Loren Pechtel

To a fair degree I am. Poverty is being poor coupled with the inability to reasonably plan to work one's way out of it. It's a *CULTURAL* phenomenon, though, not a racial one.

Note that it's not independant of SES--the attitude without the lack of assets simply results in a lazy person who squanders their money.

ohwilleke

I don't think that comparable statistics are possible.

To give one example, the demographic of African-Americans who trace their lineage to the American slave trade, and African-Americans who are recent immigrants from Africa, are very different.

African-Americans of recent immigration from Africa tend to be more educated than any racial group in the U.S., tend to come from different religious backgrounds, and are not culturally part of American black life. Dominicans and Haitians and Jamaicians also have a significantly different culture and different demographic makeup to go with it.

American blacks, in contrast, (i.e. those who trace their lineage to the American slave trade) are an insignificant proportion of the population of almost every country but the United States outside military bases and perhaps Paris (American blacks are even quite uncommon in Canada and Mexico).

The black population of France is predominately, a group of immigrants from French colonies in Africa.

The black population of Latin America is part of a system of racial classification in which mulatto, mestizo, and white are all important components. The U.S. census bureau, recognizing this reality, but not up to replicating the Latin American racial classificatio system, simply lumped everyone who was part of that classification system into the rubric "Hispanic", even though the mostly mestizo Mexican-American population, for example, has little in common with the strongly European descended Cuban-American population, or the largely black, Haitian-American population.

To be black in Haiti or Jamaica, means something very different culturally, than it does to be black in Alabama or Detroit, even though in that case, both share a lineage of the slave trade.

I don't agree with those who say that race is simply a meaningless concept. American blacks are actually a quite well defined cultural phenomena which extends to the vast majority of the U.S. The blacks in South Central L.A., the blacks in New York City, the blacks in Gary, Indiana, and the blacks in Atlanta have far more in common with each other, than they do with recent immigrant blacks from Africa in the U.S. or France, or with African descended people in the Caribbean or Africa itself.

But, there simply isn't anything to compare the American experience to in any meaningful way. You aren't comparing apples and apples. Most of the world has ethnic divisions, but almost none of the world has the same ethnic division as the U.S. does.

Consider Europe. Almost every country in Europe has a "white" population that is far more homogeneous than that in the U.S. In the U.S., people who are considered white, increasingly have little identity with European subgroups. This is a continuing trend. As recently as the 1950s, whites who had ancestors from Catholic Europe (Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Poland, for example) were considered minority outsiders, while today, they are mostly just considered "white" unless they are recent immigrants. In Finland, or Belgium, or Italy, the vast majority of people in a city or region will trace their roots there not just a couple of generations, but for thousands of years. The people who live in Baravia have not just lived in Germany since its inception (only 1870), but have lived in Bavaria as far back as they can trace their lineages.

The "minority" population in a place like Bavaria consists not only of the most recent immigrant group (mostly Muslim Turks), but also of Gypsies who lack the same kind of eternally fixed geographic links, and of European outsiders from places like Italy, the U.K., Finland and Berlin.

Each European country draws what Americans would think of as a "non-white" population mostly from its former colonies. England is full of people who hail from India and Pakistan and the Carribean. France has many Algerians and people from West African colonies. Germany has many Turks. The Netherlands has many Morrocans and Turks (9% of the population). Many European nations, especially those that were never Colonial powers, are far more homogeneous than any American whitebread suburb. Greece is 98% Greek Orthodox and Greek in descent, for example.

Trying to compare crime rates among South Asians in England, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Morrocans in the Netherlands, and Basques in Spain (a home grown minority), and Koreans in Japan, to the U.S. experience is not meaningful.

Are crime rates strongly different by race in each of those countries? I don't doubt it. But, that doesn't make comparisons very useful.

Interestingly, both Sweden and England, to take two examples, while having seemingly far more homogeneous populations than the U.S. does, also have a sort of caste system which is much more rigid than its American counterpart. Both maintain governmental statistics, not unlike those kept in the U.S. by race, based on social classes A, B, or C. Really rigid tracking with long term consequences in schools starts much earlier in most of Europe than in the U.S. (around age 11 in Germany, France, the U.K. and Sweden, as opposed to about age 16 in most American high schools), and most of this tracking is closely linked to social class which is acknowledged within an ethnically homogeneous group to a much greater degree.

Oliver Twist may have been a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, with an English accent to boot, but he also had no doubt that he was at the bottom of the heap and had only the barest of a glimmer of a hope of ever escaping his lot.

Jesse

I recently read about a book that argued that a lot of the differences between blacks and whites that are still present when you control for income become a lot smaller if you control for "wealth", ie assets like property ownership:

http://www.yale.edu/isps/journal/volume2/conley.html

http://csf.colorado.edu/authors/Gime...ha/conley.html

http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0009/scoop.html

Here's the book's amazon.com page:

Being Black, Living in the Red

Also, if anyone is interested in the debate on biological diffces between races in Science & Skepticism which GFA mentioned earlier, here it is:

Race and Rushton

lunachick

This might also interest you.

Drug busts in Texas town raise doubts Forty of the 43 people arrested during a sting in Tulia are black, but that group makes up less than 10 percent of its population.

More.

From Refuse and Resist

The whole thing is just yuk, don'cha think?

Anyway, I know all this focuses on one small town in Tex-ass and is an extreme case, but it does make one wonder how much of this kind of thing goes on on a smaller, less obvious scale elsewhere. Poor blacks up against middle-class, white juries? Do they really stand a chance in some cases? I'd think again on some of those stats and what they may or may not really represent.

God Fearing Atheist

ohwill,

I dont remember where I read it, but I remember African-Americans and individuals of African decent living in Europe having similar racial admixtures (about 1/4). I'll try and find the source.

Thanks to Jesse for posting that link (to my other thread) by the way. I can get really lazy.

God Fearing Atheist

What, you mean like urban anti-intellectualism?

The hip-hop subculture that places a distinct emphasis on getting rich quick and living the good life as opposed to working hard?

-GFA

Loren Pechtel

Originally posted by God Fearing Atheist
What, you mean like urban anti-intellectualism?

Not specifically anti-intellectualism, but the people I'm referring to certainly don't care about education.

The hip-hop subculture that places a distinct emphasis on getting rich quick and living the good life as opposed to working hard?

Again, sort of. If they are always hunting a way of getting rich quick they won't actually do very well.

kaii2

It's the chicken and the egg. Am I a poor criminal because my life is bad? Or is my life bad because I'm a poor criminal. The ugly duckling was probably a slacker too. Human beings are extremely shallow creatures. Physical appearance plays a HUGE role in how we treat each other. Always has.

ohwilleke

You are missing the point. First, there are precious few people of African descent living in Europe. Second, culturally (which is the only meaningful way to define race), they have little in common. Third, what the hell does a 1/4 racial admixture mean? Of what with what?

Worldtraveller

Original Quote
My early background was in education, and it is a common fallacy to put too much weight on IQ tests. It has been shown that all of the common (i.e. "popular") IQ tests are biased in some way.
Many were nearly level, but even these showed a bit (5 or so points) of bias trends.

I will research some links and follow this up.

Basically, similar to many 'competency tests' given in US high schools, the questions themselves are worded in such a way as to make it more difficult for anyone of a different (non white, or "middle america") background to interpret the questions.
Often, when asked another way, it was shown that some individuals actually knew many answers that were missed.

I worked as a tutor and did a fair amount of volunteer work with a bunch of students coming to the community college after schooling on the indian reservation.

Many of them had a difficult time adjusting, not because they weren't smart, or didn't try hard, but because they were used to a different mode of teaching.

As a tutor, one can adjust the teaching methods to suit the student, but in a classroom, many of these students get left behind simply because the pedagogical methods are different.
The same idea applys to standardized tests. It tests standardization more than intelligence or capability.

Just my $0.02 worth.