maintain that if he had murdered a white child, the police would not have let him go free.
I grant that this is a hypothetical, but do you know of any examples of SYG being successfully employed in a minority-on-white killing, against an unarmed victim? Let alone a minor?
I'm not assuming that they're comprehensive, but I'm also not buying the opposite assumption that Whites are committing enough crimes to equalize the table but they're just not being tried for any of them.
I don't see why not.
Per your quoted section, the gap between black and white perps, on murder alone, is about 6 points.
Now, that "white" statistic includes Hispanics (because Hispanic is not a race). It's not immediately clear to me how it breaks down on Anglo/Hispanic lines.
That said, if you broaden from murder alone to "violent crime" in general? Yeah, I think Anglos could cross that 50% threshold.
Can we agree that a greater amount of crime is committed by persons at, just above, and below the poverty line?
Can we agree that a greater percentage of persons at, above and below that line are minorities, mostly due to institutionalized racism as I've already discussed?
Depends what you mean by "a greater percentage" and how far "above" you draw that line. Are you claiming that there are merely a disproportionate number of minorities around the poverty line than in the general population, or are you claiming that a MAJORITY -- ie, more than 50% -- of people living in poverty are minorities?
Because the former is correct, and the 2010 census data you linked seems to imply that the latter is -- at least in the case of children, and where you don't consider anything above the poverty line at all.
A couple demographic caveats: it's not juveniles who are committing the majority of those crimes; poor people statistically have more children; Latinos in particular are likely to come from a culture that encourages larger families. So all those things could be skewing the (fairly dramatic) results in that "Children Under 18 Living in Poverty" chart.
And that's before we tackle the "above that line" phrase. How far above? The farther you get, obviously, the closer you get to the median income. What do the numbers look like, say at $1000/year above the poverty line? $5000? $10000?
SYG is not racist, it's classist.
Weeeeell, it's both.
I would tend to agree that a racial minority in a suit and tie is less likely to pass the vague definition of "threatening" than a white guy in a wife-beater. BUT I would hypothesize that, if we were to do a Brown v Board doll test (note: Fredric Wertham was not all bad!), a member of a racial minority would be classified as "threatening" more frequently than a white person with an identical build and outfit.
(And that's without even beginning to get into cases where clothing can denote both "rich" AND "thuggish" -- which begins to take us into the subject of organized crime, which is a whole other can of worms.)