This post is mostly a data dump, but I personally think the data included is quite fascinating. Part of my motivation was in response to another blog. I already responded once before. That previous post was about Appalachia. This one is more general— mostly about race, crime and violence, but also including issues of poverty and class, history and ethnicity, health and environmentalism; et cetera.
My thinking about all this has been going on for quite a few years now. There is a lot of data out there, but it takes immense effort to even begin to grasp what it all might mean. Trying to analyze the data can seem like a fool’s errand, for many reasons.
The breakdown by race, for example, is pretty much meaningless. Some argue that Hispanics should be separated from ‘whites’. But why? Other ethnic groups (Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc) used to be separated and at the time they had high crime rates. No one has a clue what the crime rates of these groups are today.
Also, should we try to separate the percentage of crimes by the percentage of racial genetics. So, if a black person is 60% European, then 60% of their crime should be put into the ‘white’ category, right? In that case, how do we categorize the crimes of blacks who have no detectable African genetics (about 1 in 20 blacks)?
The reality, however, is that we don’t know the genetic breakdown of criminals. Considering that, shouldn’t we ask who is determining the race of criminals when it gets recorded in official records? Is it self-identification or is it what the arresting police officer perceives, the same police officer that is arresting people based on his perception of race, as studies show?
Is it surprising in a racist society that people who are perceived as a black or another minority are more likely to be arrested for the very crimes that are perceived as being black/minority crimes, whether or not that is the case? And is it surprising that those who are arrested are more likely to be perceived as black or another minority? In the eyes of a police officer, what is the difference between a light-skinned black and dark-skinned white, both before and after the officer decides to stop and confront the person?
It is always good to keep in mind that FBI statistics are arrest data, which may have little correlation to crime data. We know that blacks get arrested more (along with convicted more and imprisoned longer) than whites, even for crimes that whites commit as much or more. Also, police are more likely to see black as carrying guns when they aren’t and more likely to see whites as not carrying guns when they are, despite the fact that whites are more likely to carry both legal and illegal guns than blacks. It’s no surprise that the police have a bad habit of shooting blacks first and asking questions later. Once dead, blacks tend to be portrayed as criminals, and without video footage the police can say whatever they want.
Interestingly, overall crime arrests for whites are about equal to their percentage of the population (here is the 2009 FBI data, in order to compare against the 2010 census data). It’s only with certain crimes that whites show disproportionate lower arrest rates, whatever that may say about their actual crime rates. There are some crimes, however, that whites commit at much higher rates. There are such things as high rates of white-perpetrated child molestation, but I don’t know if that means whites really are more inclined to pedophilia or just more likely to get reported.
A more interesting example is everything related to intoxication. Whites have a major drinking problem for some reason. You are way more likely to get killed by a white drunk driver, but these deaths aren’t included as part of the homicide rates. Even with drugs, whites have a greater predisposition to addiction, although not necessarily more drug use, depending on the drug. This might relate to their greater rates of carrying and dealing drugs, even as blacks get arrested at higher rates for drug crimes because of racial profiling (the Drug War has been mostly fought in poor minority neighborhoods, because they are a population that can’t easily defend itself: legally, financially, and in the mainstream media’s court of public opinion).
What racists like to focus on are the arrest data on murder offenders. The total numbers between whites and blacks are about equal, the difference not being statistically significant. Racists argue that whites are a larger population and so have a lower rate. That misses the point that there is no single population of either blacks or whites.
Violent crime is mostly about poverty and all that goes with it: unemployment, homelessness, heavy metal toxicity, undiagnosed mental health issues, lack of healthcare, food deserts, underfunded public schools, general lack of opportunity and resources, etc; not to mention cross-generational carryover effects from past environments caused by epigenetics, as even slavery is well within the known range of epigenetic influence. When controlled for poverty (both in terms of severity and concentration), the differences in violent crime rates disappear; other non-criminal social problems also equalize along economic lines. The fact that the total numbers of murders for blacks and whites are about the same is merely indicative that the total numbers of severe and concentrated poverty are fairly close (and becoming closer), although the percentages are different within each race.
It sucks to be a poor white in a poor area about as much as it sucks to be a poor black in a poor area. Pointing to statistics is small comfort to a poor white. Class ends up getting conflated simultaneously with race and crime, but a lot of this has to do with inequality. Poverty most often manifest as major social problems where high levels of inequality are found. The United States does indeed have high inequality compared to less violent Western countries, and that goes along with the United States also having lower economic mobility which of course is worse among minorities, but also worse where poor whites are concentrated (not to ignore the fact that poor whites do even more badly where black poverty is found the most, which so happens to directly map onto the areas of former slavery and the continuing regional legacies of inequality).
One thing I noticed in the homicide data is the shifts across ages. The lowest rates of black murders compared to white murders shows up in the oldest demographics. This fits the lead toxicity hypothesis. Lead toxicity mostly hit poor minority communities during specific decades. The oldest blacks grew up during a time prior to the spike of childhood lead exposure. On top of that, the oldest blacks reached adulthood before the deindustrialization and ghettoization of the inner cities. So they never experienced the high rates of unemployment that younger blacks have known nor did they experience the drug wars that targeted specific generations of young black males. Though older blacks did spend much of their life during a more overtly racist time, they were able to establish their careers and families while society was more stable and the economy more prosperous.
My point is that the generational differences being greater among blacks shows that environmental factors are playing a larger role for the black population. This makes perfect sense in relation to other data. For example, it is known that environmental factors have a greater influence on IQ for the poor than for the wealthy, whereas genetic influences are nearly undetectable for the poor because of all the environmental noise of confounding factors.
That ends my personal commentary. The rest of my post will be the data dump. I’ll first share some of my previous posts. Following that is a slew of info from articles and books.
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Opportunity Precedes Achievement, Good Timing Also Helps
America and the West: A Comparison of Violence
Paranoiacs With Guns: Violence and More Violence
Death of Millions is a Statistic
No, The Poor Aren’t Undeserving Moral Reprobates
Are Blacks More Criminal, More Deserving of Punishment and Social Control?
Young Poor Darker-Skinned Minority Men
An Unjust ‘Justice’ System: Victimizing the Innocent
Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility
The Myth of Weak and Broken Black Families
Black Families: “Broken” and “Weak”
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, & the Issues Being Discussed
Paranoia of a Guilty Conscience
Crime and Incarceration, Cause and Correlation
Americans Left Behind: IQ, Education, Poverty, Race, & Ethnicity
Whose Work Counts? Who Gets Counted?
The Privilege of Even Poor Whites
To Be Poor, To Be Black, To Be Poor and Black
Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope
Union Membership, Free Labor, and the Legacy of Slavery.
Substance Control is Social Control
To Put the Rat Back in the Rat Park
Rationalizing the Rat Race, Imagining the Rat Park
The Desperate Acting Desperately
Immobility Of Economic Mobility; Or Running To Stay In Place
Consumerism, Poverty, and Economic Mobility
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Race and crime in the United States: Prison data
A 2011 study which examined the racial disparities in violent crime and incarceration from 1980 and 2008 found little difference for black share of violent offending. Racial imbalances between arrest rates and sentencing have caused some to question the disparities. The authors argued that the prior studies had been confounded by not separating Hispanics from Whites.[26] Another recent study in 2012 raises a different concern, showing that Hispanics and blacks receive considerably longer sentences for the same or lesser offenses on average than white offenders with equal or greater criminal records.[27][28] Another recent study in 2012 raises a different concern, showing that Hispanics and blacks receive considerably longer sentences for the same or lesser offenses on average than white offenders with equal or greater criminal records.[27][28] A 2012 University of Michigan Law School study found that African Americans are given longer federal sentences even when factoring prior criminal records, and that African American jail sentences tend to be roughly 10% longer than white jail sentences for the same crimes.[29]
There’s no evidence of a ‘new nationwide crime wave’
These ten charts show the black-white economic gap hasn’t budged in 50 years
Baltimore: The divided city where Freddie Gray lived and died
The Poor Have Double the Rate of Violent Crime
The overall pattern of persons in poor households having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for poor non-Hispanic white households (46.4 per 1,000) and non-Hispanic black households (43.4 per 1,000). However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels. Poor whites (56.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (51.3 per 1,000) in urban households had higher rates of violence than persons in all other types of households.
Violence against persons in poor (51 percent) and low-income (50 percent) households was more likely to be reported to police than violence against persons in mid- (43 percent) and high- (45 percent) income households.
This pattern of lower reporting of violence among mid- and high-income households held true for whites but not for blacks or Hispanics. […]
Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000).
The Myth of the Black-on-Black Crime Epidemic
- Black-on-Black homicides have decreased by 67% in 20 years, a sharper rate of decrease than white on white homicide.
- According to FBI statistics 7361 Blacks were killed by fellow African-Americans in 1991. In 2011, it dropped dramatically to 2447 African-Americans.
- Among Black youth, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are the lowest in more than 40 years.
Mass incarceration no factor in crime drop
The 134-page study, titled “What Caused the Crime Decline?” found that “when other variables are controlled for, increasing incarceration had a minimal effect on reducing property crime in the 1990s and no effect on violent crime.”
The report continued, “In the 2000s, increased incarceration had no effect on violent crime and accounted for less than one-hundredth of the decade’s property crime drop.”
Some states with large Black populations, such as Michigan, Texas, New York, and California, even reduced their prison populations during the crime decline with no adverse effects. Texas, for example, has decreased its imprisonment rate by 15 to 25 percent since 2000; at the same, both property crime and violent crime have dropped about 20 to 30 percent.[…]
The United States accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population but holds 25 percent of its incarcerated population. One in three Americans now has a criminal record. One in nine school-aged Black children has or has had a parent in prison. The Brennan Center calculates that federal prison spending has increased 1,100 percent in 30 years as a result of being overpopulated by more than 30 percent – fueling the rise of for-profit prisons that disproportionately house young Blacks and Latinos. […]
“Research has shown, in fact, that the U.S. poverty rate has increased by 20 percent because of mass incarceration rate. There are proposals on the table to cut back on mandatory minimums, to curb nonviolent drug offenses, and there is renewed attention being paid across the country to rehabilitation to lower recidivism rates. All of these proposals are worth great consideration.”
Black Children in U.S. Are Much More Likely to Live in Poverty, Study Finds
Black children were almost four times as likely as white children to be living in poverty in 2013, a new report has found, the latest evidence that the economic recovery is leaving behind some of the United States’ most vulnerable citizens.
The share of American children living in poverty fell to about 20 percent in 2013 from 22 percent in 2010, according to the report by the Pew Research Center, which analyzed data from the United States Census Bureau.
But the poverty rate remained stable for black children, while it fell for Hispanic, white and Asian children, a sign of just how pervasive and stubborn poverty has been for African-Americans, according to the report. About 38.3 percent of black children lived in poverty in 2013, nearly four times the rate for white children, at 10.7 percent. About 30.4 percent of Hispanic children and 10.1 percent of Asian children live in poverty.
For the first time since the federal government started collecting the data, the number of black children in poverty appears to have overtaken the number of poor white children, even though white children far outnumber black children in the American population, the report said. About 4.2 million black children were living in poverty in 2013, compared with 4.1 million white children, though researchers said the difference was not statistically significant.
A household in poverty in 2013 was defined as a family of four, two of whose members were children, living on an annual income of less than $23,624.
In actual numbers, there were still more Hispanic children in poverty, 5.4 million, than any other group, researchers said, a ranking the group has held since at least 2008. The Hispanic population is larger and younger than any other racial or ethnic group, and the child poverty rate is relatively high. […]
The child poverty rate is closely related to the unemployment rate, as children are more likely to be poor if their parents are unemployed.
The Crime of Innocence: White Denial, Black Rebellion and the Cost of American Obliviousness
…it is undeniably true that when it comes to our political anger and frustration (as contrasted with that brought on by alcohol and athletics) we white folks are pretty good at not torching our own communities. This is mostly because we are too busy eviscerating the communities of others—those against whom our anger is aimed. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Manila, and on down the line.
When you have the power you can take out your hatreds and frustrations directly upon the bodies of others. This is what we have done, not only in the above mentioned examples but right here at home. The so-called ghetto was created and not accidentally. It was designed as a virtual holding pen—a concentration camp were we to insist upon honest language—within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. It was created by generations of housing discrimination, which limited where its residents could live. It was created by decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. It was created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.
And all of that is violence too. It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. One need not loot a store when one can loot the residents of the community as happened in Ferguson—giving out tickets to black folks for minor infractions so as to rack up huge fines and fees, thereby funding city government on the backs of the poor. Zoning laws, eminent domain, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all of these are forms of violence, however much white America fails to understand that. They do violence to the opportunities and dreams of millions, living in neighborhoods most of us have never visited. Indeed, in neighborhoods we consider so God-forsaken that we even have a phone app now to help us avoid them.
As I was saying, it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works”—especially when in fact it does. We are, after all, here, are we not? Living proof that violence works and quite well at that, thank you very much. What is worse, as per Baldwin, is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have brought about the current crisis, and that indeed we need not even know about those conditions. That innocence, as Baldwin expressed it, was the crime, because it betrays a non-chalance that ensures the perpetuation of all the injustices against which those presumed to be uncivilized are rebelling.
Coming Apart excludes non-whites from its discussions of unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, and other troublesome social indicators, but at the end of the book Murray recalculates his findings to demonstrate that in nearly every instance the same dismal patterns hold within the colorblind proletariat. (The only notable exception is the incarceration rate, which shoots way up when you include blacks.)
Blaming Decline in Family Values for Soaring Inequality
Reading Mr. Murray’s book and all the commentary about the sources of moral collapse among working-class whites, I’ve had a nagging question: Is it really all that bad?
I mean, yes, marriage rates are way down, and labor force participation is down among working-age men (although not as much as some of the rhetoric might imply), but it’s generally left as an implication that these trends must be causing huge social ills. Are they?
Well, one thing oddly missing in Mr. Murray’s work is any discussion of that traditional indicator of social breakdown, teenage pregnancy. Why? Because it has actually been falling like a stone, according to National Vital Statistics data.
And what about crime? It’s soaring, right? Wrong, according to Justice Department data.
So here’s a thought: maybe traditional social values are eroding in the white working class — but maybe those traditional social values aren’t as essential to a good society as conservatives like to imagine.
Review – Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis
Putnam shows that as social capital has now deteriorated, poorer families generally have fewer close friends and fewer “weak ties” that help parents and their children navigate through school and work. Compared to wealthier families, poor families’ networks are disproportionately concentrated within their own extended family and perhaps a high school friend or two. He calls lower-class social circles, “redundant,” that is “their friends tend to know the same people they do, so that they lack the ‘friend of a friend’ reach available to upper-class Americans.” He reports that 64% of wealthier kids have some mentoring beyond their extended family, while on the flip side, 62% poor kids do not. This affects kids’ ability to handle difficulty at school or at home, Putnam argues, by making it difficult to navigate through challenges and build resiliency.
“Studies during the past 40 years have consistently shown that, if anything, drug usage and binge drinking are more common among privileged teenagers than among their less affluent peers,” Putnam reports. “What is different, however, are the family and community ‘air bags’ that deploy to minimize the negative consequences of drugs and other misadventures among rich kids.”
Poverty leads to death for more black Americans than whites
She said that poor white Americans are more likely to reap the benefits of living near areas with better resources and higher incomes, while poor black Americans tend to live in relatively isolated inner-city neighborhoods.
“When low-income whites can reside in close proximity to higher-income whites then they reap the benefits of living in a higher-income area and everything that goes along with that,” Nuru-Jeter said.
In black communities, economic segregation is much higher. Higher-income black people are more likely to move away from low-income black people. Poor black communities often struggle with higher crime rates, fewer grocery stores, a higher proportion of liquor stores and less green space such as parks.
“In terms of opportunity to lead the healthy life, the environment doesn’t really support that,” Nuru-Jeter said. […]
A college education, commonly believed to be a ticket out of poverty, is expensive. In fact, about half of black college students graduate with more than $25,000 in student loans. Yet even a college degree doesn’t guarantee that they will be better off. In fact, a recent Demos analysis of Americans’ net worth revealed that white high school dropouts have about the same wealth that black college graduates do.
Concentrated poverty and homicide in Chicago
If the homicide rates in the poor black areas were twice the rates in the better-off white areas, that would be significant. The differences above, averaging about 13 to one, are staggering. This is what apartheid looks like.
Let’s remember how things got this way, in Chicago and a host of other northern cities. Policies throughout the first seven decades of the 20th Century—some governmental, some commercial—hemmed blacks in geographically. So did the bombing and burning of the homes of blacks who tried moving into white neighborhoods, and the shooting and stoning of these intruders. Racial segregation combined perfectly with racial discrimination in hiring and schooling to create vast areas of concentrated poverty—most notably in housing projects, but in other black neighborhoods as well. In areas of concentrated poverty, children are far more likely to grow up with one parent or no parent, neglected and abused, amid alcoholism and drug addiction. If you want children to become violent in their teens and early 20s, these are the right ingredients. Merely having more police around to catch them in the act is like throwing thimblefuls of water on a house fire.
The Enduring Effect of Neighborhoods
Richard Florida interviewing Robert J. Sampson
Chicago is hailed as a great comeback city. Business and the arts are flourishing and it has seen extensive investment and renewal and gentrification, yet in one startling graph, you show the striking persistence of poverty across its neighborhoods from 1960 to 2000. Earlier anthropologists and sociologists like Oscar Lewis would have pointed to a so-called “culture of poverty.” You disagree with that. Explain.
“Culture of poverty” advocates typically attribute the persistence of poverty to self-defeating norms among the poor. Structural forces take a back seat. I view culture and structure as inextricably linked, with structure in the driver’s seat. So while culture matters—here Lewis was right—the question is how and why.
My data show that the poor are quite conventional morally. It is also a myth that the work ethic is weak among the poor, witness the long hours put in among first-generation immigrants in concentrated immigrant communities.
Despite commitment to mainstream values and striving to get ahead, the stigmatization heaped on poor neighborhoods and the grinding poverty of its residents are corrosive, leading to what I call “moral cynicism” and alienation from key institutions, setting up a cycle of decline. Those with the means move out, leading to further cynicism and an intensified “poverty trap” in the neighborhoods left behind.
Trust and altruism toward strangers—such as giving CPR to heart attack victims or mailing an anonymous lost letter on the street—are undermined by levels of concentrated poverty and segregation laid down as far back as 1960. Initial conditions thus matter, setting in motion a reinforcing mechanism.
Despite political change and urban social transformation toward the end of the 20th century and gentrification in the early 21st century, neighborhoods remained remarkably stable in their relative economic standing—whether at the bottom or the top. Overall, then, while cultural norms shaped by poverty may linger or take on explanatory relevance, they cannot be thought about independent of structural change and socioeconomic resources.
A good deal of the book and a great deal of your own work focuses on urban crime. In another startling graph, you show the “spatial persistence” of the rate of incarceration in Chicago neighborhoods. What causes such localized persistence of incarceration and crime?
Much interest has been focused of late on the national phenomenon of “mass incarceration.” Yet mass incarceration has a local concentration too, what we can think of as “punishment’s place.” Like the geographically concentrated nature of crime, a small proportion of communities bear the disproportionate brunt of U.S. crime policy’s experiment with mass incarceration. For example, large swaths of the Chicago, especially in the southwest and northwest, are relatively untouched by the imprisonment boom no matter which time period we examine, with almost no one sent to prison in some areas. By contrast, there is a dense and spatially contiguous cluster of areas in the near west and south central areas of Chicago that have rates of incarceration many times higher that cannot be explained away by crime differences. In fact the incarceration rate in the top African-American community is over 40 times higher than the highest incarceration rate in the white community. This is a staggering differential even for community-level comparisons —a difference of kind, not degree.
The rate of male unemployment predicts crime and incarceration in predominantly black communities much more strongly than in white communities. Incarceration is part of the cycle of “poverty traps” that find their most intense manifestation in segregated and racially isolated communities. There is a reciprocal feedback – imprisonment removes males from their families and the wider community, a form of disruption, while at the same time unemployed males drive the incarceration “input,” thus reinforcing a vicious cycle of disadvantage. Counterintuitively, then, incarceration does not just reduce crime through the incapacitation of criminals, at the same time it appears to indirectly increase future crime through a neighborhood feedback effect
Twin Pillars of Poverty in Black America: NTDs and Incarceration
In the United States of America, a higher percentage of African Americans live in poverty than any other racial/ethnic subgroup. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 27.4% of blacks lived below the poverty line in 2010, compared to 9.9% non-Hispanic whites, while 38.4% of black children (almost five million children) lived in poverty compared to 12.4% of non-Hispanic white children [1]. A high percentage of Hispanics (26.6%) and their children (35%) also live below the poverty line [1]. […]
This disturbing data undoubtedly account for a significant amount of maternal and child poverty among African Americans in the U.S. Five years ago, I proposed a second possible underlying factor, namely high rates of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) among the poor, especially in the American South [3]. NTDs are chronic infections often lasting for years that both occur in the setting of poverty and can actually cause poverty by making people too sick to go to work and causing developmental delays in childhood. My research published in a PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases article entitled, “Neglected infections of poverty in the United States of America”, identified a (previously hidden) burden of NTDs among the poor in the U.S. and mostly among people of color [3]. The leading NTDs among African Americans include toxocariasis, a parasitic cause of asthma and epilepsy; trichomoniasis, a sexually-transmitted parasitic infection, congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection that results in severe mental disabilities and deafness, congenital syphilis, and possibly dengue [3]. I estimated that the number of cases of these NTDs among African-Americans exceeds 4 million at any given time [3]. These are not rare diseases! Among Hispanics, a second group of NTDs includes Chagas disease and cysticercosis [3]. I recommended a series of measures to combat NTDs in the U.S. including programs of active surveillance, disease transmission studies and research and development efforts to produce new drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines [3].
Who Benefits From the Safety Net
Another finding of the study is that the distribution of benefits no longer aligns with the demography of poverty. African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the poor, receive 14 percent of government benefits, close to their 12 percent population share.
White non-Hispanics, who make up 42 percent of the poor, receive 69 percent of government benefits – again, much closer to their 64 percent population share.
The Nurture Assumption
by Judith Rich Harris
p. 240
I mentioned a study of African -American kids from “high risk” families —no fathers, low incomes. The ones who lived in low-income neighborhoods were more aggressive than their middle-class counterparts; aggressive behavior was the norm where they lived. But the ones who lived in mostly white, middle-class neighborhoods were not particularly aggressive. These black kids from fatherless, low-income homes were “comparable in their level of aggression” to the white, middle-class kids they went to school with. They had adopted the behavioral norms of the majority of their peers.
pp. 285-7
When the biological father is living but not living with his kids, you have a family situation that is statistically associated with unfavorable outcomes for the kids. Let me show you how it might be possible to account for the unfavorable outcomes without reference to the children’s experiences in the home or to the quality of parenting they receive there.
Most single mothers are nothing like Murphy Brown: most of them are poor. Half of all homes headed by women are below the poverty level. Divorce usually leads to a drastic decline in a family’s standard of living— that is, in the standard of living of the ex-wife and the children in her custody. 22
The loss of income impacts the kids in several ways. For one thing, it can affect their status in the peer group. Being deprived of luxuries such as expensive clothing and sporting equipment, dermatologists and orthodontists, can lower kids’ standing among their peers. 23 Money is also going to play a role in whether the kids can think about going to college. If it’s out of the question, then they may be less motivated to graduate from high school and to avoid getting pregnant.
But by far the most important thing that money can do for kids is to determine the neighborhood they grow up in and the school they attend. Most single mothers cannot afford to rear their children in the kind of neighborhood where my husband and I reared ours —the kind where almost all the kids graduate from high school and hardly any have babies. Poverty forces many single mothers to rear their children in neighborhoods where there are many other single mothers and where there are high rates of unemployment, school dropout, teen pregnancy, and crime. 24
Why do so many kids in these neighborhoods drop out, get pregnant, and commit crimes ? Is it because they don’t have fathers? That is a popular explanation, but I considered the question in Chapter 9 and came to other conclusions. Neighborhoods have different cultures and the cultures tend to be self-perpetuating; they are passed down from the parents’ peer group to the children’s peer group. The medium through which the cultures are passed down cannot be the family, because if you pluck the family out of the neighborhood and plunk it down somewhere else, the children’s behavior will change to conform with that of their peers in their new neighborhood.
It’s the neighborhood, not the family. If you look at kids within a given neighborhood, the presence or absence of a father doesn’t make much difference. Researchers collected data on 254 African-American teenage boys from an inner city in the northeast United States . Most of the boys lived in households headed by a single mother; others lived with both biological parents, a mother and a stepfather, or in other kinds of family arrangements. Here are the researchers’ conclusions:
“Adolescent males in this sample who lived in single-mother households did not differ from youth living in other family constellations in their alcohol and substance use, delinquency, school dropout, or psychological distress.” 25
Within an economically disadvantaged inner-city neighborhood, the kids who live with both parents are no better off than those who live with only one. 26 But within a neighborhood like this, the majority of families are headed by single mothers, because mothers with partners generally can afford to live somewhere else. The higher income of a family that includes an adult male means that kids with two parents are more likely to live in a neighborhood with a middle -class culture and, therefore, more likely to conform to middle-class norms.
Homelessness: It’s About Race, Not Just Poverty
Homelessness is primarily a poverty issue. In 2010, nearly one-quarter (23.3 percent) of black families lived in poverty, three times the rate of white families (7.1 percent).
But there is more to it than that. Understanding why blacks are overrepresented in homeless shelters requires an examination of the longstanding and interrelated social and structural issues facing the black community. Throughout U.S. history, housing discrimination has been ever-present, both in the form of official government policies and societal attitudes. Federal policies that reduced the stock of affordable housing through urban renewal projects displaced a disproportionate number of poor blacks living concentrated in cities to other substandard urban neighborhoods.
Residential segregation, which affects black households to a greater extent than other minorities, perpetuates poverty patterns by isolating blacks in areas that lack employment opportunities and services, and experience higher crime and poverty rates. Blacks are also overrepresented in the criminal justice system, which increases the risk of homelessness and developmental delays among affected children.
Lower educational attainment among blacks, in particular black males, is a barrier to gaining any employment and especially to qualifying for jobs in well-compensated sectors. Black males earn bachelor’s degrees or higher at half the rate of white males (15.6 percent compared to 32 percent). Employment disparities rooted in subtle forms of discrimination persist even with educational advancement.
In 2010, blacks with an associate’s degree experienced a higher unemployment rate than whites with a high-school diploma (10.8 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively). Furthermore, a male black employee with a bachelor’s degree or higher was paid one-quarter (25.4 percent) less on average in weekly full-time salary ($1,010) in 2010 compared to a male white worker ($1,354) with the same level of education.
Getting unstuck: Why some people get out of poverty and others don’t
While many of the factors related to increasing income are at least potentially under the control of people born in the lowest income level, at least one important item is not: race.
“If you look at the findings, there are some that are not potentially encouraging,” says Elliott. “This study reinforces how difficult movement is upward out of the bottom (fifth) for blacks rather than whites.”
The study is based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics — a look at actual parent/children pairings starting in 1968 and continuing to today. This means that because so few samples were taken in the 1960s from Latino families, there isn’t enough data available to see how those families have fared over time. So the study is best able to look at black and white families. Elliott says Pew has found a persistent gap between white and black families.
Whites were two times more likely to leave the bottom fifth of income than blacks. Forty-five percent of blacks got out of the bottom versus 68 percent of whites.
That 23-point difference shrinks when comparing the percentage of whites and blacks that climbed to the middle fifth. Twenty-five percent of blacks at the bottom made the middle while 35 percent of whites did — a 10 percent difference.
“This underscores the persistent race gap in economic mobility,” Elliott says.
When Exceptions Prove the Rule: Poverty, Whiteness and Privilege
So, in the case of Appalachians, the proper test of their racial privilege (or lack thereof) would be to compare whites in the region with blacks in the same region and to then ask, do whites have an advantage or privileges relative to their regional counterparts of color? That most people aren’t even aware of the existence of blacks in Appalachia (though they comprise about 6 percent of the region’s population, and are among some of the poorest) seems a pretty good answer to that question. That whites are the ones we instantly think of when we think of Appalachian poverty, and the ones for whom we typically then express such great sympathy, seems to indicate a very substantial kind of privileging; a kind that erases from our consciousness altogether, the problem of rural black poverty as though it were a non-factor.
And indeed there is far more sympathy expressed for the white poor, historically and today, than for the black and brown poor: another form of implicit preference for, and privileging of, whiteness. Now that the economy is imploding, one can hear concern expressed about the poor (especially the once middle-class poor, mostly constructed as white), and how terrible it is that they are now facing such hardships. Yet when those same hardships were being experienced by the urban black and brown (whose communities have been in a recession or even depression state for entire generations in some cases) little sympathy attached. Indeed, as Martin Gilens explained in his book Why Americans Hate Welfare, as the media imagery of the poor began to shift in the early 1970s, from mostly white and rural to mostly black and urban, public animosity towards the impoverished rose in lockstep. As contrasted with the mostly sympathy-filled portrayals of the Dust Bowl poor in the 30s, or the white families that were losing their farms in the 80s, black families suffering under the combined forces of the decline in city-based manufacturing employment, as well as racism, redlining by banks and neglect of urban school infrastructure, were viewed as responsible for their own plight.
The simple truth is, working people are not all in the same boat, and white working class folks have real advantages. Black and Latino workers are typically the first fired in an economic downturn, and remain twice as likely to be unemployed and 3-4 times as likely to be poor, in good times or bad; and white high school dropouts are twice as likely to find work as similarly uneducated African Americans.
Furthermore, according to Thomas Shapiro’s groundbreaking work on the racial wealth divide, whites in the bottom fifth of all white households (in terms of income) have, on average seven times the net worth of similar blacks. In large part this is due to a major advantage in home ownership and thus equity, due to passed down property from parents. Indeed, whites with incomes below $13,000 are more likely to own their own homes than blacks with incomes that are three times higher, largely due to these intergenerational transfers of wealth.
Involuntary sterilization is no longer legal, and intelligence is recognized as a complex interplay between biology and environment. Indeed, the 1960s, the era that Mr. Murray blames for the moral failings that have driven poor and middle-class white America apart, was the very same era that stemmed the human rights abuse of involuntary sterilization. (Not coincidentally, it was the same era that began addressing the discrimination that entrenched black poverty as well.)
The stigmatization of poor white families more than a century ago should provide a warning: behaviors that seem to have begun in the 1960s belong to a much longer and more complex history than ideologically driven writers like Mr. Murray would have us believe.
Crime and Criminal Statistics in Nineteenth Century Massachusetts
by Roger Lane
This data from Massachusetts challenges the traditional assumptions at two levels. First, the available evidence points to the fact that serious crime was not increasing but decreasing between 1835, the first date for which reasonable records are available, and the turn of the century. Second, while a full explanation for this decline would require a social history beyond the limits of a brief study, the structure of the evidence suggests that, under relatively stable conditions, the urban-industrial growth of the commonwealth was itself a major contribution. In short, the growth of cities had a literally “civilizing” effect on the population affected. […]
At the beginning of the period covered, in 1835, Massachusetts had a population of about 660,940, 81 percent rural, still overwhelmingly pre-industrial and native born.” Its inhabitants, used to living and working independently, were more free than lawabiding, not easily constrained by formal rules. Although scarcely a frontier, the commonwealth was used to this condition and was prepared to tolerate considerable disorder. No city in the state boasted a full-time professional police. The machinery of justice was not equipped to handle many cases, and the citizens often ignored their lesser injuries or dealt with them privately.
By 1900, in contrast, the 2,805,346 inhabitants of Massachusetts were 76 percent urban. And the move to the cities had produced, for better and worse, a more tractable, more “civilized,” more socialized generation than its predecessors. What had been tolerable in a casual, independent society was no longer acceptable in one whose members- were living close together, whose habits were governed by the clock” and whose livelihood, controlled by a supervisor, was dependent upon cooperation and a delicate interdependence. All cities and many towns had acquired police forces. And throughout the state, the victims of violence and theft were conditioned to seek official help. The whole system of criminal justice had expanded to meet new demands. As a relative decrease in major offenses eased the task of dealing with minor ones, the system was increasingly able to undertake the task of “maintaining order,” of dealing with irregular or distasteful behavior.
In nineteenth-century Massachusetts, then, the figures indicating a “rise in crime” represent at the least a misleading half-truth. Further study may well show that the case is similar for other times and places. If so, we should readjust the conventional notion of an inevitable urban viciousness.
Its acceptance on the one hand is part of a continuing tendency to pasteurize the image of our rural past. And on the other it helps to perpetuate that mistrust of the city that has haunted our society for too long.
Crime and Policing in Rural and Small-Town America: Third Edition
by Ralph A. Weisheit, David N. Falcone, L. Edward Well
p. 48
Informal social control, keeping things in, and showing a greater suspicion of government may also help account for rural-urban differences in the willingness of local communities to cooperate fully with reporting to the FBI’s UCR. Reporting to the CR program in 2003 differed by population density, with reports covering 95% of citizens living in metropolitan statistical areas but only 83% of those living in rural areas (FBI, 2003). Similarly, Laub (1981) has found that while the overall likelihood of reporting crime to the police is similar for rural and urban citizens, those in urban areas fail to report because they think nothing can be done, while those in rural areas fail to report because they consider the crime a private concern, even when the offender is a stranger. As a New Mexico state police officer observed: “In a lot of these [rural] areas, there’s really no law enforcement—no police, no sheriff, no state police station. People prefer to handle their own affairs and disputes themselves” (Applebombe, 1987, p. 11). The officer’s comment should be taken as more figurative than literal, although there are remote areas of Alaska where the statement could be taken literally. The statement does reflect two dimensions of the issue that are distinct but tend to reinforce each other. First, rural citizens may less often to choose to deal with a problem formally because they see it as a local problem. Second, in some rural areas formal police authority is in fact physically distant and is not an immediate option.
p. 55
Kenneth Wilkinson (1984) also used county-level data but came to a very different conclusion. In contrast to other data, he found that homicide rates were higher in rural areas. He accounted for this by noting that in a geographically dispersed population, social interactions occur more frequently among family members and close acquaintances; both are groups at a relatively higher risk for homicide. Wilkinson also observed that when compared with large cities, homicide rates were higher in rural areas but lower in small cities. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of crime-specific analyses and of using care in defining the term rural. Simply treating everything outside of major metropolitan areas as rural can mask important patterns.
p. 59
Finally, official police data provided in the UCR also reveal some offenses for which the rates are higher in small towns and rural areas than for large cities… [R]ural counties are much higher than large cities in the arrest rate for DUI and for crimes against family members and children. This last finding conflicts with field research and some survey research that suggests that family violence rates are similar across rural and urban areas and that police in rural areas are more hesitant to respond to family violence… [S]mall towns are higher than either large cities or the most rural areas in arrest rates for fraud and vandalism. In small towns and rural areas arrest rates for fraud are about four times greater than in the largest cities. Curiously, arrest rates for vandalism are lowest in the most rural areas and highest in small towns, with city rates falling in between.
Is Water Fluoridation an Environmental Racism issue?
Lead and Crime: Some New Evidence From a Century Ago
Cities with at least some lead piping had murder rates that were, on average, 8.6 percent higher than cities with galvanized iron or wrought iron pipes. Other causes of death were mostly unrelated. Only the murder rates changed1.
In the United States, nearly a million children between the ages of one and five have lead in their blood at levels above the safety threshold.
Low-income children are eight times more likely to be exposed to lead paint, and African-American children are five times more likely than Anglo children to suffer from lead poisoning. […]
Toxicity Threshold for Lead and IQ Scores – Studies
In the largest study of its kind, data from 4,800 children and adolescents showed that those with blood lead concentrations as low as 5 ug/dL had learning problems. For every 1 ug/dL rise in blood lead levels, their reading scores dropped an average of 1%.
The more data we get, the more we must lower the toxicity threshold for lead. “There is no safe level of blood lead,” says Dr. Bruce Lanphear, an associate professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. It’s estimated that one in every 30 U.S. children suffers from the harmful effects of lead.
” Until the last decade, we couldn’t find children with levels low enough to study them in this way,” said he study’s author Dr. Lanphear at a news briefing in March 2001, sponsored by the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and the American Public Health Association.
His research team also measured blood lead levels in 276 New York children – twice a year, from six months to five years old. At age five, the kids were given an IQ test. Those with a lead concentration of less than 10 ug/dL scored on average more than 10 points lower on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, compared to children with concentrations of less than 1 ug/dL.
Levels as low as 2.5 ug/dL were associated with lower scores in tests of reading and mathematics. (The CDC’s threshold of safety established in 1991 is still 10 ug/dL.) Lanphear said the study also found that for every additional 10 ug/dL increase in blood-lead concentration, IQ declined by an average of 5.5 points.
Low-Level Lead and Cognitive Performance – Study
Neurologists at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem found a direct link between low-level long-term exposure to lead and deficits in cognitive performance and behavior in childhood through adolescence.
They also concluded that “there is no threshold below which lead remains without effect on the central nervous system.”12
Intellectual Impairment in Children with Low Blood Levels – Study
Researchers at the College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, released a new study in April of 2003 to examine low blood lead concentration and IQ. The results suggest that there may be more U.S children who are adversely affected by environmental lead than previously estimated. In the study, 172 children had their blood lead concentrations measured at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months of age.
These same children were given the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale at the ages of 3 and 5 years. 101 of the 172 children whose blood lead concentrations measured below 10 µg per deciliter (the CDC’s threshold of safety) showed a 7.4 point decline in IQ.13 […]
” Of wider concern are the subtler effects on mental function seen among children exposed to lead before birth. Researchers have now documented small but significant mental deficits among children whose fetal lead level (measured in umbilical cord blood at birth) exceeded 10 ug/dL. . . . If the exposure ends at birth, the effect appears to be reversible and children recover normal IQ scores by four or five years of age. But if a child is also exposed to lead after birth (as is often the case) or is raised in an otherwise disadvantaged environment, his intelligence may be permanently compromised.” […]
“Lead Kids” and Attention-Deficits-Studies
According to Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Baltimore-based Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, “lead kids” have very low levels of concentration, are very disruptive, and have violent tendencies.
The relationship between hair lead levels of children and their attention-deficit behaviors in the classroom was evaluated at the University of Massachusetts. Researchers found a “striking dose-response relationship between levels of lead and negative teacher ratings. . . An even stronger relationship existed between physician-diagnosed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and hair lead in the same children.”16
A similar study done at Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam found that children with relatively high concentrations of lead in their hair “were significantly less flexible in changing their focus of attention.”17
Violent Behavior: A Solution in Plain Sight
THE TOXIC ENVIRONMENTAL BURDEN
According to a study by the Environmental Working Groups, blood samples from newborns show exposure to over two hundred eighty-seven toxins, including mercury, fire retardants, pesticides and Teflon—exposure that occurs even before they are born. Of these, one hundred eighty cause cancer in humans or animals; two hundred seventeen are toxic to the brain and nervous system; and two hundred eight cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests.123
Common exposures have been documented for mercury from vaccines, amalgam fillings, and fish; for lead from paint, soil and water fixtures; for arsenic from treated wood, pesticides and shellfish; for aluminum from processed food, cookware and deodorants; for cadmium from shellfish, paint, pesticides and piping; for antimony from Scotchgard; for manganese from soy milk, welding and metal works; and for fluoride from water, tea, medications and soy. All of these metals are documented to be extremely neurotoxic.
Heavy metal exposure compromises normal brain development and neurotransmitter function, leading to long-term deficits in learning and social behavior. Studies show that hyperactive children and criminal offenders have significantly elevated levels of lead, manganese or cadmium compared to controls; high blood lead at age seven predicts juvenile delinquency and adult crime.124
Prenatal and neonatal toxic metal exposure to mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, nickel and aluminum have been documented in medical publications and medical texts to cause common and widespread neurological and psychological effects including depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders, social deficits, mood disorders, schizophrenia, anorexia, cognitive impairments, ADHD, autism and seizures.125
High lead, copper, manganese, or mercury levels are associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), impulsivity, anger, aggression, inability to inhibit inappropriate responding, juvenile delinquency and criminality.126Occupational mercury exposure has been found to cause depression, anxiety, anger, antisocial behavior and aggressiveness.127
Manganese toxicity has a known association with impulsive and violent behavior. A poor diet increases the susceptibility to lead and manganese toxicity. The most significant dietary source is soy infant formulas, which typically have very high levels of manganese.128
Lead has been the subject of extensive research documenting its relationship to all of these conditions and to juvenile delinquency. Based on a national sample of children, there is a significant association of lead body burden with aggressive behavior, crime, juvenile delinquency and behavioral problems. After adjustment for covariates and interactions and removal of non-influential covariates, adjudicated delinquents were four times more likely to have bone lead concentrations greater than 25 parts per million (ppm) than controls. Communities with a higher percentage of children having blood lead over 10 mg/dL are significantly more likely to have higher rates of violent crime and higher rates of educational failure.129
Communities using silicofluorides in the water supply also report higher rates of learning disabilities, ADHD, violent crime and criminals using cocaine at the time of arrest. The use of fluorosilicic acid (H2SiF6) to fluoridate public water supplies significantly increases the amounts of lead in the water. Data from analysis of a national sample of over four thousand children show that water fluoridation is associated with a significant increase in children’s blood lead, with especially strong effects among minority children.129
Studies have found that heavy metals such as mercury, cadmium, lead, aluminum, nickel, and tin affect chemical synaptic transmission in the brain and the peripheral and central nervous system.130,131 They also disrupt brain and cellular calcium levels, significantly affecting many body functions. Inadequate calcium levels in the brain can adversely affect cognitive development and contribute to degenerative CNS diseases. Calcium-dependent neurotransmitter release results in depressed levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine, all conditions related to mood and motivation.131
Are Big Cities More Dangerous Than Small Ones?
So where did we see the most exposure to gasoline lead? Answer: in places with the densest concentration of automobiles. And that’s in the inner core of big cities. In the early ’60s, big cities had double the ambient air lead levels of midsize cities, which in turn had air lead levels 40 percent higher than small cities. (Nevin, p. 316.) So if lead exposure produces a rise in crime, you’d expect to see a bigger rise in big cities than in small ones. Over time, big cities would become increasingly more dangerous than small ones.
Likewise, when lead was removed from gasoline, and children started to grow up normally, you’d expect to see a bigger crime decrease in big cities. Over time, crime rates would start to converge.
And that’s exactly what we see in the data.
The protests in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982, to prevent the siting of a polychlorinated biphenyls landfill in the county became the driving force to a 1983 US General Accounting Office study, “Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities.” The study revealed, “ Three of the four commercial hazardous waste landfills in the Southeast United States were located in majority black communities.” The General Accounting Office Study, or GAO study, solely studied off-site hazardous waste landfills in the Southeastern United States limiting the scope of the study.[60] In response to this limitation the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, or CRJ, directed a comprehensive national study on demographic patterns associated with the location of hazardous waste sites.[60] The CRJ national study conducted two examinations of areas surrounding commercial hazardous waste facilities and the location of uncontrolled toxic waste sites.[60] The first study examined the association between race and socio-economic status and the location of commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities.[60] After statistical analysis, the first study concluded that “the percentage of community residents that belonged to a racial or ethnic group was a stronger predictor of the level of commercial hazardous waste activity than was household income, the value of the homes, the number of uncontrolled waste sites, or the estimated amount of hazardous wastes generated by industry”.[61] The second study examined the presence of uncontrolled toxic waste sites in ethnic and racial minority communities, and found that 3 out of every 5 African and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with uncontrolled waste sites.[62]
Other studies like the 1987, “Toxic Waste and Race in the United States,” by the Commission for Racial Justice, found race to be the most influential variable in predicting where waste facilities were located.[63]
Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s
In short, lead paint simply wasn’t available in most rural areas before the 1880s except in very narrow corridors with good transportation. You can see this in the prevalence of white barns along the National Road. Then, starting in the 1880s, revolutions in both rail transport and mail order distribution made economical lead paint available almost everywhere—including rural areas. A couple of decades later, homicide rates had skyrocketed in rural areas and had nearly caught up to urban murder rates.
By itself, of course, this would be merely speculative. What makes it more than this is that it adds to the wealth of other evidence that lead exposure in childhood leads to increased violence in adulthood. In the post-World War II era, lead exposure came mainly from automobile exhausts, but in the post-Civil War era it came mainly from the growth in the use of lead paint. And when lead paint became available in rural areas, farmers found it just as useful as everyone else. Given what we now know about the effects of lead, it should come as no surprise that a couple of decades later the murder rate in rural areas went up substantially.
Where slavery thrived, inequality rules today
In a passing comment, Chetty and his co-authors observed that “both blacks and whites living in areas with large African-American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility.” Far from being divergent, the fates of poor blacks and poor whites in these regions are curiously, inextricably, intertwined.
Instead of chalking it up to race, recent research points toward a more startling and somewhat controversial explanation: When we see broad areas of inequality in America today, what we are actually seeing is the lingering stain of slavery. Since 2002, with increasing refinement in the years since, economic historians have argued that the “peculiar institution,” as it was once called, is dead but not gone. Today, in the 21st century, it still casts an economic shadow over both blacks and whites: “Slavery,” writes Harvard economist Nathan Nunn, “had a long-term effect on inequality as well as income.” […]
The question, then, is how exactly did slavery have this effect on contemporary inequality? Soares and his colleagues speculated that limited political rights for slaves and their descendants played a role, as did negligible access to credit and capital. Racial discrimination, too, would have played a part, though this would not explain why whites born in former slaveholding regions might find themselves subject to higher levels of inequality. Nunn, though, advanced an additional explanation, pointing to an idea advanced by Stanford economic historian Gavin Wright in 2006.
In lands turned over to slavery, Wright had observed, there was little incentive to provide so-called public goods—schools, libraries, and other institutions—that attract migrants. In the North, by contrast, the need to attract and retain free labor in areas resulted in a far greater investment in public goods—institutions that would, over the succeeding decades, offer far greater opportunities for social mobility and lay the foundation for sustained, superior economic growth.
Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind
In his masterful history, Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner recounts the experience of the progressives who came to the South as teachers in black schools. […] In short, white progressives coming South expected to find a black community suffering the effects of not just oppression but its “cultural residue.”
Here is what they actually found:
During the Civil War, John Eaton, who, like many whites, believed that slavery had destroyed the sense of family obligation, was astonished by the eagerness with which former slaves in contraband camps legalized their marriage bonds. The same pattern was repeated when the Freedmen’s Bureau and state governments made it possible to register and solemnize slave unions. Many families, in addition, adopted the children of deceased relatives and friends, rather than see them apprenticed to white masters or placed in Freedmen’s Bureau orphanages.
By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.”
The point here is rich and repeated in American history—it was not “cultural residue” that threatened black marriages. It was white terrorism, white rapacity, and white violence. And the commitment among freedpeople to marriage mirrored a larger commitment to the reconstitution of family, itself necessary because of systemic white violence.
“In their eyes,” wrote an official from the Freedmen’s Bureau, in 1865. “The work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” […]
Nor had the centuries-long effort to destroy black curiosity and thirst for education yielded much effect:
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the freedmen’s quest for self-improvement was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education …. The desire for learning led parents to migrate to towns and cities in search of education for their children, and plantation workers to make the establishment of a school-house “an absolute condition” of signing labor contracts …
Contemporaries could not but note the contrast between white families seemingly indifferent to education and blacks who “toil and strive, labour and endure in order that their children ‘may have a schooling’.” As one Northern educator remarked: “Is it not significant that after the lapse of one hundred and forty-four years since the settlement [of Beaufort, North Carolina], the Freedmen are building the first public school-house ever erected here.”
“All in all,” Foner concludes, “the months following the end of the Civil War were a period of remarkable accomplishment for Southern blacks.” This is not especially remarkable, if you consider the time. Education, for instance, was not merely a status marker. Literacy was protection against having your land stolen or being otherwise cheated. Perhaps more importantly, it gave access to the Bible. The cultural fruits of oppression are rarely predictable merely through theorycraft. Who would predicted that oppression would make black people hungrier for education than their white peers? Who could predict the blues?
And culture is not exclusive. African-American are Americans, and have been Americans longer than virtually any other group of white Americans. There is no reason to suppose that enslavement cut African-Americans off from a broader cultural values. More likely African-Americans contributed to the creation and maintenance of those values.
The African-Americans who endured enslavement were subject to two and half centuries of degradation and humiliation. Slavery lasted twice as long as Jim Crow and was more repressive. If you were going to see evidence of a “cultural residue” which impeded success you would see it there. Instead you find black people desperate to reconstitute their families, desperate to marry, and desperate to be educated. Progressives who advocate the 19th-century line must specifically name the “cultural residue” that afflicts black people, and then offer evidence of it. Favoring abstract thought experiments over research will not cut it. […]
And it’s not just knowable from Eric Foner. It can be gleaned from reading the entire Moynihan Report—not just the “tangle of pathologies” section—and then comparing it with Herb Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. It can be gleaned from Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. One of the most important threads in this book is Wilkerson dismantling of the liberal theory of cultural degradation.
Slavery By Another Name
by Douglass A. Blackmon
Introduction (from excerpt)
As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians concurred that the South’s practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn’t be determined. Official accounts couldn’t be rigorously challenged, because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.
Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources—southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the collective effect of the decisions by hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this period to sell blacks to commercial interests.
I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large—seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What’s more, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and resources.
Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events.
In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.
Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime.
HBD debunked – Debunking hypocritical hereditarianism and “human biodiversity” ‘role models’
Putative “role models” show high rates of violence. It just depends on the era studied.
As regards the 2011 black homicide rate of 17.51 per thousand this is high, but often surpassed by whites- it just depends on the time period you want to study. The supposedly more self-restrained Dutch of Amsterdam posted a whopping 47 per 100,000 in the 16th century, higher than any rate ever recorded for New York City, Irish and all. (Epstein and Gang 2010. Migration and Culture, Vol 8) In Maryland the rate at which unrelated European adults killed was 29 per 100,000 adults per year in the mid 1600s. In white Virginia it was 37 per 100,000. The supposedly more virtuous Yankee peoples in colonial America in the Chesapeake posted a rate of 12 per 100,000.
In some decades of the 1800s, white San Francisco posted rates well above 17.5. Even allegedly milder white Oregon posted a rate around 30 per 100,000. (Randolph Roth- Homicide Rates in the American West) Using modern FBI formulas, mostly white Los Angeles County in the 19th century ran up a body count of about 414 homicides per 100,000. (McKanna 2002. Race and Homicide in 19th Century California). Nor is the West unique. Studies show the heavily white Scotch-Irish Kentucky-Tennessee borderlands posting a rate of 24 per 100,000 starting in the 1850s. ( –Randolph Roth, 2009. American Homicide). In a study of homicides in white Russia, it was found that in 1998, the homicide victimization rate was 23.9 per 100,000. The 1999 homicide figures were substantially up over those for 1998.” –Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Vol 1. 2002 (David Levinson ed) p. 1426. […]
Whites post higher rates of child molestation than other groups according to scholars Hattery and Smith 2007, depending on the baselines measured, and said white child molesters serve LESS time for their crimes than black crack cocaine offenders, according to some studies. QUOTE:
‘Furthermore, our analysis suggests that child molesters, who are primarily white men, serve shorter average sentences than crack offenders who are primarily African American men. Child molesters serve an average of 6 years and only 43% of their full sentences, whereas the average inmate serving a sentence for possession of crack serves 11 years and 80% of his or her sentence.”
–(African American families, by Angela Hattery, Earl Smith, SAGE 2007. pp. 245)
—
and as one conservative police chief report states:
“Criminal profiling has a legitimate and successful history when applied to serial killers, rapists, hijackers, child molesters and arsonists. Ironically, some criminal profiles show a racial relationship between white males and serial killers, rapists, and child molesters.”
(– Carl Milazzo (1999) Race Relations in Police Operations: A Legal and Ethical Perspective. International Assn. of Chiefs of Police)
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The police chief profiling report mentions several offenses, but when broken out separately, a pattern emerges of whites as over-represented among child molesters. Kirk (1975) found that black offenders were more likely to pick out adult females for sexual assault at a rate three times more than white offenders (34% and 11% respectively), compared to white offenders who selected non-adults more. Kirk’s finding is supported by West and Templer’s 1994 study of incarcerated sex offenders, which found that a disproportionate number of child molesters were white, compared to negro offenders.
(Kirk, S.A. (1975). The sex offenses of blacks and whites. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 4, 295-302)
(West, J and Templer D. (1994). Child molestation, rape and ethnicity. Psychological Reports, 75, 1326)
——
The heavy white pattern varies by state. For example, a 1998 study in Florida was carried out on molesters over a 21 month period. Of these 88.4% were white, versus 7.9% black. Around 1998, Florida’s populations stood at 78% white, and 14.6% black (Bureau of the Census 2000). Whites were thus overrepresented among the child molesters relative to general population, (88% molesters versus 78% general population) versus blacks who were underrepresented 7.9% versus 14.6%) on molestation offenses.
— Tingle, et al (1998) Childhood and Adolescent Characteristics of Pedophiles and Rapists.
An alternative point of comparison is to compare criminals to criminals – those actually in jail for crime – rather than non-offending persons in the general population. In the 1990s in Florida, whites made up less than 50% of the prison population.* Based on such patterns, whites are thus overrepresented as a proportion of those in jail. The same pattern repeats itself nationally. (*Data Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 1995 – State detail.)
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The white pattern is also seen in some federal crime reports. Per the website below- quote:
QUOTE:
http://stop-molestation.com/disturbing-stats-on-child-molestation-and-child-predators/
“According to the Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, the following statistics have been recorded concerning the characteristics of offenders who violate and assault children.
* Those inmates who were convicted of committing violent acts against children were more likely to have been white, a percentage of nearly 70%, than any other race.
* White inmates were nearly three times more likely to have victimized a child than black inmates.”
——
Detailed data from Federal prison statistical reports also show the same pattern. Under the “Other sexual Assault” category, which is primarily child molestation, whites were six times more likely to go to state prison than Blacks and twice as likely to go to prison for such offenses than Hispanics. Under the category “Parole violators returned to State prison” whites were twice as likely to be returned to prison for the sexual offences than blacks.
–Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics. National Corrections Reporting Program, 1994.
NCRP9404 – New court commitments to State prison, 1994: Offense by sex, race and Hispanic origin
NCRP9405. Parole violators returned to State prison, 1994: Offense, by sex, race, and Hispanic origin
And in 1994 the white prison population was less than 50%, (48,21% per the Federal Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics- 1990) and yet whites made up 77% of all child molesters in prison, almost 30 percent more than their representation in the general prison population. Whites are thus overrepresented as child molesters in proportion to their incarceration rate. […]
Much is made of comparisons to blacks and assorted European immigrants, but as the example of the Irish shows, blacks are not some unique, basket case. They suffered and show the same patterns that often accompany rural people being urbanized. As anyone who has a basic knowledge of black history knows, WWII was to spark major changes and population movements in Black America. The MAJORITY of Blacks became an urban people, in contrast to the majority rural volk of previous decades. As becoming urbanized, blacks fell prey to a common pattern that often afflicts ‘country’ people who are squeezed into the crowded slums, violent streets and indifferent attitudes of cities – there is greater social dysfunction as the old rural community bonds begin to break down. It happened with whites from and in Ireland and Britain. It happened with Chinese in the over-packed slums of numerous Chinatowns. It happened with a host of other people in varying measures. But according to HBD “experts”, black people are these unique basket cases as far as such problems go. Only they are permanently affected by such horrible dysfunctions, you see, because’ they are black. Never mind the white people who have gone before, and who underwent the same pattern. They are exempt, and covered with a magical mantle of white goodness and virtue.
Ethnic America
by Thomas Sowell
pp.25, 277
Such living patterns reflected not only the poverty of the Irish but also their being used to squalid living conditions in mud huts in Ireland… Sewage piled up in backyard privies until the municipal authorities chose to collect it, or else it ran off in open trenches, fouling the air and providing breeding grounds for dangerous diseases. The importance of proper garbage disposal, to keep the neighborhood from being overrun with rats, was one of many similar facts of urban life that every rural group new to the city would have to learn over the years, beginning with the Irish, and continuing through many others until the present day. Cholera, which had been unknown before, swept through Boston in 1849, concentrated almost exclusively in Irish neighborhoods. In New York, cholera was also disproportionately observed in Irish wards. In various cities, both tuberculosis and fire swept regularly through the overcrowded tenements where the Irish lived, and there was a high rate of insanity among the Irish immigrants.. The incidence of tuberculosis in Boston varied closely with the proportion of the Irish living in a neighborhood.
Patterns of alcoholism and fighting brought over from Ireland persisted in the United States. Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1850s were Irish.. Police vans became known as ‘Paddy wagons” because the prisoners in them were so often Irish. “The fighting Irish” was a phrase that covered everything from individual brawls to mass melees (known as “Donnybrooks” for a town in Ireland) to criminal gangs.. Irish neighborhoods were tough neighborhoods in cities around the country. The Irish Sixth Ward in New York was known as “the bloody ould Sixth.” Another Irish Neighborhood in New York was known as “Hell’s Kitchen,” and another as ‘San Juan Hill” because of the battles fought there. In Milwaukee, the Irish section was called the “Bloody Third”.. Where the Irish workers built the Illinois Central Railroad, people spoke of “a murder a mile” as they laid track. The largest riot in American history was by predominantly Irish rioters in New York in 1863..
Even the proportion of the black population who were laborers and house servants in Boston in 1850 was much lower than among the Irish, and the free blacks in mid-century Boston were in general economically better off than the Irish. The Irish-women’s work as domestic servants and washerwomen was usually more steadily available than that of Irishmen- a situation later to be repeated among blacks.
As in Ireland itself, the poverty and improvidence of the Irish immigrants to America often reduced them to living on charity when hard times came. In early nineteenth-century Ireland, even before the famine, it was common for whole families of the poor to go ‘tramping about it for months, bragging from parish to parish.’ Recourse to public charity was a well-established habit carried over to America. Expenditures for relief to the poor in Boston more than doubled from 1845 to 1855, during the heavy influx of the Irish, after such expenditures had been relatively stable for years. In New York City in the same era, about 60 percent of the people in almshouses had been born in Ireland. As late as 1906, there were more Irish than Italian paupers, beggars and inmates of almshouses, even though the Italians arrived a generation later and were generally poorer at the turn of the century. radically different attitudes toward accepting charity existed in Ireland and Italy, and these attitudes apparently had more effect than their respective objective economic conditions in America. There were similar cultural differences in attitudes toward the abandonment of wives and children. In the 1840s, ‘it was almost automatically assumed than an orphan was Irish,” and as late as 1914, about half the Irish families on Manhattan’s west side were fatherless. No such pattern appeared among the Italians.
Although the Irish immigrants (like other immigrants) had a disproportionate representation of young people in the prime of life, the mortality rate shot up after their arrival. Boston’s mortality rate in 1850 was double that of the rest of Massachusetts, even though there were relatively fewer aged people in Boston. The difference was due to the extremely high mortality rate in the Irish neighborhoods. Diseases that had become rare in America now flourished again. In 1849, cholera spread through Philadelphia to New York and to Boston- primarily in Irish neighborhoods. There had not been a smallpox epidemic in Boston since 1792, but after 1845, it became a recurring plague, again primarily among the Irish. The spread of the Irish into other neighborhoods, mean, among other things, the spread of these and other diseases. The residential flight of middle-class Americans from the Irish immigrants was by no means all irrationality…
Today’s neighborhood changes have been dramatized by such expressions was ‘white flight’ but these patterns existed long before black-white neighborhood changes were the issue. When the nineteenth-century Irish immigrants flooded into New York and Boston, the native Americans fled. With the first appearance of an Irish family in a neighborhood, ‘the exodus of non-Irish residents began. ‘White flight’ is a misleading term, not only because of its historical narrowness, but also because blacks too have fled when circumstances were reversed. Blacks fled a whole series of neighborhoods in nineteenth-century New York, ‘pursued’ by new Italian immigrants who moved in. The first blacks in Harlem were fleeing from the tough Irish neighborhoods in mid-Manhattan, and avoided going north of 145th Street for fear of encountering more Irish there.
Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana
by Gilles Vandal
pp. 162-73
Information compiled on 557 black homicides committed against other blacks provides comprehensive evidence of the frequency of black intraracial homicides in rural Louisiana. This data becomes an even more significant record of real physical violence in rural Louisiana when black intraracial homicidal behavior is compared not only to black homicides committed against whites, but also with white homicidal behavior.
Against the scattered evidence of contemporary prejudices and perceptions, one must set the hard statistics concerning black homicide. The black community certainly had its criminal elements, but in spite of the economic, social, and political emancipation that they gained through enfranchisement, blacks, with some minor exception, were less prone than whites to violence. Indeed, whites had little need to fear from blacks. The cases were rare and were mostly related to either robbery or work relations. […] The evidence provided by quantitative analysis is overwhelming. Although they formed 60 percent of the population, blacks were responsible for only 25 percent of all murders committed in rural Louisiana between 1866 and 1884 (table 7.1). In the same period they were victims of 72 percent of all homicides. The situation was even more striking during Reconstruction, when blacks committed less than 20 percent of the homicides, but were the victims in 80 percent of all murders. Furthermore, only 20 percent of whites killed during the whole period died at the hand of blacks, while 75 percent of black victims were killed by whites. Thus, though black homicides were a feature of the period, their importance was minimal compared to white homicides.
The figures in table 7.1 show important differences between black homicides and those involving both whites and the total population. Most black homicides were also intraracial in nature. Almost all black homicides were perpetrated against other blacks during Reconstruction (77%) and the early post-Reconstruction period (83%). In contrast white homicides were largely interracial during Reconstruction (77%). Only after 1876 were more than half of white homicides directed against other whites (56%). […]
Whatever the conservative newspapers may have said about black homicidal behavior, the evidence clearly shows that black intraracial homicide rates were lower than white rates during both periods. The data show that there were fewer black murders per 100,000 persons than there were white. While black homicidal behavior decreased slightly, with rates of 8.9 per 100,000 during Reconstruction and 6.6 in the early Redemption period, white intraracial homicide rates dropped from 17 to 8. The last noteworthy feature to emerge from these data is the apparent stability of black homicidal behavior as a proportion of all homicides in the twenty years with which we are concerned. But the question arises why black homicide rates remained more stable while those of whites strongly decreased.
Data in table 7.1 show that the overall homicide rates in Louisiana actually declined as Reconstruction ended. Though the evidence certainly shows that blacks were far less prone to homicides than whites, they were far from being upright and law-abiding as shown by their involvement in property crimes. Still, the figures in table 7.1 show clearly that black patterns of homicidal behavior diminished only slightly through the years, while white rates went through a slow but constant decline.
Blacks, then, were less likely to resort to murder. Moreover, when they did, blacks acted alone. Indeed, 86 percent of black intraracial homicides involved only one assailant. This was also true for black interracial violence; in 66 percent of such cases, a lone black killed a white. In sharp contrast, white intraracial (33%) and interracial (70% murders tended to involve two or more assailants (fig. 7.1). Clearly, homicide among blacks followed different patterns and thus had different consequences and meanings than among whites.
As we have seen in chapter 5, a striking feature of this analysis is the absence of women as either murderers or murder victims. Women represented only 4 percent of 156 whites killed by blacks, they cocmprised 10 percent of the victims of black intraracial violence. Meanwhile, white and black women represented 3.4 percent and 3.5 percent respectively of the victims of white violence. The higher number of black women dying at the hands of other blacks may imply a greater tendency among blacks to turn their aggression against themselves rather than against whites. The absence of women as assailants is even more evident. Indeed, women, whether black or white, represented less than 1 percent of the people committing homicides.
One must not forget that a large portion of the black population was young and consequently fell into the age group that tended to be more prone to violence. Not surprisingly these data indicate that younger members of the black population had a greater propensity to commit homicides than did their elders. This is even more obvious when compared to the rates for young whites. Thirty-four percent of blacks who killed other blacks were less than 24 years old, compared to only 23 percent of whites who killed other whites. Furthermore, only 15 percent of blacks involved in intraracial homicides were 45 years old or more, compared to 26 percent for whites. The analysis of interracial homicides gives similar numbers for each racial group. For blacks, being young and male were the conditions most consistently associated with the risk of becoming involved in a murder. this may suggest that younger blacks were more free from the restraint of slavery, less submissive to whites, and consequently less afraid to resort to violence to solve their disputes.
The data reveal few cases of homicide among the black elites. The killing of William Weeks, the assistant secretary of state, by George Paris, a former member of the state legislature and a member of the state board of assessors, represented the most notable case. But such bloody incidents among the black elites were rather rare. Most black intraracial homicides involved people from the lower social strata of the black community in both the city and the rural areas.
Meanwhile white intraracial homicides were spread more evenly through the different levels of white society (figure 7.2). This finding contradicts studies of twentieth-century North America and sheds light on attitudes prevailing within white society after the Civil War. The involvement of a large number (33%) of members of the social and economic elites is an important characteristic of white intraracial homicide. Finally, the presence of large numbers of skilled workers, day laborers, businessmen, professionals, and public officials seems to support the hypothesis that a great number of homicides, for both races, took place in towns and villages. […]
Although conservative press asserted that blacks regularly killed each other for trivial matters, my data show that the prime motives for black intraracial homicide were similar to those which moved whites to kill each other. Blacks (37%), as well as whites (32%), killed each other over personal grudges, in self-defense, and over trivial matters, as violence became an extralegal means of defending their honor and gaining respect within their own communities. Blacks lived in a world they could not change. The endemic frustration of black life and their particular code of honor were expressed not in encounters against whites but in violence within the black community. […]
Familial and marital quarrels were the second major category of criminality among blacks. Quarrels over women and disputes of passion were one of the main causes for which blacks killed each other. As shown in chapter 5, there were also a few instances of wife-killing. The killing of men by their wives did occur, but very infrequently. Overall, the relative scarcity of black intrafamilial homicides is striking when compared to modern industrial societies. […]
In spite of the conservative presses’ allegations that blacks had become inveterate criminals and that they monopolized the criminal calendar, the data presented here show that they were less prone to resort to homicide in the course of another crime. Only a few homicides could be linked to other forms of black criminal behavior. Although robberies were regularly committed by blacks in rural Louisiana, evidence shows that blacks rarely committed murder while perpetrating theft. Only 34 black homicides, of which 19 were against whites, were linked to robbery. Meanwhile, 61 white homicides originated with robberies, and 37 of these were intraracial in nature. The fact that so few homicides were related to robbery is in itself rather surprising.
When all of the evidence is evaluated, one is left with the impression that most intraracial homicides, for both races, were not premeditated but rather spontaneous acts arising from disputes between individuals who knew each other. These data confirm the view that both blacks and whites in nineteenth-century Louisiana had quick tempers and an exaggerated sense of honor. When these two elements combined with whisky, gaming, and pistols, they became highly explosive. Indeed, these were the cultural characteristics that made intraracial homicides a daily occurrence for both races in rural Louisiana.
Conclusion
Twentieth-century social scientists have fully examined the various factors that underlie black and white violence. They have demonstrated by sophisticated analysis how violence was deeply rooted in poverty, lack of education, poor housing, and disrupted family. Nevertheless few historians have examined nineteenth-century black violence, except in very general terms. Since intraracial homicide rates have been especially high among African Americans in the United States during the last century, these historians have concluded, without detailed study, that the same was true for the nineteenth-century rural South. They were therefore rather quick to draw sweeping conclusiosn and to adopt the impressionistic portrayals of black violence that they found in the local conservative press.
The foregoing analysis of the general patterns of homicide and the statistical breakdown between races show that these historians have been too hasty in blaming blacks for the high level of violence that marked the period. In fact, whites were largely responsible for the general atmosphere of violence that prevailed. Proportionately they killed each other in greater numbers than did blacks. Evidence presented here clearly shows that there were fewer black intraracial homicides per 100,000 persons than there were among whites.
This data set also reveals several important characteristics of post-Civil War homicidal behavior in Louisiana. First, violence became more intraracially oriented with the end of Reconstruction. Second, white intraracial homicide rates declined significantly with the end of Reconstruction, while black homicide rates also fell, but much less sharply. Third, white and black intraracial rates varied within the various areas of the state and were closely linked to the general rates of violence that prevailed in those regions.
The sharp decline of white interracial violence was due to a greater consensus among whites about the black issue, the fall from power of the Republicans, and the appeasement of the social and political disruption generated by the Civil War. Paradoxically, the same factors that eased the tension within the white community were responsible for the relative stagnation of black homicidal behavior. As blacks became more socially and politically alienated, violence remained a dominant feature of their community.
Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900
by Roger Lane
p. 165-74
As was appropriate for these decades of stasis, the Afro-American murder rate simply started high and stayed there. It began at 12.9 convictions per 100,000 population during 1901-1907, dropped marginally […] The most thorough investigation ever into the patterns of criminal homicide was conducted in Philadelphia during this hopeful period, from 1948 through 1952. This was in retrospect the high point of the urban-industrial revolution. Three full generations had passed since the city’s overall murder rate had begun to fall in the 1870s—since the public and parochial schools, factory and white-collar work, had combined to redirect the aggressive impulses of most of the population. Homicide was not then a major social problem for most of the population. The overall murder rate for Philadelphia, as counted by the best and highest method, the number of offenders known to the police, was 6.0 per 100,000 of population, very close to the big-city average of 6.8. By comparison with earlier years, and later, murder was almost domesticated. Over half of all killings, or 51 percent, occurred in the home and were confined largely within the circle of family, friends, and acquaintance. Only 14 percent of victims were strangers; less than 8 percent of them were robbed. The white murder rate stood at 1.8; the black at 24.6, or just fourteen times as high. Thus, for the first time in generations the officially recorded racial gap in this index of violence had not grown at all.
The future had not looked so promising for decades, as greater opportunities continued to pull blacks out of the South and into northern cities. These in-migrants were by no means troublesome social problems on arrival. On the contrary, transplanted southerners were typically vigorous and ambitious young people, more of whom had graduated from high school—34 percent—than the 33 percent among the white population of the cities in which they settled. In Philadelphia specifically they were also much less prone to mental illness than those who had been longer exposed to the multiple problems that still afflicted people who had grown up in a metropolis.
Many of the hopes, too, of these Afro-American migrants were apparently realized. The breakthroughs in civil rights helped create a new leverage in urban politics. Above all, the gains continued in factory and white-collar employment, matched by the steady but far smaller increases among professionals managers and other elite groups. The situation in Philadelphia was again typical. As of 1950, 8 percent of the black male work force had won white-collar jobs, fully 25 percent were classified as operatives and kindred workers,” and another 11 percent were called “craftsmen, foremen, etc.” Over the next decade these figures crept up, the white-collar workers to 10.5 percent and the craftsmen to 12.5.
The year 1960 marked three related and dramatic firsts. The census of that year, marking the climax to the long historic process of migration, recorded that the black population of the United States, once overwhelmingly rural, had reversed that situation and become more typically urban than the whites, by a margin of 73 to 70 percent. The end of an almost equally significant process was signaled by the black proportion of factory workers for the first time exceeding the white, or 28 percent to 21 percent in Philadelphia, 25 to 20 percent across the country. In a further development, the national death rate from homicide dropped for both whites and blacks—the white rate from 2.6 to 2.5 per 100,000 annually, the black from 28.8 to 23.1. As of 1960, which closed out three eventful and promising decades, the overall murder rate of 4.7 was the lowest in any decennial year since the F.B.I. began collecting statistics in 1933.
PHILADELPHIA AND THE WIDER WORLD, 1960-
Yet the promise of the mid-century decades has not generally been realized, and in particular the condition of poorer blacks in cities is in many respects worse than it was a generation ago. Patterns of criminal behavior have intensified, exacerbating all other problems, as part of a wider national and even international increase in violent and illicit activity of all sorts. In other respects, too—some positive, many negative—the postindustrial era dating form the late 1950s has created a different world for Afro-Americans and indeed for everyone.
The central irony is that just as blacks were beginning to enter the urban industrial age, the economy and indeed the whole society shifted beneath them. The high point occurred toward the middle of the 1950s when the Afro-American unemployment rate reached a historic low of 4.5 percent. From then on, though migrants continued to move into the city, the city itself was increasingly not what it had been. Part of the reason that blacks had by 1960 become more characteristically urban than whites is that whites were leaving the city in larger numbers.
Race, Reform, and Rebellion (3rd ed.)
by Manning Marable
p. 152
In 1960, the homicide rate per 100,000 blacks was 21.9, slightly less than the black homicide figure of 1910 (22.3). By 1970, the black homicide rate reached 35.5 percent, compared to a 4.4 figure among American whites. During the Nixon, Ford and Carter administration, black fratricidal violence soared. About 55 black males per thousand were victims of violent crime during the 1970s. Of all black working-class and impoverished households 13 to 16 percent experienced robberies every year in the decade. Black male homicide rates were between 600 and 900 percent higher than those for whites by the late 1970s. And by 1980, 50 percent of all American homicides were black males killing other black males.
American Homicide
by Randolph Roth
Kindle Locations 222-225
Race and slavery are connected to America’s homicide problem, but not in a straightforward way. Before the 1890s, for example, African Americans were far less likely to kill than whites were, and especially unlikely to kill one another. Why, for the past century, has the opposite been the case? Why were Virginia and Maryland no more homicidal than Pennsylvania in the 1720s and 1730s, when they had more slaves and free blacks? Why did slave states become more homicidal after the Revolution, when free states became less homicidal?
The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America
by Stephen Steinberg
pp. 111-124
However, now that immigrants have escaped from the poverty of earlier generations, they tend to look back on their experience in poverty as different from that of lower-class minorities today. Thus, Nathan Glazer distinguishes between “slums of hope” and “slums of despair,” by which he implies that immigrant slums were not afflicted with the social disorganization and cultural distortions that are identified with present-day slums. According to this view, despite their material privations, immigrant families stayed together, workers organized for better wages, and a stubborn ethnic pride cemented immigrants together in collective self-defense against the deprecations of the outside world. The solidarity of family and community is assumed to be the chief reason that immigrant ghettos were spared the social pathologies associated with today’s ghettos.
But were they so spared? A number of recent studies suggest that social pathologies of various kinds were more widespread in immigrant communities than has previously been acknowledged. Once again, it will be useful to focus on the Jewish experience, since Jews have so often been held out as an example of a group that, despite the poverty of the immigrant generation, did not produce high rates of crime and other such pathologies.
“Slums of Hope”
Chroniclers of the Jewish experience in America have rarely suggested that crime among Jews was ever more than an idiosyncratic event. […] However, this was not the prevailing view in the early part of the century.
In 1908 the “crime wave” among immigrant Jews emerged as an explosive political issue […] In the popular mind Jews were very much a part of the crime wave that had besieged American cities, and Jewish groups were kept busy defending Jewish honor against the exaggerated and often malicious allegations that periodically appeared in the press.
The debate within the Jewish community over the “criminality problem” produced the usual ideological split. Most of the Yiddish press, as well as moderate Jewish leaders, attributed the rising rate of crime among Jews to the breakdown of the traditional order. The problem, they believed, was that in America parents had lost control over their children, and religion and other traditional values had been shattered. To remedy this situation, they called for a revitalization of traditional values through religious instruction and various social work programs; they also advocated a more concerted effort within the Jewish community to stamp out crime.
The socialist Forward, however, took a quite different view of the rising rates of crime among Jews. The problem, the Forward insisted, was not with the Jewish community or even an erosion of traditional values, but with capitalism. The Forward explicitly rejected the notion of “Jewish crime.” It seemed obvious that the destitute condition of immigrant Jews was the root cause of crime, and for this reason the Forward opposed the Kehillah and other specifically Jewish efforts to control crime. If crime was a product of conditions endemic to capitalism, then narrow strategies that treated crime as an internal disorder of the Jewish community were misdirected and doomed to failure.
The experience of other immigrant groups certainly is consistent with the Forward’s view that crime had nothing to do with ethnicity as such, but was primarily a function of poverty. The history of prostitution in America is a case in point. The “oldest profession” has always been the province of the newest group to reside in urban ghettos. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was the Irish who, despite a strong tradition of chastity, figured most prominently among the streetwalkers of New York and Boston. Later in the century they were replaced by Jews and other immigrants. Only in recent decades has this dubious mantle been passed on to blacks and other newcomers to the city.
Generally speaking, there has been an ethnic succession in an all areas of crime, beginning with the Irish, who were the first identifiable minority to inhabit urban slums. In the 1860s Harper’s Magazine observed that the Irish “have so behaved themselves that nearly 75% of our criminals are Irish, that fully 75% of the crimes of violence committed among us are the work of Irishmen. . . .” Speculation as to the causes of the alarming rate of crime among the Irish centered on ethnic traits, especially the intemperate disposition of the Irish “race.”
By the end of the century, the connection between immigration and crime became something of a national obsession. The United States Immigration Commission, which carried out a series of studies on the “immigration problem,” devoted a whole volume to “Immigrants and Crime.” On the basis of extensive statistics collected in New York, Chicago, and Massachusetts, the commission drew up a composite picture of “races and nationalities . . . exhibiting clearly defined criminal characteristics.” Italians figured most prominently with respect to crimes of personal violence, including murder. The Irish stood out among those arrested for drunkenness and vagrancy. The French and Jews were disproportionately represented among those arrested for prostitution. In addition, Jews were second only to native Americans when it came to crimes against property, including burglary, larceny, and receiving stolen goods. Greeks, Italians, and Jews all ranked high with respect to infractions against city ordinances regulating peddling and trade. The commission concluded that “immigration has had a marked effect on the nature of the crime committed in the United States.” Though the report did not attempt to explain the observed relationship between crime and ethnicity, neither did it consider the possibility that the correlation was simply a by-product of poverty. For the commission, the relationship between nationality and crime was self-evident, and implied its own remedy: crime should be reduced by restricting the immigration of those “races” that were prone to criminality.
Today, of course, it is blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos who are blamed for high rates of crime, and as before, crime is treated as a cultural aberration rather than a symptom of class inequality. No doubt, the incidence of crime in immigrant ghettos was lower than it is today; nor, perhaps, were homicides and other crimes of violence as prevalent. But neither were immigrants mired in poverty over many generations. On the contrary, having entered an expanding economy, most immigrants were on the threshold of upward mobility. Yet if the Irish, Italians, Jews, and others produced as much crime as they did in a single generation, what could have been expected of these groups had they remained in poverty for five or eight or ten generations, like much of the nation’s black population?
That crime in immigrant communities was primarily a response to economic disadvantage, and not a product of deeper cultural abnormalities, is easier to see now that these groups have attained middle-class respectability. To realize this should make it easier to avoid confusion of social class with culture and ethnicity when considering the problems of minorities today.
“Slums of Despair”
If social scientists have idealized the immigrant communities as “slums of hope,” they have also portrayed the communities of today’s racial minorities as “slums of despair,” characterized by a tangle of pathology involving high rates of crime, unstable families, weak and disorganized communities, and a debilitating culture of poverty that is said to impede social and economic progress. In this respect, contemporary sociological thought is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Social Darwinism. Then, as now, the prevailing attitude toward the ghetto was of moral condemnation, and the onus for the ethnic plight was placed on the ethnic groups themselves. Of course, there is no small irony in the fact that the “New Darwinists” invariably have their roots in the very ethnic groups that were previously maligned by the Social Darwinists. […]
Controversy surrounded Moynihan’s insistence that the problems of black families today are a by-product of the ravages of slavery on the black family. This is a seductive argument, since it appears to place the onus of blame on a racist society. But for Moynihan it is not our sins but the sins of our fathers that are at the root of the problem. That is to say, the report tends to minimize the role of present-day conditions as they operate to undermine black families; instead, the emphasis is upon racism as it operated in the distant past. Aside from this misplaced emphasis, more recent historical evidence calls into question the assumption that slavery shattered the black family as a cultural institution.
In his history of The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Herbert Gutman marshaled an enormous body of evidence to show that despite the abuses inflicted on black families during slavery, the cultural fabric of the family remained intact, and blacks left slavery with very powerful family traditions. Even before Gutman’s book was published there was evidence that contemporary problems in black families do not have their roots in slavery. Had Moynihan examined available data prior to the 1940s, he would have realized that illegitimacy and family instability are only recent trends that began with the mass movement of blacks to cities since the First World War. In other words, if there is a crisis in the black family, it has its roots not in slavery, but in the conditions that black migrants encountered in northern ghettos.
When immigrants lived in urban slums, they, too, experienced strains in the family system. In the early 1900s, for example, desertions wee widespread among Jewish immigrants, and Jewish journals and social agencies expressed alarm over the “desertion evil.” Some indication of the magnitude of this problem can be gleaned from the records of the United Hebrew Charities of New York, which reported that in 1903-4 alone it had received over one thousand applications for relief from deserted women. The Jewish Daily Forward routinely ran a “Gallery of Missing Husbands” to assist women in locating their errant spouses.
Once again, it would not be correct to imply that family instability was as common among Jews and other immigrants as it is among today’s racial minorities, for this was not so. But neither was their experience in poverty the same. Despite the hardships of immigrant life, most immigrants had left still more depressed conditions in their countries of origin, and their American experience of poverty was generally short-lived. In the case of New York’s Jewish population, the proportion residing on the Lower East Side declined from 75 percent in 1892 to only 23 percent in 1916. If this was a “slum of hope,” then it is clear that there was something to be hopeful about.
The vulnerability of the family to poverty was revealed during the Depression. A study by Edward Bakke, called Citizens Without Work, traced the devastating impact of unemployment on the family system. Bakke wrote:
“The family, dissociated from many of its former community contacts, is now thrown in upon itself where conflict and confusion dominate and established relationship patterns have disintegrated. There is no comfort in the family circle. The breaking up of the family unit may be considered at this time by one or both of the parents since there is a present failure to receive satisfaction customarily expected of the family and very little prospect that the future will offer anything different.”
The dissolution of families occurred despite the fact that the “citizens without work” had been unemployed for only a short time, and could hardly blame themselves for a collapse in the national economy. In contrast, racial minorities today not only experience chronic unemployment, but do so at a time of general prosperity, a condition that exacerbates feelings of self-blame, with dire consequences for the family. […]
The issue with respect to the culture of poverty, however, goes beyond the question of how much weight is to be given to internal versus external factors. The more compelling question has to do with the relationship between these two sets of factors and particularly with the ways in which external structures impinge upon and shape the values and life-styles of the poor. The stark figures presented in the Moynihan Report, for example, do not shed light on the process that results in a high rate of illegitimacy and family breakdown. To suggest that a weak family system produces family instability is meaningless, when the only evidence for the claim that the family system is weak is the high rate of family instability. To break out of this pattern of circular reasoning, and to understand the process through which family relationships are undermined, it is necessary to explore the linkages between economic forces, cultural values, and individual states of mind.
“Whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals”
In The Condemnation of Blackness, Muhammad shows how “the racial data revolution” was made to work against blacks even as social scientists, journalists, and reformers created pathways to rehabilitation for Irish, Italian, and other foreign-born immigrants once tagged with a similar stigma of criminality. Where white criminals enjoyed the privilege of “racial anonymity” and were afforded an understanding of the structural roots of poverty and crime, black criminals, whose crimes, we can now see, differed little in form and function from those committed by whites, were made to stand in for the imagined deficiencies of the race as a whole, so that in evaluations of black fitness for modern life, the innocent came to be tarred along with the actually guilty. “Whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals”—in exposing the roots of this persistent refrain, one that has justified not only racial violence but the kind of benign neglect that has relegated blacks to the margins of an American social sphere that has historically expanded to incorporate new and different groups, Muhammad shows how this particular mismeasure of man has become foundational to our thinking about modern urban America, and how its insidious logic remains with us to this day.
White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology
Chapter 18
“Being a Statistician Means Never Having to Say You’re Certain”
by Oscar H. Gandy Jr
Kindle Locations 5769-5785
Arguments in support of racial profiling that are based on crime statistics often point to the “fact” that “blacks, who are only about 13 percent of the population, make up ‘35 percent of all drug arrests and 55 percent of all drug convictions,’” implying that African Americans are responsible for a “disproportionate share of the crime” (Muharrar 1999, 8).
It then falls to public intellectuals like Kennedy to remind us that not only is the implication that one is likely to draw from these statistics dangerously incorrect, in that arrest and conviction rates bear no necessary relationship to the commission of drug-related crimes, but that the social cost of using race to activate police surveillance exceeds the short-term benefits that the supporters of profiling might reasonably expect.
Kennedy (1999) suggests that each encounter that an “innocent” or nonoffending African American has with the police increases their sense of alienation, resentment, and disregard for the police and for the criminal justice system. Public opinion data support this claim, in that African Americans are more likely than Whites to hold unfavorable opinions of the police, with young Black men most likely to hold unfavorable opinions of their local police (Gallup 1999). This alienation feeds back into the system and weakens it, inviting high-level concern about the nature and extent of “jury nullification” and the reluctance among African Americans to participate in the imprisonment of still more young men (Cole 1999).
Most of what we have read about racial profiling has been framed in terms of the importance of the war against drugs (Allen-Bell 1997). The police and much of the general public have come to believe incorrectly that African Americans are far more likely to be users of illegal drugs than Whites. For many, the numbers of African Americans in prison for drug offenses supplies all the proof that anybody might need. But those “facts” deserve greater scrutiny.
If the truth is that African Americans are no more likely than Whites to be carrying drugs as they drive the New Jersey Turnpike (ACLU 1996), yet they are far more likely to be stopped and searched
Chapter 19
“Crime Statistics, Disparate Impact Analysis, and the Economic Disenfranchisement of Minority Ex-Offenders”
by Regina Austin
Kindle Locations 5910-5930
One of the most significant disabilities burdening the economic advancement of blacks and Latinos today is the tendency to link their race and/ or ethnicity with crime and violence, a linkage that statistics seemingly confirm. For example, although Blacks represent roughly 12.8 percent of the population, they constitute 28.6 percent of persons arrested, 27.7 percent of persons convicted in federal courts, 44 percent of those convicted of felonies in state courts, 37.8 percent of those incarcerated by federal authorities, and 46.5 percent of those incarcerated by state authorities. 2 Similarly, Latinos, who represent roughly 11.9 percent of the population and may be of any race, are 27.3 percent of federal inmates and 17 percent of state inmates (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2000; U.S. Census Bureau 2000). 3
All manner of social and economic consequences follow from the mistaken significance attached to such racialized criminal justice data. Because minorities are disproportionately represented among those arrested, convicted, and incarcerated, it is assumed that any individual minority person is more likely to engage in criminal behavior than any individual White person. It is accordingly thought to be rational for actors or decision makers in political, economic, or even social settings to avoid contact or interaction with minority persons who might use the encounter as an opportunity to commit a crime. There are many problems with this approach. For one thing, it is an erroneous interpretation of the gross criminal justice statistics. Even if the data are taken at face value, the percentage of the minority population engaged in criminal behavior is still quite small and so are the chances that any random minority individual poses a threat of criminal behavior (Armour 1997, 38– 39, 165 n. 10). 4 More importantly, action predicated on misinterpretations of racialized crime data produces grave social, political, and economic consequences that contravene norms of fairness and equality. The burdens imposed on Blacks and Latinos because of the inappropriate interpretation of crime data extend beyond racial profiling by law enforcement officers, a practice nearly universally condemned. 5 For example, statistical discrimination and the exaggerated fear of minority criminality have impaired the ability of law-abiding minority citizens to engage in such mundane activities as shopping in a retail establishment without being closely watched, having a pizza delivered to their door (because deliverymen fear being mugged), or paying for a purchase by check (because merchants fear that the checks will bounce) (Austin 2000; Linstedt 2000). 6
Kindle Locations 6210-6218
All racialized crime statistics should be published, read, or interpreted with the following explicit or implicit disclaimer:
Racial and ethnic data must be treated with caution because of the varying circumstances under which such information is recorded or reported…. Race and ethnicity may be recorded from observation or from self-identification. The use of racial or ethnic descriptions may reflect social custom rather than genetic or hereditary origins. Moreover, existing research on crime has generally shown that racial and ethnic identity is not predictive of crime behavior within data which has been controlled for social and economic factors such as education levels, family status, income, housing density, and residential mobility. (Minnesota Department of Public Safety 2000)
Stated more succinctly, descriptive racialized crime statistics that are not controlled for social and economic factors are “not sufficient for causal analysis and should not be used as an indicator of the role of race and criminality in economic decision making” (Walker, Spohn, and DeLone 2000).
The Condemnation of Blackness
by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
pp. 5-9
In the period under investigation, crime, despite its variability in form and expression across groups, was a ubiquitous problem across the nation— so much a problem in the urban North that it was not clear that blackness would eventually become its sole signifier. Even the wellsprings of violent crime, as historian and criminologist Jeffrey S. Adler found in his recent definitive study of homicide in Progressive era Chicago, flowed from the same broader cultural, social, economic, and demographic shifts and tensions affecting all non-elite urban people. “Contrary to the impressions of most observers,” he writes, “African American violence was similar to white violence. It resembled white homicide in the form it took; and African-American violence paralleled white violence in how that form changed.” 22 From the 1890s through the 1930s, from the Progressive era through Prohibition, African Americans had no monopoly on social banditry, crimes of resistance, or underground entrepreneurship; the “weapons of the weak” and “lower-class oppositional culture” extended far and wide and in many directions. 23 The Condemnation of Blackness demonstrates and explains how ideas of racial inferiority and crime became fastened to African Americans by contrast to ideas of class and crime that shaped views of European immigrants and working-class whites. 24
Whiteness scholars have shown how crucial the attributes of skin color, European ancestry, and the gradual adoption of anti-black racism were to immigrant assimilation “into the singular ‘white race.’ ”25 Such benefits, Thomas Guglielmo found recently, even secured the whiteness of Chicago’s “Sicilian Gunmen” because their criminality “never positioned them as non-white in any sustained or systematic way.” 26 Building on whiteness and critical race scholarship, I explore how postbellum southern black out-migration to the urban North— to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York in particular— fueled an invidious black migration narrative framed by crime statistics and reshaped broader racial discourses on immigration and urbanization during Progressive era. Evoking the specter of black rapists and murderers moving north one step ahead of lynch mobs, innovative racial demographers such as Frederick L. Hoffman explicitly sanitized and normalized the criminality of northern white working and immigrant classes. Consequently, the black southern migrant— the “Negro, stranger in our midst”— was marked as an exceptionally dangerous newcomer.
One of the strongest claims this book makes is that statistical comparisons between the Foreign-born and the Negro were foundational to the emergence of distinctive modern discourses on race and crime. For all the ways in which poor Irish immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century were labeled members of the dangerous classes, criminalized by Anglo-Saxon police, and over-incarcerated in the nation’s failing prisons, Progressive era social scientists used statistics and sociology to create a pathway for their redemption and rehabilitation. 27 A generation before the Chicago School of Sociology systematically destroyed the immigrant house of pathology built by social Darwinists and eugenicists, Progressive era social scientists were innovating environmental theories of crime and delinquency while using crime statistics to demonstrate the assimilability of the Irish, the Italian, and the Jew by explicit contrast to the Negro. 28 White progressives often discounted crime statistics or disregarded them altogether in favor of humanizing European immigrants, as in much of Jane Addams’s writings. 29 In one of the first academic textbooks on crime, Charles R. Henderson, a pioneering University of Chicago social scientist, declared that “the evil [of immigrant crime] is not so great as statistics carelessly interpreted might prove.” He explained that age and sex ratios— too many young males— skewed the data. But where the “Negro factor” is concerned, Henderson continued, “racial inheritance, physical and mental inferiority, barbarian and slave ancestry and culture,” were among the “most serious factors in crime statistics.” 30
Similar comparisons would echo for the rest of the twentieth century. The Progressive era was indeed the founding moment for the emergence of an enduring statistical discourse of black dysfunctionality rather than the 1960s, as is commonly believed. The post-Moynihan social-scientific and public policy view of black pathology that scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley criticize as “ghetto ethnography” began, statistically speaking, in the 1890s. The racial project of making blacks the “thing against which normality, whiteness, and functionality have been defined,” was foundational to the making of modern urban America. 31 Shaped by racial ideology and racism, the statistical ghetto emerged, study by study, in the Progressive era as the northern Black Belt formed block by block. 32 Inextricably linked at birth, they grew up together.
Northern black crime statistics and migration trends in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s were woven together into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern society. In the Windy City, in the City of Brotherly Love, and in the nation’s Capital of Commerce this tale was told, infused with symbolic references to American civilization, to American modernity, and to the fictive promised land of unending opportunity for all who, regardless of race or class or nationality, sought their fortunes. In these imagined communities of a post-slavery, post-Reconstruction civil rights America, “color-blind universalism” added an additional thread of contempt to the narrative. In a moment when most white Americans believed in the declining significance of racism, statistical evidence of excessive rates of black arrests and the overrepresentation of black prisoners in the urban North was seen by many whites as indisputable proof of black inferiority. 33
What else but black pathology could explain black failure in these modern meccas of opportunity? Unlike subsequent commentators in the 1920s and 1930s, Progressive era white race-relations writers frequently asserted that racism had nothing to do with black criminality. They self-consciously critiqued black criminality in what they perceived to be race-neutral language. The numbers “speak for themselves” was one frequent refrain, followed by “I am not a racist.” 34 A variant attached to both rhetorical strategies accused black race-relations writers of being biased and sentimental toward their own. They were accused of “coddling” their own criminals and excusing their behavior. When black experts dug in, when they made forceful counterarguments of epidemic racism in the heyday of “separate but equal”— even in the North— they were often charged with playing the race card (a concept then still in its infancy). The familiar resonance of these statements and exchanges is a testament to their longevity in American culture and society. 35
One explanation for the staying power of black crime rhetoric is that it had far more proponents than opponents compared to other racial concepts. 36 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the statistical rhetoric of the “Negro criminal” became a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority. As an “objective” measure, it also became a tool to shield white Americans from the charge of racism when they used black crime statistics to support discriminatory public policies and social welfare practices. Evidence throughout the first half of this book shows that the gap in the racial crime rhetoric between avowedly white supremacist writers and white progressives narrowed significantly when it came to discussing black crime, vice, and immorality. Progressive era white social scientists and reformers often reified the racial criminalization process by framing white criminals sympathetically as victims of industrialization. They described a “great army of unfortunates” juxtaposed against an army of self-destructive and pathological blacks who were their “own worst enem[ ies].” 37 Race and crime linkages fueled an early antiliberal resentment that pushed African Americans to the margins of an expanding public and private collaboration of social, civic, and political reform. 38 Northern white settlement house workers, for example, drew on these ideas when they limited their crime prevention efforts “for whites only.” 39 Local YMCA officials, playground managers, and recreation center supervisors drew on these ideas when they locked black youngsters out of constructive sites of leisure and supervised play. Trans-ethnic gangs of white men— backed by consenting police officers— drew on these ideas as they attacked black pedestrians and homeowners in an increasingly violent and enduring contest over racialized space in the urban North.
To be sure, racial liberals— a subset of white progressives— pushed back against the rising tide of northern segregation, discrimination, and violence during the Progressive era. 40 Such leaders as Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington distinguished themselves in their NAACP commitments to civil and political rights. Drawing on the pioneering work of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, racial liberals also promoted new cultural explanations of black criminality and rejected the biological determinism of the racial Darwinists who had dominated scientific discourse on race since the mid-nineteenth century. But there were limits to Boas’s culture concept. 41 The statistical evidence of black criminality remained rooted in the concept of black inferiority or black pathology despite a shift in the social scientific discourse on the origins of race and crime. The shift from a racial biological frame to a racial cultural frame kept race at the heart of the discourse. Although racist notions of (permanent) biological inferiority gave way to liberal notions of (temporary) cultural inferiority, racial liberals continued to distinguish black criminality from white and ethnic criminality. In effect, they incriminated black culture. Attempts to deemphasize blackness and provide social welfare for African Americans never matched the scale or intensity of the Americanization project among immigrants. The racial-cultural content of white ethnic criminality gradually began to lose its currency during the Progressive era, while black criminality became more visible (and more contested by blacks). 42
ARE Blacks A Criminal Race? Surprising Statistics
Unfortunately, this false debate has obscured the deeper issue – whether or not Blacks contribute disproportionately to the crime rate. Media coverage, conviction rates and “common knowledge” (stereotypes) all suggest that Blacks commit crimes at a rate disproportionate to our numbers in society. Conservatives embrace this assumption, and call for tougher laws. Liberals embrace the same assumption, though squeamishly, and instead call for more social programs.
The better question for public debate is this: do the actual government statistics bear out the claim that Blacks contribute disproportionately to the crime rate? Or is this largely a stereotype, which is driven by the disproportionate rate of ARRESTS and CONVICTIONS of Black people? And does the over-focus on Black crime conceal an alarmingly high crime rate within the white population? […]
Those who believe that African American or Latino youth are more “criminal” than any other ethnic groups are simply wrong. The real facts tell us much more than stereotypes, or musings—both of which obscure the well-documented disparate treatment accorded African Americans compared to whites within the justice system. These comments on racially disparate crime also overlook the area of “corporate crime.”
And another thing about that “Blacks being more Criminal…” noise
As you can see the clearance rate for violent crimes are far far higher than they are for property crimes such as Burglary or Larceny – yet Burglaries and Larcenies occur many times more often, which means that since the most common crimes actually lead to the lowest percentage of arrest we really have NO IDEA whose doing what “the Most”.
If they’re only arresting 22% of the people who perpetrate larceny, that means 78% of them are getting away with it. 78% of 6.1 Million is 4,797,000 Crimes being committed that no one is being arrest for. […]
[Ed. To reinterate: being ARRESTED MORE OFTEN doesn’t mean that someone is necessarily GUILTY More often. Arrests only show the amount of focus that Police are placing in that particular area, so what we can see is that the Police focus is HIGHER for Murder and for Robbery than it is for Burglary and it is for Larceny, even though Murder and Robbery are much less frequent than the others. It doesn’t mean Black people committed more of these crimes, it only means they get presumed guilty and arrested for them more often.]
It’s very possible that Black People are arrested more often simply because they are suspected more often regardless of whether they did the crime or didn’t. We can see from the results of the Innocent Project that using DNA evidence 317 people who had been convicted and sent to death row – Couldn’t Have Done the Crime, so exactly how positive can we be about everyone else in prison with cases against them that are nowhere near as rigorously vetted as Death Row Cases are? […]
The presumption of Black Guilt drives police to stop, question, ticket and arrest black people far more often than they are found actually committing crimes, and the same type of thing affects who gets charged, who gets sentenced harshly [remember “affluenza”] and who ultimately winds up in jail and prison for longer periods. This is has been shown to be case by many studies. […]
What we don’t see here in any of the data is a greater propensity for Black Criminality Across the Board. It’s not across the board, where’s there’s a disparity it’s limited to specific areas and doesn’t spread to every type of case.
Yes, even if we were able to add a control to eliminate the police disparity and bias that has been repeatedly proven, proportionally Blacks would probably still be far too represented in cases of Murder and Robbery, but there may be reasons for that. Many of the Robberies are economically induced. People steal because they Want Stuff they don’t have. People who have stuff, and are earning a decent wage at a decent job don’t usually need to commit Robberies – those people can commit Larceny by stealing from their employer while they’re on the job.
Also a lot of Murders in the Black community are retaliatory, especially when Gangs and the Drug Trade are involved. They’re Pay-Back for someone else being Murdered. People are getting Street Justice, because they don’t think the POLICE are going to catch the person who did the first crime [rightly or wrongly the perception is that many murders of Black people are far more likely to go unsolved without an arrest or prosecution even when other Black people are the perpetrators], so as a result they take the law in their own hands. […]
Yeah, it’s an issue. Yeah, they’re out of “proportion” in these two areas. But it’s interesting how people that harp on this proportion stuff, don’t ever want to recognize that they’re also dramatically out of proportion on access to jobs, access to healthcare, access to housing, and access to decent education. Their out of proportion in their access to HOPE, and without Hope nothing good can flourish. These things are not unconnected. If you go further down the table Black people are actually below their proportion – just 12-13% of those arrested – when it comes to DUI and liquor laws but I’m not really expecting that they get any “credit” for that stuff. Blacks overperform in plenty of areas and that’s used against them all the time.
But again, the total number of Murders we’re talking about are fairly small compared to every other crime that’s happening on the list. Same thing with the Robberies. Take an unemployment rate somewhere in the 20-30% for young black men, add some resentment, persecution, lousy schools, hopelessness, desperation and puree for 50 years and a shit load of pointless Murder and Robbery is just a couple of the crappy results you’re gonna get. Shiny Happy Talk about “Opportunity” and “Pulling up your Pants” aren’t very convincing in that environment.
Yes, Murder is a far more serious crime, but is Robbery really that different from Burglary or Larceny? We’re literally comparing Millions of Crimes, with Thousands, and Hundreds. Why doesn’t that proportional difference count?
Either way we can see that Larceny – one of the most common crimes – isn’t where you see Black people jumping out way ahead of White people. Not even.
In raw simple numbers Black people with 2.6 Million Arrests really can’t possibly commit More Crime than White People at 6.5 Million Arrests. That’s just not logical. Maybe if Black people were only at 1.7 Million Arrests, or 1.4 Million some people who seem eternally bothered by this would feel better – but it still feels like a big smoke screen to take our attention away from the OTHER 4.7 Million Criminals that are getting away without an arrest and without a conviction for their crimes, year after year after year. Now I think it’s safe to assume that some of those missing arrests are for repeat offenders, even if they don’t get caught the first, second, third or tenth time – they might get them on the eleventh so there just might not be a one-to-one relationship between one single crime each being performed by one single criminal.
But then that means we really have no fracking idea how many of who is actually doing what now what do we? All we know is who is far more likely to pay the price for it in our jails and losing their lives on our streets.
Although I can’t prove it, somehow I just don’t think most of those missing guys and gals doing the most crimes and not getting caught – are Black. I just don’t. Black guys, generally speaking, are automatically suspected of everything and practically can’t get away with anything.
Black-on-Black Crime You Say? White People Kill Each Other Just as Much as Black People Do
The final issue with the “Black-on-Black Crime” argument involves the disparate treatment of Black and White offenders in the criminal justice system. Whites represent a majority of the American population and are responsible for 54% of murders involving an intimate partner, 59% of murders involving a family member, 55% of murders involving infants, 56% of murders involving elders, 54% of sex related murders, 53% of gang related murders, 70% of workplace related murders, 55% of arson related murders, 80% of poison related murders, and 53% of murders involving multiple victims (BJS, 2011). Blacks comprise 13% of the population and are responsible for 59% of felony murders, 65% of drug murders, 50% of murders involving an argument, 56% of gun homicides, and 54% of murders with multiple offenders (BJS, 2011).
Although Whites commit more types of homicides in comparison to Blacks, Blacks are more likely to be arrested and convicted. Whites are just as likely as Blacks to commit crimes against people of their own race, but Blacks often receive longer sentences and are more likely to be incarcerated or sentenced to death when they commit crimes against people of their own race. It is a double-standard that Whites who commit crimes are more likely to be acquitted, and Blacks who commit crimes and are more likely to be convicted. This historical issue of racially disparate treatment in the criminal justice system is another reason why people rally for justice. Using the “Black-on-Black Crime” argument only serves as a means to distract people from macro-level issues of injustice.
White People Commit the Most Heinous Crimes, So Why Is America Terrified of Black Men?
In our nation’s history, so many of the sickest, most appalling crimes have been committed by whites. Yet no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how young the victims, no matter how much fear is engendered in a community, no matter how much media attention and public discussion the crimes of whites engender, the race itself is never sullied. One does not look at a white man or woman and feel concern that pale skin enhances the likelihood that he or she is an assassin, a bomber, a murderer. […]
Let’s look at run-of-the-mill crimes today. Who’s committing them? Who should be feared? Again, it depends on what categories of offenses we choose to fear. Whites are disproportionately arrested for some crimes, such as arson, driving under the influence, and vandalism. That is, even with the focus of police resources on black communities, whites are convicted of these offenses at numbers greater than their percentage of the population. Drunk driving is a real menace, killing over 10,000 Americans per year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. Yet no one eyes a white driver next to him on the road and says, “A-ha, light-skinned guy, he’s probably drunk, I’m calling the police.” The statistics don’t matter. Our perceptions do.
How much crime overall is committed by African Americans? You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to strip away anxieties and emotions and arrive at the factual answer to this question. Most go quickly to FBI arrest or incarceration statistics, to see who has been convicted and sentenced for various offenses, broken down by race. But this data doesn’t include every state or even consistent reporting from one police department to the next. Nevertheless, this FBI data shows that African Americans, who comprise 13 percent of our population, represent 38 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons. That is, blacks are locked up at nearly three times their rate in population, a shockingly high number. This statistic is often used in support of the black-as-criminal conclusion.
But these numbers are almost entirely useless, because they are both over- and under-inclusive. They include a small number of people who may be innocent as well as a very large number of inmates incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, especially marijuana possession, which does not strike fear in the hearts of most people. Worse, these numbers are flawed because they do not reflect who’s committing the crime, merely who has been apprehended and locked up. They leave out all the burglars and rapists and killers who are still on the loose.
And the statistics don’t take into account unequal policing. Many people are unaware of the huge disparity of law enforcement resources applied to majority black urban neighborhoods in comparison to the relatively lax policing of white suburbs. Police departments send legions of officers to patrol inner city neighborhoods, with high concentrations of blacks, stopping, questioning, and frisking African Americans (and Hispanics), and where law enforcement has more eyes on a community, it finds more offenses. Once in the “sticky” criminal justice system, young men of color are likely to find themselves under correctional control, monitored, watched for many years, even after release from incarceration. To make room for the skyrocketing number of Americans (disproportionately men of color) incarcerated in the last few decades, we’ve slashed and generally eliminated prison counseling, drug treatment programs, education and vocational programs. Once released, ex-cons are legally discriminated against by employers, denied food stamps, access to public housing, school loans, professional licenses, and access to many other basic services. As a result, the United States has a high recidivism rate, as drug dealing and other criminal enterprises are the rare occupations that offer jobs to released former inmates. In inner city neighborhoods, it’s easy to fall under correctional control, and once in, it’s tough to get out.
The chief problem with arrest and incarceration statistics, compiled so diligently by law enforcement annually and relied upon heavily by most legal analysts, is that they are only as good as the humans making decisions as to where to focus police, what crimes to charge, what plea bargains to offer, what sentences to impose. As we’ve seen, nearly everyone harbors implicit racial fears and assumptions, and the humans staffing our criminal justice system are no better nor worse than the rest of us. We know that at every turn, similarly situated African Americans are treated more punitively than whites in the criminal justice system.
Thus the decisions made at the entry point to the criminal justice system – community policing decisions as to who gets watched, who gets stopped, who gets questioned, who gets patted down for contraband – powerfully determine not who is a criminal, but who gets labelled as criminal. All things being equal, inmate numbers would easily tell us who has broken the law. But again, almost nothing is equal in our justice system.
For example, arrests. We know that overall blacks and whites use marijuana at about the same rate (whites are more likely to sell). Among young people aged eighteen to twenty-five, the most common age to be caught up in the criminal justice system, whites are more likely to have smoked marijuana. This is contrary to the widely held association of drug use with African Americans. When we include other narcotics, whites constitute the vast majority of drug users. Yet in one survey, when subjects were asked, “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user.
Nationwide, four times as many African Americans as whites are arrested for marijuana possession. In Iowa and the District of Columbia, the number jumps to eight times as many. How does this happen? Because police departments, partly driven by a desire to increase their drug arrest statistics, concentrate on minority or poorer neighborhoods. Focusing on low-level offenses is easier and cheaper than investigating serious crimes, and drives those arrest numbers high, triggering increased funding. And so hundreds of thousands of inner city residents are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for having a joint, a cookie, or a baggie of marijuana in their pocket, even though the majority of Americans favor legalization.
When was the last time you saw a drug sweep in the suburbs?
If one reasoned only from arrest records, one would conclude that blacks are four times as likely as whites to smoke marijuana. And we know that would be wrong. Reasoning backward from arrest or imprisonment statistics to conclude that minority groups are violent criminals is equally flawed.
We know that police disproportionately target neighborhoods of color, so that’s where the vast majority of arrests occur. That does not necessarily mean that’s where most of the criminals are.
White people are more likely to deal drugs, but black people are more likely to get arrested for it
Here’s a pretty astonishing chart on the skyrocketing number of arrests of black Americans for nonviolent drug crimes. Brookings’ Jonathan Rothwell lays it out:
Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.
Even more surprising is what gets left out of the chart: Blacks are far more likely to be arrested for selling or possessing drugs than whites, even though whites use drugs at the same rate. And whites are actually more likely to sell drugs
U.S. Homicide & Suicide Rates in Whites & Blacks
(6) The suicide rate is notably increasing for whites.
(7) The homicide rate is notably decreasing for blacks.
White-on-white murder in America is out of control
And there are many countries full of white people — Norway, Iceland, France, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — where white people murder each other at a much lower rate than you see here in the United States. On the other hand, although people often see criminal behavior as a symptom of poverty, the quantity of murder committed by white people specifically in the United States casts some doubt on this. Per capita GDP is considerably higher here than in France — and the white population in America is considerably richer than the national average — and yet we have more white murderers.
To understand the level of cultural pathology at work here, it’s important to understand that 36 percent of those killed by whites are women — a far higher share than you see with black murderers.
Race, Crime and Statistical Malpractice: How the Right Manipulates White Fear With Bogus Data
* Only about 1 percent of African Americans — and no more than 2 percent of black males — will commit a violent crime in a given year;
* Even though there are more black-on-white interracial crimes than white-on-black interracial crimes, this fact is not evidence of anti-white racial targeting by black offenders. Rather, it is completely explained by two factors having nothing to do with anti-white bias: namely, the general differences in rates of criminal offending, and the rates at which whites and blacks encounter one another (and thus, have the opportunity to victimize one another). Once these two factors are “controlled for” in social science terms, the actual rates of black-on-white crime are lower than random chance would predict;
* No more than 0.7 percent (seven-tenths of one percent) of African Americans will commit a violent crime against a white person in a given year, and fewer than 0.3 (three-tenths of one percent) of whites will be victimized by a black person in a given year;
* Whites are 6 times as likely to be murdered by another white person as by a black person; and overall, the percentage of white Americans who will be murdered by a black offender in a given year is only 2/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.0002). This means that only 1 in every 500,000 white people will be murdered by a black person in a given year. Although the numbers of black-on-white homicides are higher than the reverse (447 to 218 in 2010), the 218 black victims of white murderers is actually a higher percentage of the black population interracially killed than the 447 white victims of black murderers as a percentage of the white population. In fact, any given black person is 2.75 times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by an African American.
To say that white people’s lives are endangered by black folks, as though it were some widespread social truth, is to ignore the facts in the service of one’s prejudices and paranoiac fears. According to the most comprehensive data set ever compiled regarding homicides in America, which breaks perpetrators and victims down by race and ethnicity, the numbers of black-on-white homicides, and the percentage of homicides by African Americans that involve white victims are both much smaller than one would expect. And although interracial homicide in either direction is quite rare, the fact is, any given black person in the U.S. is almost three times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by someone who is black. […]
[O]nly a ridiculously small percentage of African Americans will kill anyone in a given year. In 2010, since there were 42 million African Americans in the population, for there to have been 8,384 black murderers (and even if we assumed that each of these were separate and unique persons — i.e., there were no repeat offenders, which is unlikely), this would mean that at most, about 2 one-hundreths of one percent of all blacks committed homicide that year. So to fear black people generally, given numbers like these, is truly absurd. […]
In other words, although interracial homicides are incredibly rare in either direction, any given black person in the United States is about 2.8 times more likely to be killed by a white person than any given white person is to be murdered by a black person.
Just to put the risk of a white person being murdered by a black person in perspective, that risk is one-fifth the risk of dying while out for a walk, and we’re about 2.5 times more likely to die from choking, more than twice as likely to die from post-surgery complications, and about 60 percent more likely to die from falling down stairs.
Likewise, we are more than 40 times as likely to die in a motor vehicle accident, about 3 times as likely to date a supermodel, 4.5 times as likely to strike it rich on Antiques Roadshow, and far more likely to die from falling in the bathtub.
Which is to say, rather than fearing black people, white folks should — statistically speaking — stop bathing, stop driving, gather up all the dated nicknacks in our basements and call our local public television station, never climb stairs, and go on a completely liquid diet that won’t involve chewing. […]
*A note here about why the black homicide offending rate is so much higher than the rate for whites. Contrary to the arguments of many on the right — and especially white nationalist types — that the disproportionate rate of violent crime (and especially murder) is due to something either genetic or cultural about black folks specifically, the facts say otherwise.
According to the research by actual criminologists (which is to say, not by racist internet trolls), socioeconomic variables explain the difference between white and black violence rates, and where economic conditions are comparable between whites and blacks, there are no significant racial crime differences. In fact, the correlation between economic variables and crime are remarkably consistent from one society to the next. Evidence gathered from more than thirty countries has found that race and ethnicity have far less to do with crime than these environmental factors.
Please note, it is not that poverty in the abstract causes crime — or is, in and of itself, even the main correlative factor for crime — but rather, the kinds of conditions associated with extreme poverty that are to blame. Although whites in the U.S. also suffer poverty, black poverty is more severe and more likely to correlate with crime. Seven out of ten poor whites live in stable, mostly non-poor neighborhoods, while eighty-five percent of the black poor live in mostly poor areas. Blacks are three times more likely to live in extreme poverty than whites (less than half the poverty line), and six times more likely to live in concentrated poverty neighborhoods. Indeed, three-quarters of persons living in concentrated poverty neighborhoods are people of color (powell, john, 2001. “Socioeconomic School Integration,” Poverty and Race Research Action Council Bulletin, 10: 6, November/December: 6).
Looking specifically at homicide rates, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that crowded housing was the key to higher murder rates among blacks in the U.S. When census tracts with similar incomes, population density and housing conditions are compared, racial murder rate differences evaporate, (Pope, John, 1995, “Murder linked to dense poverty,” New Orleans Times-Picayune. June 14), because the poorest neighborhoods have similar homicide rates, no matter their racial composition.
A 1990 meta-analysis of twenty-one different studies on homicide, covering thirty years of research found much the same thing: among all the factors positively correlated with higher homicide rates, two of the most significant were unemployment rates and community resource deprivation.
Indeed, racial crime gaps in the U.S. are largely a reflection of geography. Since blacks are more concentrated in cities, which have higher crime rates no matter their racial makeup, the crime rate among blacks is skewed upwards; but this has nothing to do with any genetic or cultural predisposition to crime. In large measure, because cities are more crowded, and because crowded areas tend to increase levels of anonymity amongst residents, and chip away at the levels of organization in a neighborhood, they will be the site of elevated levels of crime. Adjusting violent crime rates for levels of urbanization alone cuts the racial disproportion in half, with economic conditions explaining the remainder.
In fact, absent a litany of socioeconomic factors, there is no substantial independent relationship between a community’s racial composition and its homicide rates (Johnson and Chanhatasilpa, 2003: 92). Although the homicide rate among “middle class” blacks is higher than that for middle class whites, the reasons for this have nothing to do with race: middle class blacks tend to live in much closer proximity to poor communities, tend to be substantially less well off than middle class whites, and are thus exposed to more negative social influences than whites of their same general class group (Ibid, 107).
The role of social and economic environment and community conditions in determining crime rates is particularly evident among juveniles. A comprehensive analysis of homicide and robbery data, which looked at the importance of such things as race, poverty, family disruption and unemployment in determining crime rates in these categories, found that black male joblessness explained black family disruption, which in turn was highly related to black murder and robbery rates, particularly for youth.
Via LAWSONRY News And Analysis reports:
While the majority of all violent crimes are perpetuated by men, American mass murders in particular seem to be the territory of white men. The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime writes that, “Compared with assailants who kill but one victim, mass murderers are overwhelmingly likely to be male, [and] are far more likely to be white,” and the numbers prove it. According to Wikipedia, 75% of the rampage killings on US record were perpetrated by white males, as were 71% of massacres in schools, and 60% of workplace rampages – a seriously disproportionate number for the number of white males that make up the general population. Clearly, there is more at play here than the advantage of opportunity. […]
News outlets have a also broken down by demographic, shooter’s identities, weapons and number of victims of these shooters. The most common denominator, most of these killers were white men…
Whites Commit More Crimes Than Blacks, FBI Says
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 910,200 of the men and women behind bars last year were black, 777,500 were white and 395,400 were Hispanic.
In 1997, about 9 percent of the black population in the U.S. was under some form of correctional supervision compared to 2 percent of the white population and over 1 percent of other races.
Blacks were two times more likely than Hispanics and five times more likely than whites to be in jail.
But those numbers count only those who were jailed for a crime. In 2003, more than twice as many whites as blacks were arrested and charged with a crime, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.
Of 9.5 million offenses charged, 6.7 million whites were arrested, compared to 2.5 million blacks.
The most common crimes were drug abuse violations, resulting in arrest of 770,430 whites and 381,006 blacks.
Whites were far more likely to be arrested driving under the influence. Of 998,035 total offenses, 877,810 of those arrested where whites.
Blacks, meanwhile, were more than twice as likely as whites to be arrested for gambling, 5,153 to 1,964.
And while blacks comprise about 13 percent of the population, they were charged with most of the robberies, 40,993 compared to 33,070 for whites, and nearly as many homicides–4,395 black and 4,454 white.
Whites outnumbered blacks about 2-1 in arrests for other crimes, including rape (11,766-6,114), aggravated assault (203,076-103,697), burglary (143,889-103,697) and larcey/theft (556,215-233,806.)
Whites also were most often arrested for motor vehicle theft, arson, other assaults, fraud, embezzlement, dealing in stolen property, vandalism, weapons charges, prostitution, sex offenses, crimes against families and children, liquor laws, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, curfew and loitering, suspicion, as runaways and all other offenses not including traffic.
The Distorted Exaggeration of Black-on-Black Crime Ignores Much of America’s Criminality
This myth relies on shaky evidence and a selective definition of crime that ignores crimes committed by powerful institutions and the people who run them, many of whom are white men.
Blaming the crime problem on black people is unfair and ill-founded. On one hand, according to FBI homicide data, African Americans commit more homicides than other racial groups. In 2013, there were 5,375 black homicide offenders versus 4,396 who were white and over 4,000 whose races were unknown. However, that is a very small percentage of the national black population, which is over 40 million people. The vast majority of black people do not commit any crimes.
Moreover, so-called black-on-black crime has decreased over the decades. In the past 20 years, black-on-black homicides decreased by 67 percent—a sharper decline than white-on-white homicide—and “[a]mong black youth, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are the lowest in more than 40 years,” according to Demos. Throughout the country, crime has continuously fallen since the 1990s. Plus, black-on-black crime is hardly unique. Most crime is intra-racial. Around 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black offenders, while white people kill each other at roughly the same rate. […]
American discourse on crime is deeply politicized and influenced by racial and class bias. “Crime” is synonymous with “black.” In news reports and TV shows about crime, the criminal is usually a black person, especially a black male. But as legal expert and author Lisa Bloom points out in her book Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat it, many mass killings and heinous crimes — such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado that killed 12 moviegoers — are committed by white people. White people are also the ones most frequently arrested for crimes like rape, robbery, assault, forgery, and fraud. Yet unlike black people, white people are not collectively blamed for violent crimes committed by people who look like them.
Missing from American discourse on crime are those abuses committed by the powerful. War crimes, human rights abuses, violations of international law and the U.S. Constitution, and corporate and financial crimes are regularly carried out by governments, large corporations, and people with wealth and political clout. These crimes harm large numbers of people but are largely ignored and mostly go unpunished.
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports — the official national crime database—leaves out many corporate and state crimes, while largely emphasizing street crimes. It tracks some white-collar crimes, like fraud and embezzlement, but leaves out many others, like money-laundering and human rights abuses or civil liberties violations. These infractions are tracked elsewhere, but extra digging is required to find the information. Such discrepancies have a serious effect on how the public perceives what is and is not a crime.
Here are five examples of the kinds of crimes that slip under the radar in the U.S.
1. America’s Illegal Invasion of Iraq […]
2. The CIA’s Secret Torture Program […]
3. Banks Undermine the Economic Status of Minorities […]
4. Wall Street Is Complicit in the International Drug Trade […]
5. The U.S. Government’s Covert Role in the Drug Trade […]
Crimes of the powerful are far more destructive than any street crime could ever be. Street crimes, from theft to murder, harm individuals or small groups of people, while crimes of the powerful, from aggressive and perpetual war to money laundering and economic plunder, destroy entire communities and countries.
Crimes of the powerful are sophisticated and effectively concealed. Street crime is visible. State and corporate crimes involve manipulating complicated laws, rich lawyers siding with the powerful, multiple actors, layers of bureaucracy, and government secrecy. People with power have the resources and connections to manipulate the system so that they are not held accountable, like corporations buying loyalty from politicians through campaign contributions.
This is what makes our entire discourse on crime a total joke. Crimes committed by marginalized groups receive attention and punishment, while crimes of the powerful go ignored and unpunished. The black criminality myth cloaks anti-black fears under the guise of “law and order.” It serves to justify routine police brutality and the mass incarceration of black people. It means that whenever a police officer kills an unarmed black person, racist apologists can pull out the black criminality myth card and say they had it coming.
The True Lie that Black Men Commit More Crime than Whites
The black people commit more crime canard is a fallacy of both process and outcomes. African Americans are subject to discrimination in the legal system at every level. As documented by The Sentencing Project, and detailed in such works as Race, Crime and the Law, and The New Jim Crow, African Americans are more likely to be stopped by police without cause, to be more aggressively questioned, receive longer and more severe charges for the same crimes as white defendants, and to have fewer resources to defend themselves in court.
As compared to white neighborhoods, black and brown communities are also subject to more severe surveillance and aggressive police tactics. Moreover, the disproportionate number of minorities in the criminal justice system can be largely explained by the War on Drugs. In total, if white communities were subject to the same type of aggressive police tactics as black and brown communities, the number of white people in prison would skyrocket.
The data is very telling here. While people of color are the prime targets of such policies as “stop and frisk” and racial profiling, it is in fact white people who are far more likely to be both drug users and to be in possession of narcotics at a given moment. This reality signals to a larger social phenomenon: black individuals who commit crimes are representative of their whole communities, crime is racialized, and there is no qualifier of individual intent. All black people are deemed suspicious and guilty because of the deeds of the very few.
In contrast, white people who commit crimes are unique individuals: the criminals who destroyed the global economy, a group of white men, were not taken as representative of the entire white community. There is a long list of crimes such as domestic terrorism, serial murder, child rape, sedition, treason, and financial fraud that are almost exclusively the province of white people. But again, whites as a group are excluded from suspicion or indictment as a “criminal class.”
The supposition that black men (and black folks more generally) are by definition “suspicious” is a channeling of the once in vogue concept known as “rational” or “reasonable” racism. Applying this logic, George Zimmerman is justified in shooting first, profiling, or harassing black people because “statistically” the latter are more likely to commit crime. Again, this is a chain of reasoning that is rife with problems.
Generalized statistics about crime tell you very little about a given person’s likelihood of committing a criminal act. This is especially true in a society where race and class are variables which over-determine how the courts treat suspects and who the police choose to single out for surveillance, harassment, and arrest.
Broad statistics also tell us little about a given population’s capacity or propensity to commit crime. For example, while black men are disproportionately incarcerated, the majority are in jail for drug offenses. African Americans are also more likely to be poor than whites. When a researcher accounts for these variables, the story becomes one of class and not race. Further problematizing the true lie that “black equals criminal,” is that disparities in crime largely disappear when you consider the black middle and upper classes in comparison to their white peers.
As demonstrated by Jody Armour in her book Negrophobia, less than 2 percent of black men are incarcerated for violent crimes. By implication, to generalize from the demographics of a given prison population to a specific person’s likelihood of committing a violent crime is a fool’s errand of the first order.
This is a counter-intuitive dynamic: just because a given group may constitute a higher percentage of those in jail, it does not in fact mean that a given individual is more likely to commit said type of crime.
A person is more likely to suffer a violent crime at the hands of a family member, friend, or acquaintance than a stranger; and most crime is intraracial.
Ultimately, incarceration is a function of many structural factors in relation to the criminal justice system.
Anecdotes matter. Police often give a pass to those who they know or trust. The white kid with weed just made a mistake; the black or Latino is a hardcore thug to be jailed. The judge may give parole or a lenient sentence to a white defendant in order to “teach them a lesson” about bad behavior. By comparison, a person of color before the same judge is already a “lost cause,” someone to have the book thrown at. We see this same dynamic even in schools: researchers have determined that white and black youth who are accused of the same offenses see wildly different outcomes in terms of punishment. The latter are suspended or expelled, while the former are given warnings or other remediation.
Blacks are 13% of Population, yet Commit more than Half of the Murders (drugs, FBI)
People living in poverty with access to less quality education, and fewer everyday mundane resources(jobs,healthcare, recreational parks) tend to commit way more crimes than those who are from a more affluent upbringing.
In general most black people tend to live in densely populated areas(cities),whereas poor white Americans tend to live in less densely populated areas(rural settings) where the nearest neighbor may be a few miles away.
Guess which population of poor people are more likely to have confrontations, the people living in the densely populated area. Theoretically if more poor white Americans lived in more densely populated areas(in cities), white on white crime would be astronomical.
It should come as to no surprise either blacks are routinely aggressively policed harder, yet non-blacks are more to carry guns or contraband:
With that said, the stats suggest there are about 4400+ black homicides a year, and there are 40 million blacks in America.
4400/40,000,000 x 100% = 0.01 aka less than one percent of the black population will likely commit a murder.
There’s no way you can parrot the “black on black gun crime epidemic” narrative without acknowledging that statistically, the clear majority of firearm related deaths in the U.S. are white males cooking their own noodles…and well out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
Contrary to white propaganda, the face of firearm death in the U.S. is a white male with a pistol to his head or a shotgun in his mouth
In case it hasn’t been pointed out, I will state that the FBI statistics are only statistics on arrests, not actual perpetuators of crimes.
Black people are arrested more often due to a racial bias against them in law enforcement. I know a person who was arrested for murder in 2009 and therefore was a part of those statistics and he was acquitted at trial.
Just because someone is arrested, doesn’t mean they committed the crime.
Also, the FBI statistics usually has between 4000-6000 murder arrests listed as “unknown.” For all we know, all those people could be white.
Another also, white people commit DUI (they are convicted of it) much more often than black people. Over 10000 people are killed annually by drunk drivers. Most years the FBI statistic data states that 80% of the arrest for drunk driving were white people, by those statistics alone, whites would commit over 8000 murders by themselves. Many times, homicide by vehicle or DUI are not listed as actual homicides on FBI statistics. […]
It is always interesting to me how certain many people are so apt to believe that murder statistics in general “prove” that black people are violent, when even if we take the arrests into consideration, there are usually about 4000-5000 black people who are arrested for murder and that is 0.000125% of the black population.
As a whole, if you tally up the total amount of arrest by black people in any given year, it is 1-2% of the population that is even arrested. Considering that a majority of those arrests are cleared through the court processes, one can be fairly safe to say that less than 1% of black people commit crime in any given year.
ETA: One can even look into the prison population as people like to use that to claim some sort of “super criminality” in regards to black. On any given year there are 1-2 million blacks in prison. A large majority of those are non-violent offenses, but the total prison population in compared to the black population is about 2.5%. Not very significant or proof of any sort of wide spread black crime element in the country. Violent black criminals in prison are less than 1% of the black population. And even when you take into effect the storied black male criminal, overwhelmingly when you look at the numbers black males are not very violent or murderous on the whole. There are about 20 million black males in the country. Only about 5000 are even arrested for murder. I would guess that of those 5000 maybe 3000-4000 are convicted, that is only .00175% of the black male population.
White on White crime more prevalent than Black on Black
Most White people don’t kill White people. Yet media pundits, from Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly to CNN’s Don Lemon, have no problem using the phrase “Black on Black violence” despite the fact that most Black people don’t kill Black people.
When the news talks about gang-related deaths, they treat it as an almost exclusively Black problem. However, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period of 1980 to 2008, a majority (53.3 percent) of gang homicides were committed by White offenders, and the majority of gang homicide victims (56.5 percent) were White.
When was the last time you’ve seen on the news, discussions about a White-gang problem?
Crimes committed by White people are explained as deviations of the individual but have nothing to do with race, but crimes committed by Blacks or Latino’s are somehow attributed to race. Gang-bangers from South Chicago have somehow become a symbol that Black men are to be feared, but you don’t get the same fear that one could attach to the brutal murders committed by Neo-Nazi skinheads.
According to statistics from the Justice Department, White men are more likely to kill than any other racial group. When it comes to how and why people kill, Black men do, in fact, outnumber Whites in gun-related homicides, but especially drug-related offenses. However, White men top the list in most all other categories.
When the Bureau of Justice Statistics collected homicidal rates from 1980 to 2008, they found that compared to Blacks, Whites were more likely to kill children, the elderly, family members, and their significant others. They commit more sex-related crimes, gang related crimes, and are more likely to kill at their places of employment.
Mass Shooters Have A Gender and a Race
Although White individuals made up 69.2% of arrests for crimes in 20111, Black men still account for the majority of the prison population, more than six times as likely to be incarcerated than White men. Black men are also subjected, according to Lawrence Grossman, former President of CBS News and PBS, to media stereotyping where TV newscasts “disproportionately show African Americans under arrest, living in slums, on welfare, and in need of help from the community.” However, men of color do not represent the majority of school shooters or mass murderers.
Recent studies reveal that most school shooters are White males, with 97 percent being male and 79 percent White. Over the last three decades, 90 percent of high school or elementary school shootings were the result of White, often upper-middle class, perpetrators. These shootings are a direct reflection of White male privilege and the consequences that occur when groups like the NRA control influential conservative leaders. […]
There is a pattern in these school shootings that has been coined as “suicide-by-mass-murder,” and seems to be an almost-exclusively young-White-male phenomenon. Michael Kimmel, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University and founder of the academic journal Men and Masculinity, has been conducting research on the intersection between race and gender of American school shooters, and observed that “victims of [young men of color] are usually those whom the shooter believes have wronged him. And it rarely ends with his suicide. .. White men, on the other hand, have a somewhat more grandiose purpose…’If I’m going to die, then so is everybody else,’ they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender.”
Characteristics of Offenders Who Violate and Assault Children
* Those inmates who were convicted of committing violent acts against children were more like to have been white, a percentage of nearly 70%, than any other race.
* White inmates were nearly three times more likely to have victimized a child than black inmates.
Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis For Professionals Investigating the
Sexual Exploitation of Children Fifth Edition 2010 Kenneth V. Lanning
Former Supervisory Special Agent Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
p. 139:
In relationship to the age of child victims, potential offenders can be peers, slightly older adolescents, young adults, and significantly older adults. The National Juvenile Online Victimization (N-JOV) Study that looked at an estimated 2,577 arrests by law enforcement for Internet sex crimes committed against minors during the 12 months starting July 1, 2000, (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor, 2003) found the vast majority of offenders were non-Hispanic White males, older than 25, acting alone. […] The sex offenders discussed here have tended to be White males from a middle class or higher socioeconomic background.
National Juvenile Online Victimization (NJOV) Survey Publications
Chapter 2 Internet Sex Crimes Against Minors
pp. 2-7
Offender Characteristic
Male 99%
Non-Hispanice White 92%
All but one were male, the majority was between the ages of 26 and 39
(61%) with an additional 33% ages 40 or older, and most were non-Hispanic
White (91%). Nearly half (43%) had annual household incomes between $20,000
and $50,000 with 36% having incomes greater than $50,000.
Federal Prosecution of Child Sex Exploitation Offenders, 2006
p.5
Eighty-nine percent of arrestees charged with child pornography
were [non-Hispanic] white, 99% were male, and 58% had
attended some college. The median age at arraignment
was 42 years. […]
Most suspects charged with sex transportation offenses
were [non-Hispanic] white (70%). Twelve percent of sex transportation
suspects were non-U.S. citizens, and 9% were female.
The median age at arraignment was 36 years. Twenty-six
percent of sex transportation defendants had a prior felony
conviction compared to 20% of pornography defendants
and 21% of sex abuse defendants.
Southeast Asia a Haven for Pedophiles
Thailand has a reputation for engaging in one of the largest child sex trade operations in Southeast Asia. UNICEF estimates the number of Thai children involved in prostitution to be between 60,000 and 200,000, though the organization says the exact number is difficult to track.
The U.S Department of Justice said the growing popularity of the very profitable child sex tourism trade contributes to the problem. A Thai organization called FACE, the coalition to Fight Against Child Exploitation, claimed that 5,000 foreigners come to Thailand each year to have sex with children.
The organization described the average sex tourist as a middle-aged white male from either Europe or North America who often goes online to find the “best deals.” One particular Web site promised “nights of sex with two young Thai girls for the price of a tank of gas.”
The violence that goes unnoticed
Nixon and the stories he tells also cast light on the differences between top-down and bottom-up environmental movements. “Full-stomach” environmentalism in rich nations, for instance, has tended to focus on the preservation of charismatic megafauna and majestic landscapes, often to the exclusion of the people native to those landscapes. This is the environmentalism of Priuses, debt-for-nature swaps, recycling campaigns and dreams of going “off the grid.” Poor-nation, “empty-belly” environmentalists, by contrast, “experience environmental threat not as a planetary abstraction but as a series of inhabited risks.” Although Nixon doesn’t address the environmental justice movement among poor and minority communities in the U.S. as an example, the principle is similar: environmental justice advocates, like poor-nation environmentalists, are often spurred to action by a direct threat to which the larger society — itself the perpetrator — pays little attention. There’s power to be gained by the two sides coming together, by environmentalists embracing the diversity of their causes alongside activists for women’s rights, minority rights and other rights discourses. If, as Maathai writes, “Poverty is both a cause and symptom of environmental degradation,” then each movement can be strengthened by joining forces with the other.
Doing Environmental Studies During Times of Racialized Violence
Eric Garner, who suffered from asthma, died in a police officer’s chokehold, screaming, “I can’t breathe.” These horrifying last words have been transformed into a protest chant across the United States. But they must also be historicized, attuned to both slow violence and recent acts of police violence. Before Eric Garner was exposed to the act of state violence that killed him, he was caught up in what Gregg Mitman calls an “ecology of injustice that structures urban life.” In New York City’s ecology of injustice, “asthma disproportionately affects people of color living in impoverished inner-city communities.” These disproportionate rates of suffering are a result of differential exposure to health risks, such as living close to bus depots, polluting industries, cockroach allergens, and pesticides.
Rather than claiming a direct connection between, say, asthma and police brutality, we are recruiting concepts such as slow violence and ecologies of injustice to unpack the complexity of the events surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other victims of racialized state violence. Moreover, it connects the recent killing to a broader history of unjust urban ecologies that expose some people to risk more than others. The environment thus becomes not a marginal concern, but a central issue in understanding risk and exposure in the struggle for justice.
Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks
Before Freddie Gray was injured in police custody last month, before he died and this city was plunged into rioting, his life was defined by failures in the classroom, run-ins with the law and an inability to focus on anything for very long.
Many of those problems began when he was a child and living in this house, according to a 2008 lead-poisoning lawsuit filed by Gray and his siblings against the property owner. The suit resulted in an undisclosed settlement.
Reports of Gray’s history with lead come at a time when the city and nation are still trying to understand the full ramifications of lead poisoning. Advocates and studies say it can diminish cognitive function, increase aggression and ultimately exacerbate the cycle of poverty that is already exceedingly difficult to break.
It is nonetheless hard to know whether Gray’s problems were exclusively borne of lead poisoning or were the result of other socioeconomic factors as well. From birth, his was a life of intractable poverty that would have been challenging to overcome.
Equally difficult to know is the total number of children lead has poisoned. That’s because the declared threshold for how much lead a body can safely tolerate has shifted dramatically over the years as researchers have come to better understand its dangers. Decades ago, city health officials tested for blood lead levels that were higher than 20 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Now, it is believed that anything higher than 5 micrograms can cripple a child’s cognitive development. […]
“A child who was poisoned with lead is seven times more likely to drop out of school and six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system,” Norton said. She called lead poisoning Baltimore’s “toxic legacy” — a still-unfolding tragedy with which she says the city has yet to come to terms. Those kids who were poisoned decades ago are now adults. And the trauma associated with lead poisoning “creates too much of a burden on a community,” she said.
Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests
“Limiting the conversation about racism to just about how we’re policed is a lost opportunity,” Bautista wrote to me. “Folks should care not only about how racism kills quickly (via the police), but how racism also kills slowly and insidiously.”
Marmalade 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/06/what-your-vacation-choices-say-about-your-personality/
http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/04/nyt-brookings-unwittingly-show-how-immigration-effects-wages/
As left-wingers have long argued, surplus workers are intentionally used to drive down wages.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mom-sues-u-pennsylvania-amazon-over-daughters-suicide-cyanide-n422046
We aren’t a society that takes seriously issues of trauma, much less issues of justice. The tendency in America is to either blame or ignore the victim.
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/letter-from-flushing-on-gentrification-in-an-unhip-place
It is sort of an interesting article, but sort of annoying as well. The author too mindlessly buys into the mainstream assimilationist ideology. America chews people up and spits them out.
“This is the curious and crucial point. In the commonly understood examples of gentrification, artists and well-educated young people first settle into a run-down neighborhood, making it safe for the waves of affluent professionals that follow. But the Asian middle class in Flushing did the exact opposite: They made the neighborhood safe for waves of poor people. The first wave of settlers bought into the idea of Flushing as an engine for social advancement. Like the white middle class who eventually did well enough to move out, the Asian immigrants treated Flushing as a way station, not a destination. And they made it so that successive waves of immigrants could live here in the same way.”
I’m not sure this is all that unusual. There are probably many places like this. Even Flushing has a much older history of waves of immigrants, a pattern that the more recent immigrants are following. As one commenter said,
“What Mao doesn’t mention is that Flushing has been a stepping stone for Dutch, English, Italian, German, Greek, Jewish, and other European immigrants for many generations before Asians arrived.”
Here is the conclusion that annoyed me:
“Ultimately, the key to being a “good” gentrifier is to do what minorities, immigrants and poor people have had to for generations: assimilate. This is the difficulty that lies at the heart of all the exciting nightlife, creative industries and refined consumption that gentrification often brings to a poor neighborhood. Can our new city dwellers make some sacrifices in their personal tastes and desires? Can they live in a thrifty, uncool neighborhood — and resist the urge to do something about it? Can they abide by the ground rules of a poor neighborhood, take the idea of social mobility seriously and respect the necessary infrastructure? If so, they will not only enjoy cheaper rent, but something that’s even harder to find nowadays: An urban experience defined by fluidity and dynamism rather than a preserved state of “diversity.””
WTF! A “good” gentrifier? The violent history behind American assimilation is not something to be praised. Most non-WASP ethnic Americans didn’t assimilate willingly. The economic punishments and sometimes physical and legal punishments for not assimilating have many times been harsh. Willing assimilation is one thing, but that has never been the main force of American melting pot ideology.
I’d call Bernie a centrist, thank you very much. I think those who label him “leftwing” are delusional. He just ain’t that “leftwing” unless you think Hillary Clinton is a “left” sort of candidate. She’s further “right” than I have ever and will ever vote in my lifetime. To me, the neoliberal economic policies embraced by both mainstream Amercian political parties essentially represents a continuum of oligarchical fascism – the unholy alliance of economic and political power. That to me represents a “lunatic fringe”, regardless of how many people accept the narrative constructed around it. A lie is no more true for being believed by more people.
So, yes, I’d say Bernie Sanders is to the left of mainstream political discourse in this country, but that mainstream political discourse in this country is so idiotic and unhinged as to embrace fascism across the entire spectrum that is represented in the media.
FFS, the media throw around the word socialism with pinched faces and sinister tones, but they either 1) don’t know what that actually means or 2) are deliberately misrepresenting it as a sort ofinternational communist conspiracy – and that’s NPR, a supposedly “liberal” news outlet; over on Fox News it’s all bulging, rolling eyes, ululating tongues, and foaming spittle.
All I can do is nod my head in agreement.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113236377590902105
I can’t read the article. I don’t have a subscription. But I saw the title.
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1152532744762358&id=100000169315296&set=gm.839762036139867&source=48
http://www.amren.com/features/2015/08/a-blow-against-anti-white-science/
The internet recently has distressed me and made me hyper uncomfortable with being Asian. It’s made me unable to enjoy places I usually do. It’s made me want to hide from humans. I can’t enjoy places I usually so because I keep thinking how much being Asian sucks and even how I would rather be black because at least they have more self-respect and an identity and unity. I’m an ethnic group neutered by the model minority stereotype and a big inferiority-complex white worshipping. I feel fucked up. I don’t like diverse places because it makes me self-conscious.
Triggered by my mum and people like the last posts above about how Asia is flawed and “china invented shit but was satisfies with it whereas whites progresssssd.” It remiss me of my ingrained mental colonization.
I sometimes feel uncomfortable about being human and being around other humans. Life sucks. I’m not one for feeling much hope or happiness on a personal level. All I want from life is to be distracted from all the crap and focus on what matters to me. I’m not the kind of person to offer a positive view of life. I’m fascinated by life, but my fascination is just as likely to take a dark bent. I’m not sure it really matters about the details, despite how much the details obsess our minds. Life is filled with endless suffering. It sucks beyond imagining. What depresses me is thinking that America is the high point of progress. If so, we are fucked.
Much literature is about ruminating on the awful flaws of humanity, while being horrified at the idea that the awfulness could actually be changed. Please talk about the flaws of humans, but fear any indication that these flaws can be changed through science.
People fear transhumanism.
See: dystopian fiction
I do like literature that ruminates on the awful flaws of humanity or simply the dark and strange. That is why I appreciate authors such as Philip K. Dick and other similar writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, etc). Fiction is how humans play with challenging problems and possibilities, and consider their implications.
I don’t like being in the diverse city anymore because I think of miu, inequality, etx etc.
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dying_vets_fuck_you_letter_to_george_bush_dick_cheney_needs_to_be_read
A truthful letter. What we need is a protest movement of veterans. There is nothing the government fears more than when veterans turn into activists. A veteran has a kind of moral authority that few others have, because they put their lives on the line for their country. That is why the US government responded so violently to Shay’s Rebellion and the Bonus Army, for both were cases of veterans demanding justice, and the government in attacking them showed their true nature.
I’m not sure why but cities here burn me out. NYC lately has been burning me out, every night I feel burned out by it and want nothin but to retreat into bed and sleep, and want nothing more but to dream of open fields and stars. I never felt this way in Tokyo. I think it’s because the internet has made me uneasy about diverse american cities, because I know cities aren’t racial equality kumbaya places but places where societal evils like inequality racism and stratification are on full display, where fucking hipsters appropriate everything and still look down on the people. I don’t know who is “good” is who is a Miu. Diverse cities are burning me out. Because all the differences are shat in my face and I can listen to my mom ruefully talk about how Chinese people are stagnant because chinatown is a working class dump while all the nice areas are white. All cities do to me is remind me of white supremacy and my own internalized inferiority complex. I need some fuckijg self respect.
NYC makes me feel burnt out at the end of the day. But tokyo dosent. I love tokyo.
Maybe I don’t like urban environments but that dosent explain why I like tokyo. Maybe I just don’t like american urban areas. It depresses me. Diversity I it’s current incarnation depresses me.
I wih I was black. At least black people have self respect. I’m asian. We’re the fucking “second best.” It sucks. I’d rather be openly derided and shit on like black people sometimes, rather than a “house slave” like Asians currently on.
There are different kinds of urban areas. I love cities, although mostly small cities. What I really love are small college towns.
Small college towns do tend to be diverse, but it is a different kind of diversity. They tend to have less economic stratification and more tolerance. They aren’t perfect, of course. What I like most about them is that they tend to be less stressful places. I don’t deal well with stress.
My experience is biased, though, as my experience of small college towns are in the Midwest. Region does make a big difference. I also couldn’t say what is the Asian-American experience of small college towns, Midwestern or otherwise.
I decided to do a web search to see what I could find. There isn’t a ton of stuff out there about Asians and Asian-Americans in Iowa City, but there is enough to give you some sense.
Most of the Asians here are probably foreign students (mostly Chinese and the second largest demographic being South Korean), and they are on average a wealthier group of people. That creates a particular dynamic. That economic class aspect may have played into the interaction I described some time ago:
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/to-be-a-stereotype-or-not/
It is kind of strange living in this town. There are a fair number of people of Asian ancestry, but there is such a large divide. I only rarely converse with an Asian or Asian-American outside of my job in dealing with customers… or else in ordering Chinese food.
I used to work at a local hotel. Almost all of the housekeepers were Chinese-Americans who only interacted with each other and only spoke in Chinese. I was working as basically a janitor or what was called a floor person, and all the other people working that job were Hispanic and they regularly spoke Spanish. It is odd, although understandable, how people group themselves together like that.
I suspect that the permanent Asian-American community here is rather small. It is a transitory town. Most people, especially students, are just passing through. The town is almost 68,000 and the number of students is 31,000. About 3,400 of the students are from other countries. And about 12,000 of the population is non-white (18%): 4,680 Asian (6%), 3,912 Black or African-American (5%). 3,627 Hispanic or Latino (5%), 144 American Indian (below 1%), 1,395 Some Other Race (2%), 1,699 Two or More Races (2%), and 116 Three or More Races (below 1%). But that is a significant Asian and other non-white population here.
There is a fair amount of segregation. People do choose to not just work with but also live near those of their own race, culture, language, etc. I have never had an Asian or Asian-American neighbor in this town, even though I have had some Asian-American coworkers. My parents live in an almost entirely white upper middle class neighborhood nearby. Their next door neighbors were Chinese when my parents first moved, but they moved away after a number of years. Even while they were there, my parents rarely interacted with them because the language and cultural gap was too large. My parents are neighborly people and yet were unable to connect with those neighbors, partly because some of them didn’t speak English. The kids had to translate for the parents and grandparents.
My problem is that I’m not a social person. I don’t meet new people that often and I don’t make friends easily. The Asian and Asian-American population may have increased in this town over the past decade or so, but the number of my friends and acquaintances has not increased over the past decade or so. If I haven’t known a person for at least a decade, preferably multiple decades, it is unlikely that I have much interest in spending time with them. This makes getting to know new people rather difficult. I’m too shy and depressed to put myself out. I’m curious about people, but I prefer to observe most people from a distance.
Here are the articles I mentioned above:
http://www.thegazette.com/2013/06/13/iowa-sees-surge-in-asian-populace-hispanic-growth-remains-strong
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/07/us/culture-clash-american-story/
https://www.reddit.com/r/IowaCity/comments/2pbsnj/asians_of_iowa_city_why_are_you_so_cliquey/
http://www.dailyiowan.com/2013/07/22/Opinions/34039.html
http://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/education/k-12/2015/03/16/chinese-school-iowa-city-teaches-language-heritage/24863047/
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/02/01/chinese-language-atms-give-iowa-city-friendly-feel/22682209/
http://international.uiowa.edu/news/iowa-city-working-bridge-gap-chinese
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/01/prweb12481230.htm
http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2009/12/20091204153431maduobba5.135745e-02.html#axzz3l5XRkBY3
http://jhsblackandwhite.com/asian-invasion-part-2-japan-edition/
http://patch.com/iowa/iowacity/chinese-karaoke-finds-iowa-city-following
Triggered by me and my parents going through a working class not gentrified but probably will be someday area of Brooklyn today, where we saw Chijese businesses scattered throughout and my mum talking about how Chijese culture and people was stagnant. Just like that guy said. Mum talked about how chijee people were stagnant people who never improve shit, because white people lived in developed nice glitzy areas now whereas Chinese people lived scattered throughot this gritty working class dump.
Breaks me self esteem. I’d rather be black and openly derided yet with self respect and identity rather than this awkward position of an always second place house slave like Asians are
That would get to me. I’ve never had that experience. It sounds depressing, the way you tell it. I’d be tempted to tell my mother to shut up, if she went on and on like that.
As an Irishman, you had a leg up socially. That’s not to say you didn’t deserve everything you managed to get professionally. You wouldn’t have been able to come here if you weren’t accomplished. But in a city with a significant Irish-American population, you were at an advantage while as a Middle-Eastern looking person of Indian descent (and perfectly assimilated mind you), I was at a disadvantage. And I’m a handsome, charming fella too, but that didn’t matter. My skin color and appearance did. As far as most local Bostonians go, my identity does not extend beyond those features.
The irony is that most modern Irish people I meet are very progressive. They’re friendly and welcoming and don’t exhibit any of the negative stereotypes normally associated with the Irish. Your acknowledgment of the segregation, and the lack of diversity in your workplace, is evidence of that. It’s the local Irish-Americans that exhibit those stereotypes because they’ve retained a lot of the insularity and mistrust of outsiders that their immigrant ancestors brought with them from the old country. Modern Ireland, on the other hand, has grown far beyond that mentality.
I go to a bar in the Park Plaza area called M.J. O’Connor’s on a relatively frequent basis. Based on prior experiences, I learned to walk in knowing what I wanted, cross my arms, and keep my eyes on the TV. I was still choosing to go into an Irish bar but, on the other hand, I was going to be damned if a couple of d-bags made me feel anxious about going into my favorite pub. Any effort to socialize would go unrewarded. That was the easy part. The hard part was remaining trustworthy. Without knowing it, I had become suspicious of anyone white who showed an interest, while immediately responding to ethnic minorities as allies. As a moderate right-winger who HATES playing the race card and people who play it, I was disappointed in what I was allowing myself to become.
Until a couple of the bartenders began to make small talk. First a tall Dublin girl, then a serious, but very well-spoken older bartender from Limerick. I acknowledged a pattern when a third Irish bartender began talking about his family and trying to include me in the festivities, much to the other patrons’ consternation. I had to pinch myself when all three of them would occasionally pay for my drinks. I’ve since matured and realized that I can remain trustworthy regardless of how 70% of people in one city react to me. But I give the handful of Irish people I’ve met a lot of credit for helping me retain that positive outlook while I’ve been here. I also give my co-workers (all but one of whom are from out of state) full points for giving me a chance, or I would have had to move back home.
All this venting notwithstanding, I know that not only is this attitude not a generalized phenomenon, it’s not even a Massachusetts phenomenon. It’s a purely Greater Boston thing. The second I wander outside what counts as the city limit, say, Watertown or Medford, people immediately begin thawing. Out in Worcester or Western Massachusetts, people are almost as friendly as they are in the Midwest.
“The irony is that most modern Irish people I meet are very progressive. They’re friendly and welcoming and don’t exhibit any of the negative stereotypes normally associated with the Irish. Your acknowledgment of the segregation, and the lack of diversity in your workplace, is evidence of that. It’s the local Irish-Americans that exhibit those stereotypes because they’ve retained a lot of the insularity and mistrust of outsiders that their immigrant ancestors brought with them from the old country. Modern Ireland, on the other hand, has grown far beyond that mentality.”
I hadn’t thought about that. I’m not sure I’ve ever known any Irish, although I have known Irish-Americans. One Irish-American guy I know is quite friendly and he is a bartender. I would imagine he would be friendly to almost anyone of any race. Then again, he lives in this town that has few Irish-Americans and so his ancestry is not the majority.
“All this venting notwithstanding, I know that not only is this attitude not a generalized phenomenon, it’s not even a Massachusetts phenomenon. It’s a purely Greater Boston thing. The second I wander outside what counts as the city limit, say, Watertown or Medford, people immediately begin thawing. Out in Worcester or Western Massachusetts, people are almost as friendly as they are in the Midwest.”
I have no experience of Boston or that general area. I would agree with the basic point of a Midwest friendliness, at least in some parts. It isn’t a gregarious friendliness, but more laidback and quiet. It also isn’t the outward hospitality, almost formal and superficial (from a Midwestern perspective), that Southerners are stereotyped as possessing.
But I would be curious about how people of other cultures perceive Midwesterners. Hispanics seem to fit into Midwestern communities fairly well, for whatever reason. I wonder how well Midwesterns would fit into Hispanic communities. I’m sure Midwesterners would feel lost in an Asian community.
As a White international (Irish) person who came as a student (and is now a US citizen) in Boston for 18 years I will say that when I got here first I felt Boston was very welcoming and very diverse. But the longer I stay, and now have a family with kids etc. I can see a definite subtext of racism which as Anon says is often really elitism of a form. I am in technology and not only do I not know of ANY African American managers in ANY company I have worked for in the last decade, there are no African american programmers on any team I have worked on or worked WITH. There is sexism and ageism too but less prevalent.
For Indian and Chinese foreigners in Tech there is definitely the feeling that as long as you “know your place” and do your work you will be fine but most of those who get ahead are hard-charging white guys.
I also remember attending a local Government Ward meeting in my local town and most of the people there said the one thing they loved most about the city was it’s diversity. Which was ironic (and sad) because all of the 40 people in the room were white.
I see quite a bit more animosity towards Hispanics in our community too because of “integration issues” and because they don’t want to “get with the program”. Is that racism or frustration or both? You be the judge.
In summary I think if you come to Boston as a student you will find a very welcoming city and community. But otherwise you may find some friction in the workplace and if/when you try to settle down in a town.
As many others have said the racism in Boston is very subtle to the point of being difficult to describe. Massachusetts is an elitist place and there is a very “not in my back yard” attitude about a lot of things. As a few examples, being the wonderful progressives they are, lots of people in Boston advocate alternative energy. But propose putting up wind turbines in the harbor? Hell no! Got protested and voted down like nothing else. My home town, which is almost exclusively upper middle class WASPs, was among the top 10 communities in terms of voters for legalizing medical marijuana. But as soon as it was legalized, the town passed an ordinance banning dispensaries from opening within its borders.
This is how many Bostonians approach race as well. Everyone acknowledges racism is abhorrent and evil. They will be public in their contempt and jump on any indignant bandwagon that will get them social approval. So what we don’t have are the situations of cops gunning down black people on a regular basis or obviously racist laws. But when it comes to interacting with people of other races, or living in the same places as other races, many white Bostonians will silently avoid doing so, with all the plausible deniability in the world. It is a hidden, unspoken, comfortable racism, a sort of segregated tribalism, that may not be as potent as it is in other cities, but I think it is infinitely more difficult to identify, call out, and remove from our culture.
“It is a hidden, unspoken, comfortable racism, a sort of segregated tribalism, that may not be as potent as it is in other cities, but I think it is infinitely more difficult to identify, call out, and remove from our culture.”
I’m familiar with that. It sounds stereotypically Midwestern.
In a farm state like Iowa, racism tends to be less overt, but it is there. We don’t want the police to shoot black people, but we dislike how black people make us feel uncomfortable. So, we are still fine that the police target blacks and arrest them more, just as long as they try not to shoot them too much for no good reason. As for minorities besides blacks, we simply try not to think about them too much.
We Midwesterners don’t like people who stick out, not even white people who stick out. There is a laid back quality about many Midwesterners. We would rather not deal with social problems. It’s expected people should simply work hard, keep quiet, and fit in. I’m not sure how common this attitude is in other places.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/7090921/It-is-not-elitist-to-nurture-gifted-pupils.html
“Underlying this latest Government decision I sense a fear of the charge of elitism. This is not an attitude we find, say, in sport: how very odd it would be for Manchester United to scout anything but the best young talent. No, it seems to apply only to brain power. The country needs world-class brains, dare I say it, even more than world-class footballers. We must do all we can to nurture them, wherever we find them.”
Does she seriously believe that the most promising social darwinian intellectual elite are being oppressed and disadvantaged, hammered down like nails sticking up? If so, we should expect a disproportionate number of high IQ, multi-talented, gifted geniuses in the most oppressed and disadvantaged populations and communities, right?
”“Underlying this latest Government decision I sense a fear of the charge of elitism. This is not an attitude we find, say, in sport: how very odd it would be for Manchester United to scout anything but the best young talent. No, it seems to apply only to brain power. The country needs world-class brains, dare I say it, even more than world-class footballers. We must do all we can to nurture them, wherever we find them.””
Because social stratification isn’t based on athletic ability
Also, that;s a lto of pressure for a kid. Which confuses me even more. Because it seems like nurturing the kids isn’t about their own happiness and well adjustmet levels, but coronating them as the rightful world overlords. Lots of pressure for people, to think that because they have been labeld as blessed they are now on a path to world overlordiness
”let my parents down” because they expected so much from me. ”
so she let her parents down my becoming an averge joe? It makes me wonder if these parents are abotu their kids being happy and well-adjusted, or becoming the successful top of the societal hierarchy overlords they were meant to be due to their blessings? Beause lord knows that presently most of their kids seem the opposite of well-adjusted
”high IQ, multi-talented, gifted geniuses”
Taken at face value though, you’d come away with the impression that the high iq ranges are mostly occupied by psychologically fucked up people who are total messes in life. I am only paraphrasing what I see in the gifted scene
What kind of world would it be if they really did become the intellectual ruling elite?
Well it sure explains a lot of the dysfunction right now. JK lol
That is a good explanation. Maybe we are already ruled over by ‘gifted’ overlords. That makes sense. There is the theory that sociopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and influence, because sociopaths are highly talented in manipulating power and influence. They are willing and, especially when high IQ, are able to do anything to play the game well and to win at any costs. It does make one wonder how ‘gifted’ overlaps with various psychiatric conditions.
Many scholars have high iq scores. But I don’t think the gifted advocates are interested in that
Sorry. I meant sociopaths
They probably don’t even think about it, much less find much interest in it. It is precisely their lack of interest that interests me.
Look at the link I showed in the open thread. She uses Da Vinci as an example. he was born poor and withotu means but his natural giftedness let him self study and become a genius
”Giftedness also exists outside of successful, well-educated and upper-middle class families. Children from impoverished, lower-socioeconomic and minority families are also born intellectually gifted, an inherited trait from their parents. Giftedness knows no social classification, nor does it have a cultural or ethnic bias.
After all, Leonardo da Vinci, a gifted genius of historical proportions, was born from an unwed peasant mother and because of the social caste he was born into, he was denied access to a formal education and was largely self-educated. I’m pretty sure Leonardo’s mother was not in a position to hothouse her son.”
Leonardo Da Vinci was born out-of-wedlock to a poor peasant woman. But his father was a wealthy gentleman. He spent part of his childhood with his father.
He had some education and was given opportunities to develop his artistic abilities, such as being apprenticed to the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day in one of the finest workshops in Florence. That was hardly an average, much less a below average, childhood. He was far from deprived.
That example further shows the bullshit rhetoric of ‘gifted’ advocates. You’d think they could at least get their history right.
Speaking of childhoods… I may have been really harsh on that mum (this is the one with the blessed and autistic kid) but her baking blog is really nice
http://www.lovefromtheoven.com/2015/09/29/she-is-trying/
I never blame anyone for trying. But I do blame people for not being considerate to others. I wasn’t at that theater during the incident and so I don’t know what happened. If the mother was immediately in the process of removing the child the moment the noise problem began, then that is all that one can expect. I suspect, however, that wasn’t the case.
Few people will complain about a parent genuinely trying to take care of a problem. What people won’t tolerate is a parent forcing her child’s problem onto everyone else. Just remove the child from the situation. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Or if it is that difficult, it is the parent’s fault for ever putting the child in that situation. When you have a severe autistic child, you are going to have to accept that there are some things your autistic child simply can’t do, such as go to public places where sitting still and being quiet are expected.
It sucks to have a severe autistic child. If that is the reality you face, then you need to accept that reality and plan accordingly. Irritating other people isn’t helpful. But if you choose to irritate others, don’t be surprised if they act irritable toward you.
I think sometimes that I am a ”radical’.” I have no problem using transhumanism to ”level” humanity, i humans so choose. I think people should not be stuck with their genetic and class lot but be able to change it.
http://www.giftedunschooling.com/gifted-is-not-elitist/
She makes gifted sound like it seems to belong in the DSM V.
I wonder if any of theseparents know any high iq sociopaths and psychopaths? Because they exist. Not all high iq people ”gfit into one box’.” high iq people can be like her kid, or they can be the opposite. high iq does not mean they are an extra sensitive emotionallly intense mess, even if some high iq peopel are
I agree. She does make gifted sound like psychiatric condition.
“My children’s energy is demonstrative. We don’t need to label their intensities out in the world as it is generally apparent to anyone who is around them for more than five minutes. Their giftedness is palpable.”
The way she describes her boys, I doubt others would label them ‘gifted’. If anything, they’d probably be labeled as ‘spoiled brats’, ‘lacking self-control’, or something like that. I can’t help wondering if she really just means her kids have Asperger’s or social anxiety disorder or whatever. If so, why not just use the more accurate label?
because her kids are also very smart, and if you are very smart, these issues come as a package deal?
weird for me to be saying. I’m also highly sensitive and a high iq scorer, so in some ways I fit into their box. but I still don’t like them.
Well, these parents also sound like over-coddling parents.
”. I was a gifted child (and adult I suppose) and I “let my parents down” because they expected so much from me. I was an emotional basket case, was put on medication and in therapy at 14, and it took many years to get a handle on myself. Now, as an adult, I have opted to be a homemaker and mother rather than a scientist or doctor as my parents had always dreamed. My daughter is also gifted, though very young still, and hopefully my experiences have left me more than prepared to take on what’s to come!”
” Uninformed people are threatened by what they believe that it means without understanding the full picture of overexcitabilities, asynchronicity, social differences and non conformity as the underlying attributes that go hand in hand with high intelligence.”
I think it’s just cause we all at a subconscious level realize that we live in a stratified society and are threatened when we are reminded of so, ma’am
I think the UK definition is better. G is just ”at a level ahead of same age peers.” high iq score.
”You can call it whatever you want but it doesn’t change what gifted is and what gifted isn’t. Gifted is a neurological condition that permeates cultural, ethnic and socio-economic boundaries and has nothing to do with privilege or elitism. ”
The UK definition sounds simpler and more straightforward. It has none of the bizarre psychiatric conflations.
I think that sociopaths would typically score high(er) on IQ tests, but I don’t know if that would necessarily mean that they are of above average intelligence. Sociopaths are extremely capable of finding the weaknesses in things, people, the social fabric, etc., like a shark sniffing blood or a dog “smelling” fear.
Let’s take for example the fact that I have always performed very well on standardized tests. I will readily admit that doesn’t necessarily make me “intelligent.” Rather, when I read a question, I am not always looking for answers, or even clues to the answers, but rather clues into the test maker’s mind. Are they trying to trick me? I think, if I were a test maker, how many different ways could I ask a question on a critical issue? There will always be a limited number of ways that test makers can/will ask questions–you just have to figure out which, and then recognize those particular questions when you see them. I also try to guess what would be the fake answers test makers might come up with. Test makers have fears like everyone else has fears — fears that a question will be too easy, fears that a question may have more than one answer or be ambiguous. You can practically see a test taker’s CYA precautions in some of the questions you read. You know immediately what the answer is, just like when you ask someone, “Where’s the safe?” and they say “I don’t know,” but their eyes look to the wall behind the desk. Obviously the safe is in the wall behind the desk.
Is this ability to sense weakness what intelligence is? I wouldn’t think so. Standardized IQ tests don’t necessarily test intelligence, they just test someone’s ability to correctly mark the right answer — they don’t account for how you managed to choose that right answer. Take the extreme example: you obtained all the answers ahead of time (cheated). Your score indicates a very high IQ. Does that mean you are intelligent? What if, instead of “cheating,” you are a mind reader and get the answers that way? What if you are just very good at predicting what answer test makers think is “right”? Does that mean you are intelligent?
But I do think most sociopaths seem intelligent, particularly to empaths. They have different blindspots than you do, and they think out of the box because they aren’t in a box, or at least not the same box you are. Have you ever heard a child speak a foreign language? Maybe for a moment you are amazed. “Good lord! That child’s speaking Swahili!” But you are amazed because you are framing the issue in terms of how difficult it would be for you to be speaking Swahili, particularly at that child’s age. Your mind has forgotten that some people grow up speaking Swahili as their native language, or in bilingual homes. So the sociopath can amaze the empath with his charm, wit, and intelligence, just because that is the sociopath’s “native language,” so to speak.
But are sociopaths perceived as being above average, charming, witty, and intelligent? Yes, most of us manage to come off that way. And life is almost always form over substance, rarely the other way around.
A nice thought experiment. I wonder how intelligence can be disentangled from test-taking ability. I also wonder what factors contribute to both. It would be interesting to find people who show indicators of high intelligence, but measure low on IQ tests; and those who show no indicators of high intelligence and yet somehow test high. What other indicators could be measured for intelligence beyond IQ tests themselves?
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10165.aspx
I suspect there are tons of biases like that. Gender is one of the more obvious biases, and even it has been ignored. Other biases are even more invisible. Some societies openly accept their biases as a good thing for reasons of social norms and tradition, but in this society most people simply pretend biases don’t exist.
BS. Sociopaths can love, in a different way
http://community.babycenter.com/post/a22126295/behavioral_issues_worse_due_to_being_gifted_long
lol the respinses
I don’t know about that lady’s kid. But I feel confident that some of the commenters have mental and social issues.
I have 4 exceptional children. My oldest is 8 and has a pediatric bipolar and aspbergers tendency diagnosis along with sensory processing disorders, so yes, there can be a flip side to giftedness. In all the research that I have done, a sociopath diagnosis is very unlikely before the age of 18 but there are warning signs that should be taken seriously. Even in the most loving home a sociopath can be born. BUT, if I were in your situation I would RUN from that dr as fast as possible. We have seen many dr’s over the course of the last 5 years and between research on my part and gut feelings we have landed in a good place with a dr that we trust. Even if my son exhibited all of the criteria of a sociopath I would make sure that we were seeing therapists that were working with us to help the situation, not attempting to have him admitted into psychiatric facility. My son has been in one for a short period of time and it is not a pleasent experience for either parent or child. It sounds to me as though you need family counseling and your son needs play therapy on top of seeing the behavioral therapist.
sounds slightly NR
”The world is full of jealousy anymore. People simply can’t just be happy for others, be it regarding intelligence or good grades or being successful, no; they want to bring everyone to the same level, to fit everyone into the same “box” and life just isn’t like that.”
I do wonder why the assumption of this is always some weird averaging out, say, if we have a 150 iq kid and a 50 iq kid, equality is making them both 100 iq, instead of making the 50 kid 150 iq.
I know. It’s bizarre.
Terence Tao?
https://sengifted.org/archives/articles/directors-corner-raising-a-profoundly-gifted-child
“Profoundly gifted children are quite complex with a lot of unique needs, which are best met with an open mind and a loving heart.”
Why not treat all kids that way?
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10316.aspx
“We are faced with a choice. We can choose to make adjustments in our schools for children with moderate intellectual gifts. Or we can choose to make educational adjustments for children with profound intellectual gifts. We have currently chosen the former option. We have thus had to spread our meager resources very thin, and have had to ignore the needs of the extremes. If we choose the latter option, we can focus on those who most need advanced instruction. Choosing the latter option need not mean sacrificing the needs of the moderately gifted. For if we elevated our standards, the moderately gifted could be appropriately challenged.”
Why not elevate our standards for all kids?
Thy mentioned that. It only benefits the “moderately” blessed and not the super blessed. The super blessed are too different and advanced.
Is it me or does this statement sound really social Darwinist and Malthusian?
Whatever it is called, it is extremely cynical in its lack of compassion for most people and its indifference toward the public good. The only choice we are faced with is to confront injustice and depravity or embrace it. Whether the severely or moderately gifted, they only care about a minority of kids, the supposed future social darwinian technocratic ruling elite. Creating a just and moral society would help all children, but that isn’t their concern. I refuse to play zero sum games that are driven by dogmatism, ignorance, and arrogance.
http://community.babycenter.com/post/a102685/distinguishing_mg_hg_eg_and_pg
Labels within labels. A hierarchy of labels.
the bay area is one weird ass place
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/curtis_yarvin_booted_from_strange_loop_it_s_a_big_big_problem.html
I hadn’t heard of this law before, at least not named as such. I have observed this law in operation, in my personal experience. It’s nice to know it has a name.
Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
Meanwich Jul 14, 2015
@Rustyguy “When did we become a country of whiny, perpetual victims who direct our collective free floating outrage at every little thing we disagree with?”
Pray tell of all the wonderful free speech that communists had during the Red Scare, or pray tell of all the lovely speeches given by blacks regarding slavery, or civil rights, which were so well attended by critically-thinking whites from the South. Preach to us!
Tell us of all the homosexuals given platforms in the 80s! Tell us of all the support for the Dixie Chicks in the ’00s!
No seriously, tell us about how the country has degenerated into a mindless mob of unthinking buffoons. Tell us how we’ve devolved for choosing not to listen to moronic ideas about the validity of racial separation. Tell us how our choices are such a harbinger of doom while you praise the state sanctioned violence of the past that has impoverished generations and slaughtered innocents through your willful ignorance.
The only people whining here are the ones who think like you. The ones who, miraculously, believe that the right to the free expression of ideas is equivalent to a right to an audience and a platform are the ones who are stifling speech, since while you’re busy standing righteously for the voices of the chronically un-repressed you’re ignoring the gasps and screams from people who actually have something to say.
I suppose I am one fo these types, the type who wants to see bio-tchnology engineer things out of existence. I want to engineer tribalism and inequality out, and give people malleable transhumanist selves to which they can modify at will so people are no longer stuck with their genetic lot. For example, like many northern Asians, I have short legs and large calves that disadvantage me in running. I can now give myself long legs, and maybe in the future, I can give myself short legs againn.
This de-naturalising research into human identity and the human body
can best be understood within the wider context of a ‘nature versus nurture’
debate in the West that goes back to at least the 1970s.Within the disciplines
of human biology, physical anthropology, neuro-psychology and the young
field of socio-biology, a debate has raged over whether people’s mental and
physical capacities are mainly a function of genes and the like or a product
the ‘nature’ of geography 97
over-sexed. Rather than seeing representations of bodies as accurate,
human geographers have asked why certain aspects of certain
people’s bodies gain social salience and come to be valued in
positive or negative ways (see, for example, Jackson 1994). Second,
representations of bodies profoundly affect how individuals comport
themselves. In turn, these modes of comportment can serve to
confirm the representations that engendered them in the first place!
As the feminist theorist Iris Marion Young (1990) showed in her
germinal essay ‘Throwing like a girl’, people learn to use their bodies
in ways that often conform with the societal representations into
which their bodies are fitted. Geographers like Gill Valentine have
investigated how there’s a geography to this disciplining of bodily
conduct, as individuals learn which modes of comportment are
appropriate to which spatial settings. Overall, contemporary geographers
interested in the body take issue with the assumption
that differences between people are mostly determined by biology.
They argue that there is no given ‘natural’ body that automatically
distinguishes people but only pliable bodies that vary because of
representations and practices that vary over time and space. In this
sense, contemporary geographers of the body eschew the abstract
universalism of the humanistic geography influential in the 1970s
and early 1980s. Most recently, geographical researchers on the body
have challenged the distinction between the social and physical
dimensions of the body (see Chapter 5). Good summaries of
geographical understandings of the body can be found in Valentine
(2001: ch. 2), Hubbard et al. (2002: ch. 4) and Duncan et al. (2004:
ch. 19). For a wider introduction to social science research into the
body see Shilling (1997; 2003).
of their socio-cultural environment. As this debate has unfolded, new
biotechnologies have been invented that promise to alter ‘human nature’
so that behavioural ‘disorders’ or congenital diseases can, potentially,
be engineered out of existence. In this context, many people worry that
we’re witnessing a new biological determinism to rival the eugenic beliefs
popular in Western countries in the 1920s and 1930s. The concern is
that beliefs about the supposed links between a person’s genes and their
behaviour or appearance will be used to target those with an ‘inferior’
or ‘abnormal’ genetic constitution. Clearly, human geographers’ recent
insights into the mind and body pose a challenge to such deterministic
ideas.They show that claims about ‘natural kinds’ often conceal the biases
and the group interests of those who make these claims.
Mentioning Newton brings up an important point: People who come up with new, interesting, useful ideas, often think unconventionally. Now, not all unconventional thinking results in brilliant, useful ideas. Take Newton, a very unconventional thinker. He came up with large quantities of silly mystical ravings – but he also revolutionized modern physics.
This Yarvin character also seems like an unconventional thinker – possibly in some good ways, and clearly in some less than good ways. But this idea that just because someone holds some objectionable views on one topic, means they can’t talk about a completely unrelated topic, strikes me as especially misguided. Should we not let Noam Chomsky talk at a conference on linguistics because of his knee-jerk anti-American political views?
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JoinOrDie
JoinOrDie Jun 11, 2015
@Chris Haugen This is the strongest argument made in this article, that science requires an avoidance of ideological litmus tests in order to function in the realm of evidence and reason.
I think that this is particularly important when the odious ideology depends on pseudoscience. In this case, the pseudoscience involved depends on the myth that someday there might be a genetic test for intelligence and race.
Real geneticists (who are well aware of the eugenic errors of their predecessors and know the difference between qualitative and quantitative traits and have a feeling for what genotype by environmental interaction means) are fully capable of relegating the pseudoscience to its rightful place in their discourse, i.e., no place at all. Meanwhile, however, in other fields of science, those with boneheaded genetic ideas should be welcome to present their findings, should their findings have scientific merit.
”Plato and Aristotle held democracy in suspicion and argued that human nature finds fulfillment in small, organic, hierarchical, patriarchal communities of ethnically related people. Yet we consider them the founders of Western philosophy, and universities still use their writings as textbooks. Yarvin didn’t invent some new “crackpot” theory out of whole cloth, in other words, but instead he has tried to restate what our ancestors accepted as an enduring truth about the human condition for countless generations before the Enlightenment. ”
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/drought-no-running-water-east-porterville
I’ve wondered how bad problems have to get before Americans take environmentalism seriously.
So… if a kid has a high iq and is accomplished, but is also ”neurotypical” and has no history of psychological problems, is he ”gifted?”
Apparently not, if we are to go by many of the ‘gifted’ descriptions.
Also, are the unabomber and ted bundy, who tested at iq’s in the ”gifted” range, ”gifted?” or are they not because they don’t pass the morality and (empathetic) sensitivity tests that gifted advocates trot out but were instead calculating self-serving sociopaths?
If we don’t put massive funding into giving ‘gifted’ kids lots of special classes, programs, resources, etc, then they will all turn into terrorists and serial killers. That is what ‘gifted’ means. These kids are so fragile that if they aren’t treated very carefully horrible things will follow.
My impression: a blessed kid who does things like scream and hit his mum are just acting out because fucking soociety and parents don’t see his blessed-ness. When they say gifted kids and people are sensitive, they use empathetic and positive examples, instead of examples like say, Ted Bundy sniffing out his victims like a sharp-eyed cat
Why?
Okay sorry Benjamin. But a lot of the things these parents describe their kids doing are just not normal and not acceptable, in any context.
I’d like to see a study on people who were labeled as gifted as children. What do they become as adults? How many become psychologically health, socially mature successful professionals? And how many become some combination of mentally unstable, socially dysfunctional, sociopathic, criminal, etc?
Also, does the labeling make a difference? Do high IQ kids end up doing better or worse in life for having so much expectation and pressure placed upon them? What about talented and genius kids who never get labeled? Is there a confounding factor that it is mostly kids with severe psychiatric problems or else with parents with personal issues who end up getting labeled?
tl;dr acceleration is good
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10424.aspx
In an earlier seminar on longitudinal studies which I facilitated for the Davidson Foundation, we discussed the situation for the highly gifted child who outshines everyone at school, who then grows up to be a gifted adult who outshines everyone in the workplace and who may, sadly, experience the same resentment in the workplace that she experienced in school.
That has happened to several of my subjects, but I must acknowledge that it has happened hardly at all to the Group 1 and 2 young people who did high level doctoral or masters degrees and entered highly challenging work environments which attract very bright adults – fields in which one has to be very bright, and have high level knowledge and qualifications, in order to to succeed.
I believe it is important for highly gifted young people to be counseled about the wisdom of of choosing a line of work which will not only meet their intellectual and emotional needs but where they are also likely to find a cadre of people who are also very, very bright. You may still be “the brightest kid on the block” but you are less likely to “stand out like a sore thumb” from everyone else.
Richard, a remarkably gifted young man in my study, changed schools four times before he was 12, in a desperate hunt for a learning and social environment in which he could flourish academically and be accepted socially. Sadly, he never found that in school. It is only now, at the age of 25, that he has come into his own. He holds quite a high level position in Information Technology (this is a kid who at age 12 was socializing on the modem with people all over the world – the modem was the forerunner of the web – even while he was being rejected by age-peers at school) and he is working with a cadre of highly intelligent, highly skilled professionals in his field who are encouraging and permitting him to develop his own professional skills to the utmost. Recently he told me: “It is amazing what a group of like-minded people can achieve.” He never had the opportunity to experience this in school – and sadly, he dropped out of university after only a few months because he chose a rather second-rate university rather than the prestigious school he could have entered, and consequently found the first year work quite unchallenging.
The young people in my study varied in the degree to which they have embraced, cognitively and affectively, the full extent of their giftedness. I can say without question that this depended not so much on their families’ acceptance of the degree of their giftedness as on their school’s acceptance. Where the school responded to the child’s gifts with acceleration, the child felt empowered to say to himself or herself, “Yes, it must be really true – I am indeed able to do things at a level that most people my age can’t, and it must truly be okay to do these things at this age because the teachers are helping and encouraging me to do them and they show real pleasure and excitement and gratification when I do these things well.” I think the school’s validation is even more necessary to the child than the validation provided by his parents. The child may even subconsciously suspect that his parents, who after all, love him dearly, may even be a little biased in their judgment of his abilities; if this is so, then the school’s validation is even more important.
One of the most striking findings of my study is that, the earlier exceptionally and profoundly gifted children are placed in a setting which is deliberately structured to allow them access, not to age-peers but to children at similar stages of cognitive and affective development, the greater will be their capacity to form sound friendships in their later childhood, adolescent and adult years.
When one has known deep loneliness and social isolation, the affection and acceptance of friends become especially important. When one differs from one’s age-peers so profoundly and in so many respects, intellectually, academically, emotionally and in one’s interests and values, as do the young people in my study, friendship can be difficult to achieve or sustain. When it is achieved, it colours and transforms one’s life.
The following poem was written by Jessica, by far the youngest, and one of the most remarkably gifted, of the 60 young people in my study who, through a thoughtfully designed program of acceleration, ability grouping and enrichment, has been able to find both lasting friendship and deep intellectual fulfilment. However, Jessica’s early school years, before the school accepted her difference, and her needs, were deeply unhappy.
This is one of the poems which Jessica has kindly allowed me to reproduce in Exceptionally Gifted Children: Second Edition, in which I tell a fuller story of her remarkable educational program. In Difference, which she wrote at the age of 8, she talks about self-acceptance and the acceptance of friends. The “tree” shape of the poem is a moving metaphor for the intellectual and emotional growth she was finally experiencing. She is currently 12 years old, based in 10th grade and undertaking 11th grade work in several subjects.
Difference
You are alone
In your long exploration
Of the world of difference.
Yet, as the light consoles the darkness,
And the flame consoles the desolate wick,
So a friend brightens the darkness in your heart
And makes life a joy.
(Jessica Bloom, aged 8 years 10 months.)
My suspicion is that confounding factors were not being controlled for. There probably were differences( psychological/psychiatric, economic, etc) that determined or influenced who was accelerate and who wasn’t. I have an acute sense of things being left out. I want to know why the kids were being accelerated or not. Who was making the decision and upon what basis? I want to know the details that are being ignored or overlooked.
The core of the issue is that these kids feel they don’t fit in, and it is important for them to have a place where they fit in and are understood.
The Jessica is clearly verbally precocious. The core of the issue is that precocious kids feel trouble fitting in with people their are and thrive I places where they fit in and are accepted, just like anyone
Many kids don’t feel they don’t fit in. That is true across the cognitive and academic spectrum. That has nothing directly to do with ‘gifted’. That still leaves to explain what is going on in this study.
I would assume that all kids who don’t fit in, even the stupidest, would probably do better if put into a different environment where they did feel like they fit in. That would also be true of immigrants and minorities who don’t feel like they fit in. How many poor minority kids who don’t do well in school might do well if they felt like they fit into all of society better and weren’t be targeted by racism, bigotry, and oppression?
Maybe most kids are actually gifted and no one knows it. Maybe if most kids had the most optimal environments that made them feel like they perfectly fit in, we would see entirely different results. Maybe ‘gifted’ is the normal condition or potential of all of humanity, and society simply suppresses this human reality. I’ve met few kids who didn’t at one time or another struggle to fit in or end up paying a price for conforming.
Basically kids who fit in are well off and better off that normal people, but kids who don’t are average joes or worse. In this case, places where they fit in intellectually
Well the g scene surely does proe that intelligence may skip generations, at least, considering these blessed kids’ parents tend to seem dumber than sacks of pebbles
Honestly the mum seems to be pretty fucked up as well. But yeah, the commenters seem pretty fucked up http://community.babycenter.com/post/a22126295/behavioral_issues_worse_due_to_being_gifted_long
I really, really don’t think that someone would look at this and think, ”wow! This child must be brilliant!” I think most would take the view of the psychologist who the paretns are saying to run away from.
”e has a few incidents when I was pregnant with my daughter where he’d get violent against me. When she was first born, a few times I had her in her bassinet for a nap, he would sneak off, put a pillow over her head, and then tell me she was cold. I got pregnant again when my daughter was 8 weeks old, and put off telling my son because I knew it was still a lot of adjustment. He found out at about 4 months along.
One min. he says he loves my husband, the next minute he’s attacking him. He has repeatedly attacked me, and flat out told his psych it’s because he doesn’t want a baby brother. My husband moved to MD ahead of me while I finished up custody stuff with my kids. His kids are down there. First day we had them over down there, Damien attacked his step brother, and his ex wife called saying they didnt want to come over any more. So I came back to NY to deal with my son for a bit.”
”I took him to his psych the second day we were back, and was floored by what she told me. She says he is definitely genius level. She also suspects he may be borderline sociopathic. She says he knows the difference between right and wrong, but flat out, he doesn’t care. He tried to get rid of his sister and now his brother because he doesn’t want to share mommy. He attacked my stepkids and my husband because he doesn’t want to share mommy. He made us fight in MD and attacked his stepbrother so that we would have to go back to gramma’s house in NY. He constantly walks in on me on the toilet, the shower, dressing, even once with my husband, and doesnt say anything, he just stares, which is actually incredibly creepy. He is always petting my hair telling me he loves me. My husband thinks its beyond creepy and we’re having marital issues due to this.”
I love how the commenters told her this meant her kid was misunderstood, not that this was a sign of behaviorial problems.
”His psych said flat out the fact that he knows right from wrong, and doesn’t care, the fact that he, at 4 yrs old had the insight to come up with the lie of his sister being cold, before I even asked, all point to extreme sociopathic behavioral cues that I need to watch out for.”
Those parents are so awful! They’re just accusing her of being a troll! WHY????
“I love how the commenters told her this meant her kid was misunderstood, not that this was a sign of behaviorial problems.”
That is a demented response to a parent describing her kid’s severe psychiatric problems. I’d like to see those commenters live with this kid doing that kind of creepy stuff and try to understand him. Do these people live in the real world?
It’s not creepy. It’s giftedness.
OMG!!!
”In your original post you made it clear that you had uprooted your very bright, and probably very sensitive, little boy repeatedly in the last two years. You have had not one, but two, babies without taking into account the effect on your son. You have shown remarkable disregard for his need for stability and consistency while placing him in a high stress environment.
Your son is not a problem child. You are a problem parent.
Get yourself into counseling and parenting classes to learn how to provide a stable environment for your son. Take birth control seriously because income is not the only factor in providing for a child.”
”.just maybe you should consider giving up parental rights. Can he live with his father more permanently. Sorry your life is pretty messed up.”
”I can guarantee you that I spend more time with my kids then you do. At least I’m not looking to pawn them off on someone else because I ‘failed’ them and now can’t handle them.
And don’t think you’re fooling anyone. if your son has behavioral problems that are this bad, there is NO WAY that ANY kindergarten would allow him in. Kindergarten is not a glorified day care and teachers can’t keep putting thier class on hold because ‘Damien is acting up again.’ They would have kicked him out in the first week.
Further more, I’d like to see the news article about your 3 yr old in kindergarten since that’s big news! Certainly they would like to show off that a 3 yr old has started kindy!
So, either you’re lying about him going to kindergarten or you’re lying about his behavior.
And, just so you know…’pre-k’ is not kindergarten. neither is ‘3 yr old kindergarten’ <—that's 'pre-k' with a different name. And neither counts as 'elementary school'.
If your son is how you say he is, then he needs better therapy and a lot of time away from a mother who repeatedly calls him 'creepy'. ''
Jesus Christ, these parents are real winners. They sound like the tools found throughout Manhattan with their spoiled-as-fuck rotten brats.
Then they complain that the general public dosen’t like them. Gee, I wonder why.
I’m actually starting to think that it’s not that the general public is jealous of them, but that the general public thinks they’re obnoxious as fuck.
Yeah I think it’s weird. these parents love emphasizing how their kids are natural leaders and meant to be our leaders of tomorrow, but at the same time love emphasizing how unlike most people their kids are, how not-normal their kids are. And unintentionally, how psychologically fucked up their kids are, frankly. Which brings me to my point. If your kids are so incredibly unlike most people, then why is it their rightful place to lead these masses who are so unlike them? How are they supposed to reconcile this, assuming they believe in ‘Murican ideals? It can only be reconciled if they are actually social darwinists, NR’s, etc, and I think most of them aren’t consciously those things
Many Americans aren’t consciously lots of things.
Regardless of the mum’s parenting skills, a kid hitting and attacking people is NOT normal or excusable
Thought of this again, LOL
tl;dr inclusiveness is bad for super-smart kids liek terence tao, even if it can benefit the merely sorta-smart kids
ten percent… but iq above 130 is only 2 percent of the population?
http://uniken.unsw.edu.au/regulars/profile-gift-education
If 10% of kids are gifted, then that would be millions of kids. That would require an immense gifted program. She must be including kids who show great talent and potential but don’t test well or otherwise get missed.
I also struggled socially, especially in grade school. It wasn’t that I didn’t get along with my peers, I just couldn’
t seem to connect to them the way they seemed to connect with each other. It’s gotten better as I’ve come into the later years of college, funnily. As an ENFP it sucked. lol
As a Honduran, I always say American elections are everyone’s elections and people get mad at me. Especially Americans. The American war on drugs kills people in our countries. A lot of people. Aside from being very corrupt countries, Latinamerican countries are often heavily influenced by the US. Just last year our Congress approved extradition laws lobbied by the US. We’ve extradited about 2 or 3 drug dealers but nothing has changed. Drugs are still being sold and people are still being murdered. Decriminalization and heavy regulation is the way to go in my opinion. It’s easier to treat addiction than death.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/13/white_people_s_meritocracy_hypocrisy.html
There is no more clear example of how racism operates in the minds of individuals and is enforced through institutions. Few if any of these people would identify as racist, but that doesn’t stop them from supporting only policies that benefit their race, no matter how inconsistent and hypocritical.
“As I said last week, the entire debate over affirmative action misses what’s really unfair in college admissions and this is further evidence that there’s no stable underlying concept of “meritocracy” undergirding the system. But rather than dedicating the most resources to the “best” students and then fighting over who’s the best, we should be allocating resources to the people who are mostly likely to benefit from additional instructional resources.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/3k1c8h/the_fall_of_the_meritocracy/cuu4res
“This is some nice information about the limitations of psychometrics as a whole that may very well render the debate moot, and would be good to keep in mind as you read other things.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2779444/
It is over my head, but I was able to glean some of what was being talked about. Basically, it seemed to be pointing to two issues.
First, because of the constraints in present psychometric testing and peer-review publishing, a lot of confirmation bias is probably going on and hence blindness to alternative data and interpretations, which is causing the accepted research in this field to be of a lower quality than optimal and accordingly the scientific consensus in this field to be biased. Second, it would be easy to fix these problems through better informing psychologists about a larger set of data and teaching them better techniques, and then demand higher standards for all research in the field.
The concluding discussion makes this clear:
“This paper has traced the lack of successful integration between psychometrics and psychology to a number of theoretical, pragmatic, and substantive factors that obstruct necessary changes in the research practices of psychologists. These factors are wide-ranging and distinct in nature, and thus render the task of breaking the resistance of psychology to psychometric modeling a formidable one. However, the incorporation of psychometrically sensible thinking in psychological research is important, not just for the progress of psychology as a science, but also for society as a whole. For, insofar as psychological research remains purely scientific, the lack of psychometrically defensible analyses may obstruct progress; but apart from that it is mostly harmless. However, psychological testing also has a significant and direct impact on people’s lives—for instance, through the use of tests in psychiatric diagnoses or for the selection of employees—and at present such applications do not always stand on firm grounds, to say the least. Thus, we face a pressing obligation to improve the practice of psychological research, and this obligation is not merely of a scientific nature.
“There is no question that there is ample room for such improvement. The current practice of psychological measurement is largely based on outdated psychometric techniques. We should not sit around while the psychometric procedures of our fellow psychologists slip into obsolescence. Psychometricians may prevent this through active participation in the education of psychologists, the dissemination of psychometric insights among researchers, but also through the development of formalized psychological theory. At the very least, the psychometricians of the twenty-first century should strive to play a more pronounced role in substantive psychological research than is currently the case.
“Max Planck stated that it hardly ever happens that scientists radically change their established ideas: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”; Perhaps this holds to an even stronger degree for methodological innovations, because these necessitate not just the revision of theoretical ideas, but also require researchers to learn new skills. Several promising processes, like the development of versatile computer programs and the increasing number of successful psychometric investigations in substantive psychology, suggest that the tide may be turning. I suggest we work as hard as possible to facilitate the emergence of a new generation of researchers who are not afraid to confront the measurement problem in psychology.”
“This 2014 article is science journalism, not actual science, but it talks about the new trend in the field that involves accounting for newly discovered epigenetic effects on IQ performance.”
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/26/inequality-begins-at-birth/
The article actually doesn’t mention epigenetics, but it touches upon the kind of data and observations that relate to epigenetics. Part of the problem is epigenetic research on humans is extremely difficult. In animals, it has been found that epigenetic influences can carryover across generations.
But it would be challenging to do epigenetic research that followed a large sample size of people over multiple generations or even multiple centuries. It sure would take massive funding and immense patience. This is easier to do with animals such as mice, since multiple generations pass in a short amount of time. Going by that research, we have no reason to assume that similar patterns wouldn’t be found in humans as well.
I left the following comment:
“I think the consensus given in OP’s article – IQ is between 40 and 80% inherited – is pretty representative of the studies out there.”
There is a lot of confusion about heritability. It doesn’t mean what most people think it means.
For example, epigenetics are based on environmental influences from previous generations, and yet epigenetics are inseparable from genetics in the measures of heritability rates. This is because, in reality, environment and genetics can’t be separated. Genetics only express through environmental conditions, and ultimately genes are simply an extension of the environment via evolution.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/what-genetics-does-and-doesnt-tell-us/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/heritability-inheritance-genetics-epigenetics-etc/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/identically-different-a-scientist-changes-his-mind/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/weak-evidence-weak-argument-race-iq-adoption/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/using-intelligence-to-assess-intelligence/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/americans-left-behind-iq-education-poverty-race-ethnicity/
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2013/09/25/race-and-iq-how-can-we-dismiss-the-correlations/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892514/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/epigenetics-a-turning-point-in-our-understanding-of-heredity/
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/01/mice-inherit-specific-memories-because-epigenetics/
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32637/title/Lamarck-and-the-Missing-Lnc/
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/06/10/some-epigenetic-changes-in-dna-are-heritable-and-research-is-beginning-to-explain-how/
Click to access Lester%20et%20al%20Annals%20NYAS%202011.pdf
http://breathe.ersjournals.com/content/10/1/24.full
http://advances.nutrition.org/content/1/1/8.full.pdf+html
http://works.bepress.com/anthony_walsh/80/
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-19748-2_7#page-1
http://www.jmolecularpsychiatry.com/content/1/1/11
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22308437
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23227820
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19711250
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2710163/
Another comment I left:
It turns out that twin studies are some of the worst evidence out there. There are just too many confounding factors not being controlled for, besides epigenetics. Most twins not only share genetics but also share many environmental conditions, besides prenatal conditions. This is because most twins are adopted by similar parents in similar communities, often times living near to one another in the same city or state. And of course, they are born into the same generational cohort and experience the same historical conditions, which even relates to such things as the increase and decrease of environmental toxins over time. All of that gets mixed into heritability rates.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/unseen-influences-race-gender-and-twins/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/identically-different-a-scientist-changes-his-mind/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/heritability-inheritance-genetics-epigenetics-etc/
Click to access nisbett2012int.pdf
I skimmed it. A decent overview, but it still doesn’t even mention either epigenetics or toxin exposure. That is strange. New knowledge takes a long time to become widely acknowledged, even in academia. That paper was from three years ago and at that time there was already a ton of research on epigenetics and toxin exposure, two factors that are central to the entire discussion of heritability and the IQ gap. Still, the paper does cover a lot of territory. For example, stereotype does get discussed, another issue that is typically ignored.
I was just thinking… about how it seems normal for humans to punch down, rather than up. If someone ”above” you punches at you, it is normal to react not by punching him back, but my hen punching someone lower on the scale than you are. It is normal for people to fight over crumbs rather than take on the guy throwing crumbs at you while enjoying his steak dinner.
That is how power is maintained when a society is ruled by a minority. The majority could easily take out the ruling elite, if they ever realized the game that is being played. But people are easily manipulated and those in power know it. Even so, the game sometimes goes wrong and those in power find out too late how flimsy is their control.
“We feel powerless to do anything about the problems of the world and it bothers us”
……..
http://www.conejousd.org/Portals/11/Power%20Point%20The%20Social%20and%20Emotional%20Challenges%20of%20Gifted%20Children%20(2).ppt
What does that have to do with supposed giftedness? If anything, those who feel the most powerless are those who are the least gifted.
I think it’s trying to say that gifted kids are often interested in ”adult” topics more than other kids, in a social justice humanitarian kind of way. Other kids play with barbies, but gifted kids care about world hunger, war, etc, and feel powerless that they can’t stop world hunger, war, etc…
I think these kids and the parents might accuse you and I of being dismissive of them, like they claim the general public is. They feel they are among the most neglected groups, because people assume they don’t need help since they are smarter than most people. Because they’re smarter, people not only don’t acknowledge their problems, but get jealous of them.
Well, I’m accusing these ‘gifted’ parents of being dismissive of most of humanity. They are so ignorant and clueless that they have no idea of what it means to be truly neglected. There are millions of kids in the world who are more intelligent, more talented, more hard working, more worthy, and more neglected than their kids.
you asked about dissenting opinions, well, my comments got me banned from that mum’s facebook page and my blog comments never get approved/replied to. I thought she wanted people who get her? I get her, all right.
I never even said anything offensive! I just gave one comment on how (she said filling out forms for her kid’s doctors, being a mom was tougher than the thug life) she could at least afford her special ed kid’s medical and therapy bills, people living the ”thug life” can’t. and consider that in our current state, many people are one illness away from going bankrupt and inequality is rising.
?????
” Another blog post seen by many on the internet claimed people are not born gifted, they work and create good habits in order to become gifted. There’s some envy behind these misguided posts.
Those inferior people who dare to believe that their inferiority isn’t inherent!
See, I’m actually interested in the jealousy here. It is blatantly obvious that some traits attract jealousy more thann others, and I am interested in us as a society comfronting this. One of my peeves with ”equality without sameness” is that it allows us to ignore this. You can really only have equality without sameness if all differences were equally desirable. Which they aren’t! And… should they be?
My point is the people defining the labels and deciding who gets labeled are the same type of people who are arguing for a meritocratic ruling elite and the same people who support continued oppression and disadvantage toward others. I don’t see superiority and inferiority as objective categories. Results are determined by environments. There are many potentially ‘superior’ kids whose potential will never be manifested, realized, or even recognized because of the conditions they were born into. A single gene can manifest in polar opposite ways, depending on its relation to other genes, junk DNA, environment, and epigenetics.
Still, I get your general point. The hardworking poor person is often jealous of the lazy rich person who inherited their wealth. That wealth disparity says nothing about objective superiority and inferiority. In fact, it says the complete opposite, for a society with high inequality tend to be inferior to societies with low inequality. Wealth is simply an outward signifier of opportunity and privilege, freedom and rights. But it doesn’t signify worth of one’s ability and the quality of one’s character.
Like you, I’m not arguing to make everyone equal on a lower level, as accused by the ignorant anti-egalitarians. No, I want to raise the standards for all. If higher IQ is good and most people have immense potential for higher IQ, shouldn’t we seek to raise everyone’s IQ? After we see how far IQ can be raised, then we can make comparisons about the remaining differences and consider what relevance they might have. It might turn out that populations that previously had a lower average IQ might end up, once conditions are equalized, to have a higher average IQ.
We won’t know, until we try, and that is precisely what some people are afraid of finding out. What if it turns out our unequal society was always nothing more than the result of oppression and disadvantage, that our entire society was built on injustice and self-induced ignorance? The collective shame that we would then feel as a society for the hundreds of millions of lives that were unnecessarily limited, harmed, and destroyed. That would be too unbearable for many Americans, for those people that Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the ‘Dreamers’.
”The hardworking poor person is often jealous of the lazy rich person who inherited their wealth”
I just want to add that the gifted gurus emphasis on how the blessed are born, not made, fuels the public sentiment towards them even more.
I feel sorry for Kim. The pressure and derision he faces at his life choices must suck
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20101006000616
When Kim decided to leave NASA, entered a university located outside of Seoul and became an ordinary company worker, the media took him to task. Kim says he is still bitter with the memory. “I’m trying to tell people that I am happy the way I am. But why do people have to call my happiness a failure?” he said.
Invited by NASA at the age of 8, Kim worked there for 10 years but calls the time spent there his lonely years. “At that time, I led my life like a machine ― I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept, and so forth. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I was lonely and had no friends,” he said. But for young Kim a longing to be with his mother was the decisive factor in his decision to return to Korea.
As expected, the media covered his return. “I was sick and tired of being the center of attention, again. I felt like a monkey in a zoo,” he said, adding, “At that time, there were no twitters nor instant messaging, so that gave newspapers more power, I guess ― the word went around so fast ― some people even started calling me schizophrenic for being cooped up in a room. I wanted to avoid any kind of attention toward me.”
Meanwhile, he wanted to get a job in Korea but to even do that he was told that he needed elementary, middle, and high school diplomas. “Since I had no official diploma ― I had to start all over from scratch,” Kim explained.
Nevertheless, that was no obstacle for Kim. Soon, he took certificate exams and earned his elementary and middle school diplomas within a year and then a high school diploma in the following year. “After that, I wanted to attend a university, rather than get a job right away. I wanted to attend school with friends my age, and outside of Seoul, where I thought I would receive less attention,” he said.
…
Kim says he’s led a happy life ever since. “At school, I lived my freshmen year as an elementary school kid, my sophomore year as a middle schooler, my junior year as a high school student, and spent my senior year like a normal college kid,” Kim said. “I consider my life a success ― there aren’t many people who do what they really want to do, but I do. That is what you call success, what else do you call a happy life?” he said.
Despite numerous attempts to avoid the media in the past, Kim was hounded by them again when a story arose of a boy entering college at the age of 9 ― the reports mentioned Kim as a “failing model.”
“The stories pointed me out as if I set a bad example for the little boy and reported that the kid should not grow up like me,” Kim said, expressing regret at the media reports.
Maybe it will be easier for other kids. He set an example that living a relatively normal life is possible for those with high IQ. He made a tough decision in defying expectations. But in doing so he hopefully has helped to adjust expectations a bit, which might take some of the pressure off for others. Or maybe not. It does seem rather pointless. Just leave the guy alone. He apparently is doing what he wants to be doing.
There’s just something really vaguely offputting about these posts and people. Maybe it’s my own “tall poppy syndrome.” But I tend to fit their definitions (I’m highly sensitive, prone To thinking a lot, etc) so I don’t know what to say. It’s almost selfish, them. Self-absorbed and unaware, maybe. Unaware of society outside themselves, only their reality tunnels are privileged tunnels.
http://crushingtallpoppies.com/2014/03/06/the-burdens-of-gifted-children/
Also if I take these people at face value I feel like I’d want to avoid blessed by god kids. Not because I’m intimidated by their towering intellect, but because they seem mentally unstable, lol.
“There’s just something really vaguely offputting about these posts and people.”
What I notice is how self-absorbed are the posts and comment sections. I rarely see any disagreement or debate. I suspect the comments sections are being highly censored where all of those who are critical are being silenced.
“Maybe it’s my own “tall poppy syndrome.” But I tend to fit their definitions (I’m highly sensitive, prone To thinking a lot, etc) so I don’t know what to say. It’s almost selfish, them. Self-absorbed and unaware, maybe. Unaware of society outside themselves, only their reality tunnels are privileged tunnels.”
Exactly! Like you, I tend to fit their definitions. But I don’t fit their insular reality tunnels. I don’t resonate with such extremes of obliviousness and disregard of others.
“Also if I take these people at face value I feel like I’d want to avoid blessed by god kids. Not because I’m intimidated by their towering intellect, but because they seem mentally unstable, lol.”
Yeah. I probably could have been labeled as ‘gifted’ as a kid. I also had social and psychological problems. But my parents still taught me to be well-behaved. Why is ‘gifted’ supposed to be an acceptable excuse for any and all bad behavior?
Yeah that’s what I’ve noticed. Behaviors that would get any other kid noticed (in a bad way) aren’t problematic when it comes to their kids, it’s evidence their kids are oppressed
That fucking mum after I made my comment that at least she could afford healthcare banned me from commenting! So myuch for ”dialogue”!!! It’s really just ”please agree with meeeee”
That seems to confirm what I suspected. Banning of those who disagree implies that the issue is more about ideology and self-interest than about helping all children and improving education. This issue is so important that public debate is needed. Closing down discussion demonstrates low moral character.
Maybe she thought I was being an ass and if I said things in a different tone..,
Maybe so. Or maybe not.
It becomes a burden, often a crushing burden, instead of a benefit in the ways people in the society think of ‘geniuses’ who ‘go into rocket science’ or the like. Up to 130-140 it’s most often a great benefit – better immediate comprehension, better memory, overall better cognition. This person can excel in the best universities and become a surgeon, doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.
When you go beyond that level into truly exceptional intellect, that person lives in a world of their own, literally. Researchers find that around the 2nd grade in early education, the truly gifted intellect begins to live in a world where they are becoming aware of things literally no one else they know on Earth is, there is no guidance or help to be had from parents/teachers/etc. They have no peers they can relate to socially to gain context about their development. The relationships with peers becomes ever more separated as time goes on as to the experience of life. This is referred to as the ‘isolation of the gifted child’. The gulf widens as time goes on.
Truly exceptional intellect actually becomes a barrier to the traditional ideas of ‘success’ in a society, which usually revolve around educational achievement and financial success.
There is the social aspect. Thinking differently, whether in terms of IQ or for other reasons, can cause a sense of disconnection and isolation. But not necessarily. Anyway, context is everything. The high IQ person of the past would be merely average by today’s standards. When people move to different countries, their IQ actually will change, as IQ is measured relative to specific populations. Someone might be above average IQ in one country and below average in another country, as the international disparity of average IQ is fairly large between wealthy and poor nations.
Maybe their kid’s autistic?
”Hi Celi and all, I am new to your blog but have been reading your posts via Pinterest for the last couple months–THANK YOU!! I live in Texas and have three gifted kids, all very different but all with heightened “everything;” my husband and I were both considered gifted as well. We have all kinds of fun around our house (ha!) with lots of issues that I never understood until we really started researching giftedness with our second child. He became part of the Duke TIP program this spring, and they have great resources on their website. As soon as we all started talking about the characteristics of giftedness, it’s like a light bulb went on (or in our cases, a megawatt spotlight — haha!)
We gave up trying to help our public schools understand our kids, and have intentionally given the kids extra learning opportunities at home and wherever possible. Frankly, I was continually embarrassed to explain to teachers/coaches/Boy Scout leaders that it’s because he’s gifted and wired differently that he has these meltdowns and behavior problems — they would always look at me with that incredulous blank stare. I would feel so ashamed.
I don’t think they cared to get it.
They don’t have time to get it. They have other kids to tend to, and an agenda of their own. My kid is just an inconvenience.
That’s our experience. The hardest part for me is the isolation. When my son was invited to Duke University for their Grand Recognition ceremony for his SAT scores, I desperately wanted to find someone else in my area who knew anything about this, or at least to connect (insert crickets chirping here). I very cautiously asked people if they knew anything about it or anyone who had done it — I was so afraid to ask. His school didn’t help much — the principal had only been there four years and never knew any other students to be part of it.
I really have to give a big shout out to Duke University — they have been wonderful.
What I love about your blog (besides the great resources, which are awesome) is that promotes a gifted “community” (is that an oxymoron? Haha). We need it! I need it! We’re not alone! Hooray!”
http://crushingtallpoppies.com/2015/08/21/dear-teacher-my-gifted-child-is-in-your-class/
Fair?
http://playbill.com/news/article/king-and-i-actor-shares-the-cast-reaction-to-his-defense-of-audience-member-with-autism-364217
I don’t think teachers need letters like that. Anyone who has been a teacher long enough has already seen it all with students and heard it all from parents. A teacher isn’t likely to learn any new insights from a letter. Most teachers have the basic capacity to do their job, as well as can be expected within the limits of the system.
No, that isn’t fair. There is no reason to expect strangers to tolerate disruptive behavior in situations like that. That was selfish of the parent to not remove the child. I think it would be wonderful to have special performances for such children, but a normal show is not the time for that kind of thing. What about all the other children in that theater who were unable to enjoy the experience because of the noise? Why should the rights of one person trump the rights of everyone else?
I’m really put of by the first paragraph due to it’s blatant ideological and value-laden confounding. But other tan that I enjoyed the descriptions. Overexcitabilities fit me well
http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/overexcitability-and-the-gifted
Though, I hate the blatant ideological bent. For fucks sake, intelligence and awareness =/= morality.
You can interpret hyper awareness as caring about the victims in Kosovo. Or you can interpret it as ted bundy being really good at zeroing in on a target victim, and luring her in. They are both evidence of someone keen and aware
“A small amount of definitive research and a great deal of naturalistic observation have led to the belief that intensity, sensitivity and overexcitability are primary characteristics of the highly gifted.”
I’m not sure that this is true. There are plenty of low IQ and cognitively impaired kids who have these issues. You see a wide variety of them in special ed programs.
On the other hand, there are many highly intelligent, talented, and academically successful kids that are extremely laid back and oblvious to their environments.
One of my sister-in-laws is that way. She is way more book smart than I am and she is probably aspergers or something like that, and yet she is the least sensitive and excitable person I’ve ever met in my life. She simply tunes out the entire world and lives in her self-enclosed mental space. She is quite happy living that way.
Einstein seems to have been that way. He is the embodiment of the mindless professor. I haven’t heard of any stories of him being particularly sensitive and excitable about the world around him. He was known to be so lost in his own thoughts as to forget his own name.
I suspect these ‘gifted’ descriptions are more ideology than scientific observation. But they are also self-fulfilling prophecies. Any smart and talented kid who doesn’t have psychological and behavioral issues will, by definition, not be ‘gifted’. And so every kid who gets labeled as ‘gifted’ will have psychological and behavioral issues.
they do say ”not every kid has these things” but…
they;d probably say your sister in law is ”bright” not ”gifted”
they’d oprobably say your sister in law is bright https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/gifted-ed-guru/201201/the-bright-child-vs-the-gifted-learner-whats-the-difference
Does a person exist with an IQ above 130 that dosen’t have ten million problems? What if a 130 iq person is totally neurotypical, or a psychopath, or one of the many personalities in the world?
”A parent can’t grow a gifted child with flash cards, tutors or reading to them in utero. All the hothousing a parent can muster or hire out will not deliver a gifted child—a high-achieving or advanced child possibly, but not a child who will be clinically identified as gifted by his or her IQ and other identifying inborn traits which can only be determined by a trained professional utilizing specific testing. Gifted is a medical, educational and psychological label used to identify individuals with an IQ above 130 along with other identifying characteristics such as unique emotional and social traits and needs.”
https://np.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1ls55r/i_think_classes_for_gifted_kids_like_gate_meant/?
[–]Gehbstemmer 1 point 2 years ago
When I was in elementary school, the MG (Mentally Gifted) program, was my only refuge from an otherwise miserable school experience. I was bullied and didn’t have many friends, and the MG program allowed me to interact with the few that I had. In the MG program I was surrounded by people that wanted to learn, just like me, whereas in my regular classes I was treated as a know-it-all.
Being in the MG program was great because it provided a respite from the shocking inadequacies of the public school system. A small class with an unorthodox challenging lesson plan was a great tool for me to sharpen parts of my brain that would otherwise go unused.
Should other children, especially those that are struggling, have access to the same quality of education? Yes. Is the system skewed to those with privilege who already have the benefit of coming in with a higher level of education? Most definitely. Can the existence of gifted class make other students feel inadequate? Sure. But all these things don’t change the fact that these programs can really make a difference in a child’s life and help them reach their full potential.
I think you have a point, and struggling students should be put in an environment that helps them learn. The trouble is, all children should be so lucky to have a nurturing and stimulating learning environment. Also, putting struggling students in a separate class, even if that class had superior teaching, would no doubt be stigmatized, as it’s usually common knowledge who the less successful students are.
Basically, the negatives of the existence of MG programs are outweighed by the great things they can accomplish.
permalinksavegive gold
[–]ejp10825Δ 1 point 2 years ago
I think that, if the kids are really “gifted”, they shouldn’t need extra help
That couldn’t be less true. Smart kids suffer from a bunch of issues due to or at least in correlation with their intelligence, which require special attention and special curricula to properly counter.
I can speak from personal experience on this. I can’t describe how painfully boring it was to go over basic math concepts for the sixth time when I got it the first time and to spend the first months of the school year reviewing stuff I still remembered from when it was taught the last year. By the time the teacher did get around to covering new material, it was usually stuff I’d already picked up on my own. The boredom was reflected in my behavior and ultimately my grades.
Smart kids need to be challenged.
Further, it seems a little backwards to me to suggest we shouldn’t and expend even more resources on those who are less capable. Imagine applying that logic to sports “Let’s stop identifying the best swimmers and giving them extra coaching and training so they can win gold medals, instead lets make sure everyone can get from one end of the pool to the other without drowning.”
So on the tv james Blake, black american tennis star, was “mistakenly handcuffed by police.” And it got me thinking
My mum is kind of “colonial mebtality bitter about the Chinese government, but she said, black people help each other and don’t let people walk over them. Chinese people throw wax other under the bus, hate blacks, but worship the fuck out of whites. She them goes on to say, “you must admit that whites are advanced and good and the most civilized, that is why the Chinese worship them but look down on blacks and other geoups, and throw other Chinese under the bus. The Chinese can’t stand to see fellow Chinese doing better than them because Chinese are supposed to be equal to them, since they are both Chinese. But whites? Whites are so advanced and civilized! It’s not ski color. Chinese hate Eastern Europeans cause they are not good. But westerners are so advanced!”
By advanced she dosent just mean loving standards. She means morally and philisophically (freedom! Democracy!) which irks me the most tbh.
It’s somewhat outdated
Every few centuries, power shifts. Western countries have been dominant for a few centuries now. Going by history, we should expect some challenger to come along and become the new dominant force. But every conquering society thinks it is the ultimate of superiority or even the end point of history, until the next superpower comes along. Fate is fickle and often arbitrary. I wouldn’t recommend pinning one’s self-worth on the changing currents of historical forces that transcend any society.
My mum is a bit miu-like while my dad isn’t. I’ve gone throug things with a counselor, but q lot of the baggage I have certainly has been learned t least partly from my mum, who was primarily who reared me. It’s funny as I am now older, I connect with my dad on a much deeper level because of this. I am only the cute daughter for my mum, but I can talk about anything with my dad.
My mum is an INFJ who was scarred by Tiananmen and the reality of China it showed her. It shook her to the core. My dad is an ENTJ/P who, well, is very much a thinker, lol
Out of curiosity, why did the Tiananmen incident affect your mother to such an extent? Did it change her views about the Chinese government?
I remember the event from my when I was in 8th grade. The news media obsessed over it. But it didn’t have much impact on me personally as I’m not of Chinese ancestry.
Besides, I had no reason to be shocked, as I had no belief about the Chinese government not being oppressive to an authoritarian degree. If anything, my childhood mind was shaped by American Cold War propaganda and the incident simply proved what the propaganda said about countries like China.
For me, the only lasting impact it has had was the image of “Tank Man.”
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/the-gesture-of-tank-man/
I’m not sure. I think it’s cause she’s naturally a INFJ, sweet marshmellow type who is naturally a kind person who wants to believe in people. She is cynical and bitter, but she isn’t born naturally cynical and bitter. It’s more that she gets let down easily, but things that haven’t let her down yet, she just believes in.
I think she believed in the pro- government propaganda from her childhood because she’s naturally an uncynical and trusting person who dosen’t take things with grains of salt, and can be unwavering in her loyalty, so this really shattered everything.
My dad? He’s naturally an ENTJ/P, he dosen’t have the same inborn idealism, type. In many ways my dad is a naturally more ”realistic” person, he is neither cynical nor idealistic, but simply is. My mom can be very black and white, while my dad tends to adopt a more level view of things. my dad isn’t prone to the same loyalty as she is. My mom is a chinese government evil/US is the free savior of the world, while my dad is ”they both have their flaws and strong points” so he criticizes both, which sometimes my mom responds to by calling him anti-american and to ”go back to china” lol
Even in this election cycle, my mum still sticks to Hillary Clinton no matter what else. I don
t know if more Bernie coverage would away her; i have trouble communicating anythong of substance with her. I wonder if more media coverage of bernie would do anything, i do not know. She literally believes anything CNN tells her. So she is selectively cynical, in that the chinese government makes her cynical, but anything that hjasn’t shattered her faith dramatically, she can be almost dogmatically loyal
I feel like black people are right. They comment on how Asians seem more white worshipping an self hating than they are even though they see Asians as being treated better by whites than blacks are.
I am thinking. Why so Asians, I sort of, mom struggle with such an inferiority complex more so than blacks and other groups? My mom says it’s because whites are more advanced. But east Asia is arguably more “advanced” than Africa or Latin America, yet they have more self respect than we do. Similarly we’re the model minority, yet we self-hate more than the non-model minorities.
It is “second place” syndrome? We feel on some level like we’re in second place, house slaves, which in some ways, can feel even more constraining than just being a plain field slave like blacks and other non-whites are.
As I’ve said many times before, I don’t think this is anything new. Many other immigrant groups have previously held this “second place” status in relation to dominant WASP society. Self-hatred and such are old behavioral patterns of immigrant groups. It is part of the process of assimilation. Chinese immigrants and their descendants aren’t unique or special in this regard. It’s the same old pattern repeating endlessly, from generation to generation, from one century to the next. Someone has to fill this “second place” role, and Chinese-Americans get to play… for the moment, until the next immigrant group comes along.
An interesting little tidbit, but many of the geniuses we revel in and assign eminence, actually lived very modest lives while living. They did not live glamourous lives, and it is the work they did, often on the side, the garners our respect. Da Vinci carried a knapsack around town and knocked on doors asking if people were willing to get painted, Einstein worked in a post office and odd jobs before his work shot him into eminence. The people who are remembered today for their genius tended to not be the ones going through ‘genius programs.’ Many of these people worked very modest day jobs before their work gained then recognition. They work the jobs that I actually wonder, if these parents at some level ,think their own kids are too good for (post office worker, knocking on doors for commissions, etc.)
Perhaps what makes these people what they are, is that their passion didn’t fade when they didn’t ”fit” into society. Einstein, Edison, weren’t model students. Just like many of these gifted kids are underachievers. But Einstein and Edison didn’t lose their passion, that same passion that these parents claim are part of ”gifted” kids. They didn’t fizzle because their conditions weren’t perfectly suited to their genius amazingness, but instead worked on their interests when they could.
I’m not exactly a genius, but I fit the general pattern of what you describe. I’ve always had working class jobs: fast food cook, yardwork, housekeeping, janitorial, dishwashing, and now parking ramp cashier. Yet I spend my spare time reading academic books and my intellectual pursuits, despite having dropped out of college. There are many people like this. Some later on are acknowledged for what they added to society, but most do their own thing without ever being noticed.
Yes. The main point is that your life and style is really what most of the geniuses we revel in lived this type of life, and some got recognized.
What is genius? It’s possible these people didn’t have ”genius” iq’s, we don’t know their iq’s. We just call them geniuses based on the work they have produced for us, but that work dosen’t require a high iq so much as passion and focus and persistence.
I don’t like how this article makes it seem as though the Asian American kids are the oppressors by “disdaining” the White kids.
Because which group is more likely to live up to their full potential? These Asian kids have to load up on academic and EC creds because they’re not going to have the same kind of social and cultural capital that White kids have.
http://www.8asians.com/2015/09/09/an-asianwhite-divide-in-silicon-valley/
“While noticing that white parents and Asian parents were divided on this issues, he also noticed that students would self-segregate.”
I was reminded of my own experience. I do know that self-segregation is common. I’ve seen it plenty, especially when I lived in South Carolina.
But I just now realized that for whatever reason I did have a number of Asian-American friends when I was a kid, including one of my closest friends. I never was around that many Asian-Americans, and so I don’t know why I ended up friends with the few I did know.
author is a professor at the university of iowa
https://books.google.com/books?id=7EMrKvWemagC&pg=PR18&lpg=PR18&dq=social+darwinism+gifted&source=bl&ots=-cFgn3mufu&sig=DObwuDJFuBYEKZOeFvJUPCXOYXc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAmoVChMIgcSV35TtxwIVA5QNCh1zWwqZ#v=onepage&q=social%20darwinism%20gifted&f=false
I haven’t heard of the author. It does look like a good read.
“Thus, social Darwinism provided the soon-to-emerge “gifted children’s” movement with a theoretical framework for expecting profound differences in children’s mental capacity, for interpreting these differences as genetically determined, and for responding to them with differential socicitude, with brighter children seen as a natural aristocracy, deserving better treatment because nature—not God or tradition or birth—had endowed them with special qualities.”
the book seems interrestin!
UGH
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=220203&fref=ts
I think I get it. I use a gifted example. A gifted person being in the general population of kids, is like a regular kid being in a population of special ed kids. You don’t fit in and everyone around you is so dumb, you start acting out due to your frustration. Wouldn’t you go crazy if you were in a special ed classroom? Same logic
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=828735457224624&substory_index=0&id=317606155004226
But that really is an issue of any differences.
A kid gifted in music and art will feel out of place with a classroom of kids gifted in science and math. An INFP will feel out of place in a roomful of ESTJs. A white person (who has always been in the majority) will feel out of place in a crowd of dark-skinned people. A soccer player will feel out of place on a baseball team. Someone with ADHD will feel out of place around a bunch of people without ADHD who are all sitting still and focused on tasks. Et cetera.
Humans tend to like to be around people similar to them. Still, what we focus on determines the similarities and differences we find important. Context is important, of course.
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/can-i-make-my-brain-as-plastic-as-a-childs/
That would be nice.
http://www.typologycentral.com/forums/general-psychology/3815-gifted-children.html
The basic aspect of giftedness is just IQ. With the Flynn Effect, it is mostly fluid intelligence that has increased the most. Fluid intelligence would also be the primary component of giftedness. In Myers-Briggs, questions for intuition, especially Ne, are basically measuring fluid intelligence.
So, it is unsurprising that typology functions measuring fluid intelligence correlate with those who get labeled as ‘gifted’. That is just to say that people who measure high on indicators of high intelligence will tend to get labels that correspond to high intelligence. In the end, the only significant meaning of the ‘gifted’ label is being really smart. It’s really that simple. So, why not just label them as highly intelligent and leave it at that?
There is an interesting implication to this. As the average IQ increases, one would expect the percentage of intuitives in the population to increase, as compared to previous generations. I assume they don’t norm personality tests, in the way they do with IQ tests. That would be interesting to see data on different generations taking the exact same personality tests.
On a related thought, since they norm IQ tests, does the IQ label get normed along with it. A common technical definition of ‘gifted’ is above a particular IQ. However, because IQ is constantly normed, that would mean a ‘gifted’ person today will be smarter than a ‘gifted’ person in the past. In fact, many ‘gifted’ people in the past if they were alive today wouldn’t be labeled ‘gifted’ at all. It took much less cognitive ability to be far above average IQ in the past, because the average IQ used to be functionally retarded by today’s standards. This also means that many ‘gifted’ kids right now wouldn’t meet the standards of ‘gifted’ in the future.
This goes to show that there is no objective meaning to the ‘gifted’ label. It is a purely relative assessment, where the comparison is only being made within a specific peer cohort within a specific population. As average IQ also differs between countries, it would be easier to get labeled as ‘gifted’ in some countries than in others. An average IQ person in one country could move to an average low IQ country and suddenly be considered ‘gifted’.
What if gifted advocates acknowledged that the label is just a subjective categorization? Why do we continue to norm IQ tests and so norm the ‘gifted’ label? Maybe there is a Moral Flynn Effect that correlates IQ to moral outcomes, but if so shouldn’t we praise the fact that IQ is increasing for everyone and that the racial and class IQ gaps are decreasing? Most of the population might already be ‘gifted’ if we were to norm according to the entire history of IQ testing. If the Flynn Effect continues, we might come into a new ‘gifted’ era where even the average person is smarter and more talented than ‘gifted’ people were in the past.
Gifted advocates complain that the ‘gifted’ are being ignored. I raise their argument further. We are living at a time when high intelligence has become so normal that we take it for granted. Why are gifted advocates ignoring how brilliant even kids of average IQ have become compared to past generations?
http://personalitycafe.com/myers-briggs-forum/98037-mbti-types-giftedness.html
I was thinking about this, and I am tempted to ask sometimes, but how do you think the gifted gurus would react if I introduced the possibilities of making the average joes, the masses that their kids are so different from, just like their kids? If their kids’ iq makes them above 99% of people, say, their iq is 140, or something, what if I introduced a drug or something that bumped all the other kids up to 140 as well? Making their kid, well, average in iq?
That seems to be the inevitable endpoint of where we are heading.
IQ is increasing for all demographics. And it is increasing the most for the most disadvantaged, the poor and minorities. At present, there seems to be a ceiling to how high we can raise IQ. But that ceiling only exists for those who are already in the most advantaged demographics.
There is no evidence that the disadvantaged are anywhere near the ceiling. It is highly likely that the entire population might meet at a common ceiling of high IQ, assuming we choose to continue to improve the conditions for the most disadvantaged (i.e., make them less disadvantaged).
Do those with the most advantage want to ensure all kids have the same advantages, even if it means that they would end up as merely average, even if that average was higher for all involved? Or is the desire for feeling superior more important than improving society and the public good?
http://architectureofmeaning.com/gifted-soul/gifted/qualities/
”High moral standards.”
iq=/= morality!!!
I was thinking of this from a different angle.
Pinker does argue for a correlation of IQ and morality. He points out that violent crime, war mortality, and social problems have decreased simultaneously as IQ has increased. This is an issue of populations, rather than individuals. A higher IQ person may not be more moral, but an entire society with higher IQ may be more moral, at least in terms of the data Pinker is considering. This makes a different point than the argument of the ‘gifted’ advocates. It isn’t about high IQ individuals being superior but high IQ societies being better for all.
This is an argument not for social darwinism. Instead, it is an argument for more funding to improve the cognitive development of the most disadvantaged, as studies show it is easier and cheaper to raise the IQ of minorities and the poor than it is to raise the IQ of those with already high IQs. So, we will improve society the most by focusing our money and efforts primarily on those who are in the need of the most help. It is simply a better investment, more bang for the buck.
keep in mind that gifted gurus say until they are blue in the face that gifted isn’t better, but a ”neurological difference” like autism
TO them gifted isn’t smart, but emotional turmoil.
I’m with you. Let’s not pretend. Everyone knows that having a high IQ is better than a low IQ. Cut the bullshit. Since we value intelligence, let’s do what we need to do in order to raise intelligence and improve cognitive development in general. Gifted gurus need to start being honest with themselves and the rest of us or rather become more self-aware of their ignorance and biases.
Gifted gurus, I realize, are ideologues
http://highability.org/6299/finding-gems-rough-mission-identify-serve-unknowing-gifted/
Everytime giftedness is only described aby such positive terms and only people liek davinci and such are claimed, artists, scientists, and generally respected people, I always think to myself why gifted gurus never claim, say, the unabomber, crooks on wall street, etc
Gifted people always seem so nice and moral, and creativie, and just tortured souls, color in gray, a creative person among the masses, the flower in a sea of dullness, inventors and people making the world better. Why aren’t gifted people ever pulling ponzi schemes, unabombing, expertly targeting their next victim to kill, using loopholes to break the law, etc etc? I bet Madoff was a smart guy too, look how well he pulled off his scheme and made himself rich
http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/can-you-hear-the-flowers-sing-issues-for-gifted-adults
”The high energy level of these gifted adults allows them to produce prodigiously in whatever most captures their interest. They often pave the way for others to follow with refinements of their innovative ideas. Many inventors and entrepreneurs have the trait of excitability. Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci are examples of people who possessed this trait. – See more at: http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/can-you-hear-the-flowers-sing-issues-for-gifted-adults#sthash.J40f1nBU.dpuf”
I’d love to see research on this. How does high IQ, talent, and academic attainment correlate to immoral and criminal behavior. Obviously, some of the most horrific crimes against humanity have been committed by extremely smart people. Then again, there are brilliant people who do great public good as well. Anecdotal evidence won’t help us to understand this issue. We’d need a study that controlled for the confounders, including the confounders that those with more wealth and power tend to get away with immoral and criminal behavior. That would be a difficult study to do.
off topic but many of the gifted gurus descriptions of giftedness seems less an iq thing than an MBTI function thing
I do think much is being conflated. That is typical. Most people are constantly conflating issues. It is hard to think clearly about complex issues. For one thing, most people aren’t that well informed and so that limits their capacity to think clearly.
Serial killers who are good at not getting caught, wall street crooks, crooked lawyers, mob bosses…
”Perceptivity. An ability to view several aspects of a situation simultaneously, to understand several layers of self within another, and to see quickly to the core of an issue are characteristic of the trait of perceptivity. These gifted adults are able to understand the meaning of personal symbols and to see beyond the superficiality of a situation to the person beneath. Skilled at understanding motivations, they may be able to help others to understand themselves. Adults gifted with perceptivity are those who can hear the flowers singing within others not yet aware of their own gifts. Their intuition and ability to understand several layers of feeling simultaneously help them to assess people and situations rapidly. In fact, they are often skilled at sensing the incongruency between exhibited social facades and real thoughts and feelings. Another aspect of perceptivity concerns the recognition of and need for truth. Social facades displayed by others may seem to this gifted adult to be a sort of lie. Adults gifted in this way detect and dislike falsehood and hypocrisy.
People who are gifted at “seeing” often seem to have a touch of magic about them. Religious and political leaders, philosophers, creative therapists, writers, and poets may be especially gifted with perceptivity. Jane Austen, Langston Hughes, Anne Hutchinson, William Shakespeare, and Henry David Thoreau are all examples.
– See more at: http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/can-you-hear-the-flowers-sing-issues-for-gifted-adults#sthash.J40f1nBU.dpuf
how do you think some of the g gurus would react if i said that they are unconsciously social darwinists?
They would deny it like when I tell race realists they are racists.
they could genuinely believe so, though. that they arent racist, or darwinist, etc etc. It’s not necessarily denial which implies knowing but not admitting
Im sure that mum of the special ed kid too would be offended as she has a special ed kid as well as her blessed kid
There is a thin line between awareness and unawareness, between willful ignorance and unintentional ignorance. Dissociation and splintering of awareness are well known psychological abilities and quite common. People are fully able to know and not know things simultaneously. People are strange.
they’re not THAT clueless, to be fair
http://www.giftedunschooling.com/bullying/
That is a more interesting article and extremely idealistic. It is arguing for a particular view of human nature that has its origins in Enlightenment thought. Then again, social darwinism also has its origins in Enlightenment thought.
I don’t really know what people really expect who are doing supposedly revolutionary work while paid in white liberal universities, speaking in an academic language largely invented by white liberals, asking for money from white liberal/corporate controlled foundations, competing for white liberal awards, and soliciting white liberal/corporate controlled publishing houses and white liberal/corporate controlled media outlets. They’re preaching the politics of inclusion but they’re also living in a world filled with gates and barriers, and 90% if not more of those that start out looking to fight the system end up getting co-opted by it. Very, very rare is the outsider who achieves success while maintaining their political/financial independence at the same time.
The term “social justice” (to avoid the pejorative) these days seems increasingly to mean not so much the cause of social justice per se, as a certain segment within a certain culture that fights for certain causes related to social justice aye, but or so long as those causes are congruent with the culture these activists are a part of. One consequence of this is that if the culture does not recognize your existence or your issues, then neither will the activism.
But also because they are so culturally conditioned, I think these groups often do not even well serve the populations they want the champion. Take feminism for instance. What are the biggest barriers preventing women from achieving equality today? Surely the lack of family leave in the U.S. is a huge problem, as it forces women to choose between a healthy family life and career success at precisely the age at which putting the most into one’s career is the most crucial. If you look at the pay gap that feminists are always talking about, by far the biggest contributor is related work/life balance issues, and not discrimination. Here is a concrete legislative issue feminists could be talking about. But they don’t. Instead they want to talk about “appropriation” and rape culture on campuses and #freethenipple. It’s not that the latter are not worthy of discussion, but they aren’t the main issues facing women nor are they the reason why women face structural economic disadvantages in our society. What these two issues do get is that they tend to get a lot of clicks/discussion/outrage. In other words, they are form fitted for our corporate media culture and professional activism.
Black activism has been co-opted as well. #BlackLivesMatter is obviously incredibly important to talk about, but if you ask, what is the biggest barrier preventing blacks from achieving equality? What are the biggest reasons why blacks do not earn as much money, do not have as much wealth, as whites? It’s not police brutality. What is the source of most violence that blacks suffer as victims from? Again, not police brutality. The collapse of the black family, has economically eviscerated the black “community”. Where are all the black doctors? Black lawyers? The black computer programmers and tech entrepreneurs and CEOs and Senators? It’s not that #BlackLivesMatter is less important, but it’s not more important. What #BlackLivesMatter does that none of those other issues does is that it’s useful for white corporate media and has been endorsed by it because it generates quick outrage, and therefore revenue for white corporate media outlets. Meanwhile more and more black children being born into economically impoverished single parent households are ignored because their stories serve no such function for our corporate system.
So in other words, it is not just that so called anti-racist activism is selective about the populations and causes it chooses to defend, but it seems that so-called social justice activism of the contemporary Anglo left has been so co-opted and mutilated by the white power structures it chooses to operate under that it no longer even serves the populations the claims to serve, while claiming to do so. Thus, an illusion of progress to keep oppressed people happy is maintained, while the same structural inequalities persist year after year, decade after decade.
There is truth about how dominated academia is by upper middle class whites. It is a particular world. But I must admit some of the most brilliant and hard-hitting thinkers I know of work or have worked in academia, from Noam Chomsky to Corey Robin. This includes some of my favorite black thinkers, from Angela Davis to Claude Steele.
Smart cookie, although your analysis of the wealth gap for the Black community is a bit undercooked. The “collapse of the black family” is a natural outcome of being shunted into poverty at the outset with limited to no access into the “legitimate economy” (see article about White favoritism driving Black unemployment, lack of social services, redlining, underfunding of certain public school districts, etc.) Police brutality functions as a watchdog to keep Black people from rising up from their artificially created social and economic ghettos and taking these opportunities by force. Prison is not just a jail cell. Malcolm X said it best: America itself is a prison. THAT’S structural racism. Blaming it on the breakdown of family is a microwave dinner analysis, you’re intelligent enough to dig deeper than that 🙂
I’ve written a number of posts about the black family. I was about to write another one. Maybe I’ll get around to it this weekend.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/chua-changelab-nakagawa-model-minority/
Good article.
“Historically, the term “Asian American” didn’t emerge until the 1960s, and since then, has been an extremely fluid category — shifting from narrow to capacious in line with political and economic trends. As a Census designation, “Asian” accounts for less than 5 percent of the US population, but currently encompasses individuals from over forty-five national origins, speaking over a hundred languages and dialects.”
That is what I suspected. Even white immigrants from a century or two ago didn’t have that much diversity.
“According to a recent report from Third Way, the rate of Asian political participation in the US remains relatively low, though the fever pitch of Republicans’ xenophobic rhetoric around immigration over the last few decades has swayed them somewhat toward the Democrats. While Asians tend to support a range of progressive causes like health care and (contrary to popular perception) affirmative action, they currently hold limited political power and are the targets of little campaigning outreach.”
That is also what I suspected. Most Asians aren’t right-wing reactionaries.
“In other words, discussing certain Asian groups’ material advantages today as a type of transhistorical “privilege” or “complicity” with power — rather than the result of a specific set of immigration and domestic policies that have aligned with shifting national attitudes — mystifies the mechanisms of capitalism rather than elucidating them.”
That is useful point. Race has often been used to mystify capitalism. It does this often by conflating race with class.
“That these roles sound like stereotypes indicates how business continues to use powerful racist stereotypes to segment and exploit workers and how sweeping categories like “Asian” hide deep class divisions.”
I would like to see how class divisions operate among Asian-Americans. That is a side of the story that is rarely seen in the media.
There are criticisms of Pinker. Either way, saying a high iq society tends to be nicer one, is not the same sa saying that high iq people are more moral
I was trying to make that distinction in my comment. I’m not sure that Pinker is actually arguing that higher IQ people as individuals are nicer. His book dealing with the Moral Flynn Effect is looking at population data.
I know there are criticisms of Pinker. I would be one of the first to make them. My early influences include Derrick Jensen, who is basically the anti-Pinker. I still do think there is something valid in what Pinker is saying. I’ve been reading some other books about Norbert Elias’ civilizing effect in order to better understand the argument.
gifted gurus love the tortured genius trope it seems.
http://www.rawstory.com/2014/11/north-carolina-voters-report-voting-machines-switching-their-votes-to-gop-candidate/#.VfCHwEiQMz4.facebook
I’ve heard of lots of news reports about this over the years. But I never hear of official investigations. Shouldn’t this be a national scandal that involves the FBI and extensive investigative journalism by every major news outlet? If this happened in a developing country, there would be an international investigation with outside observers brought in.
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/in-over-our-heads/
It is a rather strange rant, but the ending makes a decent point, sort of. He misses the bigger picture.
“In this age of multinational corporations, what government can reasonably claim to run its economy? The concept of self-determination has become little more than a political weapon in the hands of a corrupt ruling elite claiming to face off with Western powers, while consigning its people to an ideological prison and robbing them blind.
“So it’s time for Cameroon to shed its duplicity and hypocrisy because today, more than ever before, we need foreigners to help us resolve the many problems we face. Let’s say it loud and clear. Enough with the silence in which we shroud what the people already know: that we need all the outside help we can get. And let’s let the people decide how much of that help we want and if and when we want it to stop.”
That doesn’t just apply to countries like Cameroon. It applies just as much, if not more, to countries like the United States. There is no country more ruled by a global plutocracy than the United States. But if the global plutocracy rules nearly every country in the world at this point, then who are the foreigners who are going to save us all? We are all foreigners to someone else. Maybe we Americans need the likes of the Cameroonians to save us from the stranglehold of the corporatist empire. There is no longer an outside where outsiders reside, for we are all now inside the belly of the beast.
I can’t help it. Whenever I do an NR binge, I can’t go for long without really needing a drink
Fuck this world lol
well I thought her writing was honest and interesting, and i am sure many can relate. Ironically these reactions prove her point
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/mans-inhumanity-to-blake-dodge/
https://np.reddit.com/r/sjwhate/comments/3k5bo6/so_brave_a_femaleidentifying_college_student/
I must admit that I can’t get too excited about that kind of thing.
We are a hyper-conscious society. It’s the nature of the way our lives are ordered. We are obsessed with our identities and comparing them. Our identities, chosen or enforced, determine the roles we can play and shape our futures. This is true for everyone, but it certainly doesn’t play out the same for all.
I did find amusing the exchange at the end of the reddit comments.
tiptiptopkek 0 points 4 days ago
She’s white, conventionally pretty, nice feminine features, athletic, good GPA in high school.
Bet she’d make some great white babies.
Hope she ditches this “college shit” and marries soon, women only have two decades of fertility, and she’s already wasted about half of one decade.
apierson2011 1 point 1 day ago
Right? Seriously, why is she wasting her time getting a useless degree, doesn’t she know that’s not useful at all in the sexual marketplace?
So my dad just told me to write that I’m a us citizen on my resume, because i am asian so employers might throw me out if they assume im not a citizen wtf
I have an anglo first name, mind you
You better change your last name and probably get plastic surgery to look more Anglo. It would help also if you marry a white guy and have white babies. You should entirely assimilate and leave behind all aspects of your ancestral ethnicty, never to visit Asia again or speak any foreign language. Also, vote Republican and start bad-mouthing dark-skinned people and immigrants. You might also consider going to business school and joining the corporate world, to demonstrate your full allegiance to capitalism. That is what you should do to ensure you will succeed in white America.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkEnlightenment/comments/3kcfwp/slavoj_zizek_on_the_refugee_crisis_what_you_says/
I never have a strong opinion on immigrants in Europe. I’m not European. The last ancestor of mine that was in Europe was back in the 1800s. Many of my family lines haven’t been in Europe since the 1700s and 1600s.
My argument comes from being an ‘American’. Unlike many European countries, the US is an immigrant nation. The only comparable country would be an old former empire of the Mediterranean world such as Spain, as they have dealt with issues of immigration and diversity for longer than the US.
To be anti-immigrant in the US is to be anti-American. There is no United States without immigration. It is the entire history and identity of this country.
[–]kaboutermeisje 28 points 4 hours ago
There is a global trend happening that rejects moderate, establishment politics. The last time something like this happened was the 1930s. So yes, the Left is on the rise, but so is the Far Right, and that’s fucking terrifying.
permalinksavereportgive goldreply
Countries go through these cycles. It’s nothing new. So, I’m not sure there is any reason to get too excited. I worry more about the larger global issues. Populists come and go, but a global plutocracy gaining greater power is something to be concerned about. Basically, I worry more about those who will manipulate the global trends than those who get caught up in them at the local level. The political stage seen on MSM isn’t really the issue. That is a distraction, all theater. The power grab will happen behind the scenes. Beware the spectacle.
In the UK – and you’ll have to forgive me, as I don’t have the evidence to hand – they have done studies in terms of what the effect of ‘isolating’ students according to ability is. We call it ‘setting’. So, in some schools you’d have the top class, the middle class, and the bottom class for most core subjects such as English, Maths and Science. You also sometimes have gifted and talented programmes that run alongside these. We also used to (less so these days) have the grammar school system, where through standardised testing, kids with the highest academic potential from any background would be able to access a school place, essentially to be prepped for university education.
The results of studies that have been done indicate that isolating clever people enables them to fly high. They reach a higher academic potential when surrounded only by smarter people. What the studies also show however, is that the middle and bottom students do worse when the clever students aren’t in the classroom with them.
Essentially, the answer as to what is a better system really depends on your ideas about how society should work in general. If you feel that society should be driven by elites made up of the best and brightest, then isolation works better. If however, you believe that raising the intelligence of the majority is best, then evidence seems to show that isolating and investing in smart people seperately is not the way forward.
Edit: Grammar
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[–]DangerAwar 22 points 11 months ago
The solution, then, isn’t to drag the smarter kids down, it’s to allocate resources to making sure the average/below average kids get what they need as well. Why can’t we have the smartest children in their gifted environment while ensuring the rest of the kids get exactly what they need to succeed?
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[–]thetwaz1 24 points 11 months ago
Because evidence appears to suggest that there’s nothing that quite substitutes having mixed ability classrooms for raising overall attainment.
Quality of teaching and extra support helps, absolutely but there’s just something about having peers beside you that are smarter that helps the majority of students raise their attainment in a way that extra professional support doesn’t appear to. This is from a quick google search, but here are a few that illustrate some of the evidence:
I personally think that there should be gifted schools instead where all the gifted children are sent. Average teachers have no idea what the mind of a gifted child is like, and are not equipped to maximize its abilities. Or, forget age groups, and just teach children as fast as they can be taught, and classify children by their level of education, but this would still be inefficient, as some students will grasp concepts before the teacher has even finished explaining the first time, and others will need further explanation in order to understand, no matter what age they are, or how fast they got there.
The difference between an average student and a gifted one, can be very big. Putting gifted children in environments designed for average children is slowing them down a lot. Children can often even understand concepts more deeply than their own teachers. Even in university.
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[–]AkzidenzGrotesk 5 points 11 months ago
This ignores the self-reinforcing diagnosis of labeling students as “gifted” “average” and “special needs”. It has been found that even a simple disclaimer stating “this test is not a measure of intelligence but rather an instrument for finding possible solutions to a problem.” can lead to large increases in scores for those previously labeled as being in the lower half of the class. If they know that they will not be labeled as “stupid” by a test, they will actually do better. Things like sleep, nutrition and cultural attitudes to education can directly effect this kind of aptitude labeling and can be a disservice to those children who would do well had they not been labeled as “special needs” or even “average”.
There is already a move to change public education from the tiered tracking method to individualized “competency based” education models. If a child is assessed as able to solve certain problems within a subject easily, they are challenged to move on to the next subject. This allows for a lessening of the labeling issue, the ability of the teacher to address problems with students who do not understand the material or identify students who need to be challenged with higher order levels of thinking. It also allows for the social aspects of school to develop naturally among age-groups. The days of pulling kids out of class for extra-help and embarrassing them are hopefully coming to an end. In the end, telling a kid that they are “gifted” can lead to a constant search for the “right answer” to reinforce their labeled identity and limits their creative problem solving skills.
tldr: Don’t label students, it limits them.
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[–]Akoustyk 0 points 11 months ago*
I don’t think it does. It might affect them but it’s worth it to let the smart kids flourish. Average is the vast majority of human beings. The recognition system is a difficult problem. Teachers are average. They have no idea what it means to be gifted. They don’t understand it.
Letting kids go faster is good, but it is also better for the gifted kids to have smarter teachers. Its odd when you are much smarter than your teacher. They are supposed to be your source of knowledge. Then you ask them a question, and they have no idea.
Recognizing the potential of kids can release them and nurture them as well. But that field is still young and they are still quite lost.
In my elementary school it created this monstrous hierarchical society of brats. We all knew the IQ cut off for the advanced learning program and even though we were told not to share our scores we were kids so of course everyone knew everyone else’s.
The problem I have with “Gifted” programs is the rhetoric, I don’t see why schools couldn’t just have these programs without the cut off criteria and I don’t see why it has to be called “Gifted.” If it was just an after school extracurricular science club that anyone could be in I think the same children would end up in it anyway because generally children who want extra learning are pretty gifted anyway, but occasionally someone would be able to get that extra enrichment who wouldn’t have made it through the arbitrary testing and very well could be just as brilliant as everyone else.
I agree that we need to promote intellectualism and that it is important not to leave talented children unchallenged, I just don’t see why we have to segregate them in order to do this.
Mine was also an IQ test. I agree that these tests are objectively not a great way to measure intelligence. However, I’m not necessarily arguing that the method of identification should be an IQ test, I really just can’t think of a better method that would still be practical.
As for the hierarchical society, while I do think that’s unfortunate, my high school also had a hierarchical society where the jocks were at the top. That seems like more of an endemic problem than one with the Gifted program.
In my own elementary school, segregating gifted kids into their own class provided a better environment for them to learn in, because it celebrated intelligence and hard work rather than putting kids down for being “nerdy.” I’m not saying that all mainstream or gifted classes are like this, but they were in my experience.
I think you have a good point about the rhetoric though. It could just as easily be called something else that wouldn’t be as likely to breed elitism.
Ok but why do we need to test people at all? Don’t you think the jocks wouldn’t be caught dead in science club anyway?
I think people could segregate themselves based on their talents and we don’t need to tell certain people they aren’t allowed to join
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[–]namigga[S] 5 points 11 months ago
It’s essentially the same as testing people for sports teams via tryouts, or for bands via auditions. We don’t trust only the best basketball players to tryout for the team, and if someone isn’t good enough to make the cut then we definitely tell them they’re not allowed to join.
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[–]BojackOfCourseMan 3 points 11 months ago
Yea I was thinking about that while writing that. I think it depends on the age. If they are really young they don’t really do that kind of tryout stuff for sports yet either.
But at the high school level yea I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with what you are saying.
Also when it comes to things like band its different because in most schools you try out for the good seats and the better groups but everyone gets the chance to play and participate in some capacity.
And just because sports does it too I don’t think is a good reason, as intellectuals we should be able to be better than that.
I’m going to talk mostly about highly gifted students here (the top 0.5%, more or less) because that’s the group for whom gifted programs are most critical. “Ordinary” gifted kids (98th-99.5th percentiles) can usually do reasonably well in mainstream classes.
Highly gifted students need accelerated or enriched material that replaces regular material. They’re poorly-served by mainstream classes because the pacing is completely inappropriate for them. They’re as different from average students as average students are from intellectually-disabled students. If an average student needs to practice a method twenty times to master it, a highly gifted student may only need to practice it once. In fact, they may not need to practice it at all; they might be ready to integrate it into a more complex method immediately after seeing it. But they’re still required to sit through the multiple explanations and reviews and then do all the practice problems. This causes a number of problems:
They’re bored. Of course, all kids need to learn to tolerate a certain level of boredom. But the level of boredom that highly gifted students are asked to tolerate every single day in school is roughly equivalent to the level of boredom that’s used in detention as a punishment for misbehaving students.
The things they do to help them cope with the boredom – reading, drawing, talking, pacing, daydreaming, sleeping, going to the bathroom repeatedly – are interpreted as disruptive or disrespectful.
They very quickly learn that they don’t actually need to do homework. Or most of their classwork, for that matter. They often begin refusing to do their work, and if their refusal isn’t accepted, begin passive-aggressively “losing” or “forgetting” their assignments.
As they get older, they may begin skipping school or using drugs and alcohol to cope.
As a result of 1-4, they often have grades and disciplinary records that don’t properly reflect their abilities, which may prevent them from getting into accelerated/enriched high school programs and selective universities (although their exceptional standardized test scores usually mitigate this effect).
If they go to college – and most will eventually – they’ll arrive without ever having learned proper study habits or discipline because they’ve never been challenged academically. This places them at increased risk of failure.
Added enrichment programs held outside of school hours do essentially nothing to solve any of these problems. Now, these programs do have some value for low-income kids (of all ability levels) who don’t have access to adequate mental stimulation after school. I’m absolutely in favour of the existence of after-school enrichment programs. But one group they do not help is highly gifted students. After six or seven hours of being bored to tears, the absolute last thing a highly gifted student needs is more incorrectly-paced academic instruction.
The other issue that I have with your proposal, even as it applies to “ordinary” gifted kids, is that it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of giftedness. Gifted kids are smarter. They learn faster. But they don’t have longer attention spans, more hours in the day, or even (necessarily) more interest in academic subjects. They’re just as likely as average students to want to play sports or music or participate in political or cultural extracurricular activities or just to go home and play.
The idea that a gifted child’s problems can be solved by keeping them in school for a couple more hours is as misguided as the idea that an intellectually-disabled child’s problems can be solved by sending them home a couple hours early. It just doesn’t work that way. Exceptional kids need different instruction, not just different amounts of the same thing.
One of the major things for me was that emotionally and maturity-wise, I was always just average. I could read adult level books by second grade, but I didn’t truly understand all the themes, etc. (particularly why someone would be so upset due to this silly relationship thing). Once again, my mom was awesome and understood and really got me steered toward books that were in my reading level, but were the kind of themes I could understand given my average emotional maturity.
This is the kind of stuff that can be addressed by specific gifted classrooms/programs. The gifted kids are just kids. But they catch on faster. But probably not maturity-wise.
Exactly. That’s why I’m so frustrated by suggestions that gifted kids just need more work or that they need to learn to cope with the boredom. They’re just kids.
Well, maybe. Yes, a neat thing about humans and memetic evolution is that it only takes one person’s brilliance for 7 billion people (or more, especially if you include the future) to benefit, and benefits add on top of other benefits. One person curing cancer would help a lot of people. So what you say makes sense.
However, that is a very high-risk, high-return investment. Nobody has cured cancer, benefits are not uniform, and not every talented person even produces net positive value. So betting on (investing in) gifted children makes sense in principle, but it’s not necessarily the best payoff for a finite investment.
Another approach is raising the bottom level. That is, invest in raising the “troubled” ones up to average, or close to it, through “at risk” programs. That will tend to increase their usefulness to society in terms of productivity and decrease the likelihood of them being a drain on society. This is more predictable than the “cure cancer” talent investment, and smaller in magnitude but wider in effect. It is many small improvements instead of a few big ones.
Another approach is betting on the “middle class”. That is, raise the average of everyone by investing in the best research on learning techniques and applying them across the board. This approach reaches the most people overall and tends to have the biggest overall effect, though perhaps less on a per person basis than the above two approaches.
So given a finite amount of time, money, and resources to invest, which should we chose? Well, this is the same issue across all investments, including economic policies and fiscal planning. Generally speaking, you do some of each and use the portfolio approach to even out the bumps. We should invest in all of them.
OK, but at what ratio? Well, I would say to do it based on risk-adjusted payoffs based on statistical measurement of value generated by each. That is, measure the payoff of each strategy on average and support each strategy by the percentage of payoff that each one provides to the overall total. Since there is a feedback loop involved (payoff is a function of investment in the strategy), you might need to experiment a bit from there to see if higher payoff ratios maintain their ratio or have diminishing returns for increased investment.
The problem, of course, is that measuring such payoffs is very difficult and attributing them to the investment is even harder. So I think the best answer we have is going to be some rough estimation via a range of economic analyses by multiple independent (and nonpartisan) researchers.
In a sense this agrees with you, as having them as a necessity, but perhaps not in terms of the priority. They should be prioritized exactly as their real-world payoff compares to other programs, which I don’t think is as relatively high as you might think. Valuable, yes, but not the only valuable program.
Ah, education, where everyone who went to school suddenly thinks they understand all educational psychology, philosophy, and data.
This particular case is an interesting one, as it’s been implemented several times due to the observation that different students perform at different levels. So wouldn’t it make sense? And then you split off kids based on their previous acedemic performance, and better kids do better, isn’t that great? Worse students also do worse, but oh well, we expected that beforehand, since we claimed they were somehow less capable. Perhaps they learn slower, or differently, or are less motivated. Perhaps they were jus tkeeping the “intelligent” ones down.
Now, it’s been a few years since I studied any sort of educational philosophy, psychology, and experimental evidence, so sorry if there is something newer. But IIRC, when we looked at actual experiments, it turned out that “gifted” people were generally less gifted than thought, and a large portion of their apparent educational successes were due to other circumstances of their life.
There was a kahn academy talk a while ago that found a great deal of the “speed” someone learned at was just due to their mastery of previous basic skills. I think it was this one. They found that kids often didn’t a concept, and others moved ahead of them at breakneck speed. But as soon as kids understood the concept, they moved ahead at the same breakneck speed.
“in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot of assessment, you say ‘These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes. But when you let every student work at their own pace, and we see this over and over and over again, you see students who took a little bit of extra time on one concept or the other, but once they got through that concept they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted.”
There are other experiments that show similar effects. split up a classroom by academic success. Tell the teachers of the students getting high grades that its the lower achieving group. Tell the teacher of the lower achieving group that they got the high achieving group. within a semester the roles of each group flips – previously high achieving students basically plateau. low achieving students just skyrocket.
so by all accounts separating kids as if they have a higher or lower potential is a bad idea. We cant really determine “potential” with any accuracy.
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I have a great deal of issues with dividing students into different programs according to their apparent capacities – namely, the selection of students and the effect of this kind of segregation on all students.
Unsurprisingly, “gifted” students are usually from the middle and upper classes. While exceptions do occur, “greater potential” and motivation is mostly the cumulative result of favorable social and economic conditions – and natural talent plays little to no role in this. In other words, by selecting “gifted” students we institutionalise inequalities and replicate them. We need to remember that it all boils down to being lucky or not – it is unfair, and as a society, we shouldn’t promote this kind of inequalities.
Now about effectivity, studies have shown that segregating students into groups according to their so-called “capacities” is negatively correlated with overall success of the students. While “gifted” students do, in some way, benefit from it, the negative effect on other students brings down the whole average under non-segregated levels. A lot of factors come into play here, but composition of the class is, according to this french comparative study, as important as the socio-economic background. The results of the study are similar to everything else I found on the matter when I studied the issue a few years ago. Society gains more from heteregeneous students classes.
Let me nuance my words a little before concluding : I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t adapt education to students. Every student deserves and needs adaptated resources. You are absolutely right – so long as they are not divided into homogeneous groups. I would even add that the student that should be given more attention is not the lucky one, but the disadvantaged one. The latter needs it most.
Where I live, the gifted program in elementary school is a once a week class. You skip normal classes all day and go learn about something not included in the standards (For instance, in my time we did units on wolves, epidemiology, icthyology, and inventors, to name a few). A large part of the program as I remember it was to challenge us to think creatively or to see things from different perspectives. It was also about investigating on your own and not just learning straight from the teacher. Sure, at the time it just seemed like having fun, playing games, and sometimes eating pizza, but there was more to it than that.
As an aside, while the students in the gifted program are gone for the day, the rest of the class would do review work that the gifted students presumably didn’t need as much. So the other students actually got the help they may have needed without the gifted students sitting around bored.
However, once you get to middle and highschool, the gifted program just means automatic enrollment into advanced and honors classes. These classes are, of course, open to anyone who makes the grades to get in, but students in the gifted program can not be removed from these classes if space fills up (unless they ask to be dropped to a regular class), whereas a “non-gifted” student may get forced into the regular class if there is no space in the advanced one. This system allowed students to take high school classes in middle school and then have time for more challenging classes in high school.
Q tests favor memorization simply because it isn’t interactive. It also doesn’t allow for out of the box thinking, only thinking as defined by the people creating the test. You’re hemmed in by an answer key and the limited time available to score a test.
Which is a larger problem of IQ tests; They only find people similar to the people creating the test to be intelligent. We’re not really able to grasp intelligence that is foreign to us without laborious testing. Animal intelligence is low hanging fruit for an example of this. The vast majority of us wouldn’t be able to identify intelligence if it hit us in the face because we only understand intelligence in our life. People on Reddit will see intelligence as defined by the demographics of the site. That means computer use, pop science and stuff like that will determine intelligence. Whereas a theoretical website that may be more bohemian would determine intelligence to be understanding art.
I was in a gifted program, and I felt great about it. Having that status some how made me feel proud, and maybe a little bit superior. I was friends with many people in and out of the program and those out of the program seemed to lack the same amount of care as those in the program. I’m not certain if it is intelligence, or if it’s just how much a kid wants to devote themselves to the work.
Anyhow, I ended up moving schools from my advanced program to a new country that did not recognize it. That country had its own gifted program, and not being allowed into the highest level classes and learning uninteresting coursework changed my attitude a bit. I didn’t feel like trying because there was no challenge, and even if I did do well there would be kids in the special programs that I could never sum up to.
There are certain sociological aspects to gifted programs that, in my experience, have significant effects on the performance of those who are not in them.
The few may do very well, but everyone else may be deterred at the same time.
I went to a public high school (in the United States) that had students from both very poor and very rich areas. The school focused most of their attention on the advanced classes, leaving those in regular classes to fall farther and farther behind and many dropped out. Inevitably almost all the advanced kids were the rich kids. They had all the advantages (highly educated parents, access to tutors and extra curricular activities, etc). Separating them based on ability only increased the gap between rich and poor students. A public school system should ensure everyone has the same resources and opportunities to succeed, not favour the students who already have the best opportunities. There should still be separate levels, but all students should have the chance to excel
Gifted programs just don’t do much. All the time I spent in a gifted program we basically did brain puzzlers. Yeah really fantastic. Julius is a fish. woopdeedoo.
There is this mensa mentality about being smart for the sake of being smart, and not actual useful skills that persist through life.
Trying is more important that succeeding. How to actually talk to people and your peers. How to code and the basics of a computer. How to have a balanced budget. How to plan for your future.
There is a such a myriad of things I had to learn on my own that academia never taught me. Academia, is stuck sometime in the 1900’s mentality about how to approach children’s education. The belief that kids should not work, is on top of those. Academia is only good mostly for more academia. There are some great classes and great teachers amongst them.
If you want to be truly gifted, truly educated and beyond mediocrity, stop following what academia tells you. Those who are truly gifted lead themselves, create their own education and want to learn. That’s how education should be approached. Primarily because it scales.
As an IB alumnus, I strongly disagree with the existence of Gifted programs. They create a system of apartheid within schools that lead to anti-intellectualism among those who are not in them and snobbery among those who are. I would have learned far more by interacting with peers of different backgrounds than I did by doing meaningless extra work. Granted, it did make my college classes a cakewalk, but severely stunted my social development and that of my peers, as we simply had both less time to socialize and were inexperienced in doing so with individuals of average intelligence. IB kids also ran ~90% of extracurrricular things besides football/men’s basketball, and they or supervising teachers would almost invariably put other IB kids in leadership positions. IB kids could roam the halls unimpeded; non-IB kids were always asked for a pass. Is that really a society you want to create, one where the masses are excluded from the major institutions of society and a cognitive elite is excluded from the normal experiences of youth? There is much more to a child than his intelligence.
I really don’t care about ‘gifted’ classes on principle. What I care about is the anti-democratic ideology of so many ‘gifted’ advocates and the world it would be created if unimpeded. Maybe ‘gifted’ classes would be fine if not for all the social darwinian ‘gifted’ advocates, but that isn’t the world we live in. Anyway, in such a utopian world, there would be no reason to use the ‘gifted’ terminology at all, which is inseparable from the social darwinian ideology.
I apologize. Maybe that’s what turns me off. Also, you notice, this isn’t seperate from the current situation at large of increasing inequality and the fact that we are in a social darwinian world
I think if people felt that their place in society wasn’t some fucked up caste system that they are stuck into my virtue of genetics, the gifted advocates wouldnt be so unpopular
Also, my guess is that we live in an age of helicoopter parenting, so a teacher would of course roll her eeyes at those parents as every day helicopter parents harass them. How they are supposed to tell if the parent is a helicopter parent or if kiddo is really blessed, if kiddo is currently a fuckup?
Having been in an HS gifted program, nothing was really gained and I think I learned less with the specific teachers we received.
Now, looking at my friend who came from a magnet, who got his really fucking smart brother into a magnet, and who is in a college “gifted” program, I can tell you that the resources given and the attention given is absolutely insane. I’m not sure how much harder their classes are but the dedication to their success is much greater than the dedication the school has for the general population. Kind of like Gladwell’s Outliers.
I’m extremely jealous as someone who used to be considered smart at a young age (96-99% percentiles effortlessly) but really wasn’t stimulated or evaluated for flaws — I stayed high and graduated every year until the difference in my skill and the amount of skill I might have had was greater.
So what’s my point — Gifted programs, if actually well-thought out, are fine. Programs for the lower-scoring are fine. What I think would really help everyone is more programs to help adequately introduce people not only to gifted institutions and programs, but to help them academically adjust so that being Gifted doesn’t just mean being in a system of constant success since age six, but being able to realise success at age sixteen. When I was younger, I had to switch from pre-Algebra 1 to Algebra 2 (skipping pre-Algebra 2) after having so much free time that I kept on asking for work and she ran out. But not having anyone to teach me what they had learned during the year, I had a difficult time adjusting, and did poorly.
Another issue, I’d say, is that there’s an eco-system — so someone who’s amazing at English but not so good at Math might not be allowed in, even if its for the best of their English ability and they’re better than anyone else in that year. Yet everyone who is smart and well-balanced but not actually amazing might be in a Gifted Program. The challenge for both the student who is great at English and the students who are all more or less at the same level being taught the same things together is lacking. It would be more like US AP courses, but I think those are nice.
Many years ago, I read a study where a school took a bunch of students of varying abilities and switched them all over to the gifted level course work, and they realized that students rise to the meet to teacher’s challenges.
What has unfortunately happened in my home school district is that the students who need the most help get the worst teachers and the easiest coursework. Teachers want to teach; it’s why they went to school so what happens is that they great teachers and the ones with seniority, fight to teach the most advanced students, who happen to love learning, while the brand new and terrible teachers get to babysit the kids with behavior problems and the ones who just refuse to do their work.
It’s not right that the system is designed so that the students who need the most help get the worst teachers. I would make the case that everyone should be taught at the gifted level, and if there is some politically motivated reason why they can’t kick out or fail the troublemakers, like they will be denied much needed federal funding, then assignments should be participation based or graded on a curve because I don’t know what else the school board is supposed to do. How can you force somebody to learn?
I know the research that is referred to. I is sort of the opposite of stereotype threat. Instead, it is when one is given a positive stereotype and treated accordingly. The research involved not just fooling the students but also fooling the teachers. Both were told these students were exceptional and so all involved acted accordingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/teachers-more-likely-to-label-black-students-as-troublemakers.html
There’s those studies that showed that segregating blessed kids, having them ounch in their weight class essentially, made them better off, but made the normals worse off. Eh.
The Reddit. Isn’t it interesting, but these peopel are different from the gurus.
lot of posts seem to be focusing a lot on the need of the education system to revamp and that’s very true. Gifted education programs do indeed need to undergo a rethink in the qualities amongst students that they are selecting for. At the risk of side-lining this issue, I would like to point out one additional disadvantage of gifted education programs:
Stress
I admit that I am a gifted student myself and that I firmly believe the gifted education system does has its merits and should not be abolished. OP I agree with the benefits of gifted education you propose. Where I come from (Singapore) we have a gifted education system that lasts from age 10 to 12 (your grade 4 to 6 iirc). All students have to undertake a math and science test to see if they can enter the Gifted Education Programme (GEP).
The reason why some in Singapore have been calling for the abolishment of the GEP is that it creates a lot of pressure to get in. The GEP in Singapore is tied in with many other benefits other than just good classmates and fun programmes, but it is also perceived to be a “fast-track” route to get into a better high school. (This may or may not be accurate because gifted students have a different selection procedure for high schools that other students. Nonetheless I believe that parents would still pressure students for gifted even if the selection process is the same). As a result, parents often push their children to study extremely hard before the gifted test in the hopes that they get in. A few desperate ones even send their children to tuition courses that charge thousands and who purport to be able to “raise your child’s IQ”. I don’t believe they can, but parents do and that’s what matters. Now, it is clear that the reason behind the pressure is the importance that your society places on the value of education. If your society values education as the only route for success, then gifted programmes will unfortunately be subject to a lot of stress for parents. In fact, in Singapore the pressure in getting students into good schools has led to tuition companies lying about their statistics in order to attract customers!! There was a teacher arrested for lying that he was in the Gifted Programme, and undoubtedly there are many more. When demand for gifted education is that high, you can imagine the stress.
Ultimately, if you want to remove the stigma behind this, then society must change its view of education as the only route to success. Merely making it seem as though gifted education programmes don’t affect anything won’t fool anyone if parents care about grades more than they care about succeeding in other means in life. I’m not sure if Canada still has this impression, but if so then Gifted education programmes cannot be made a priority for the fear of worsening the stress.
As an aside, I also note that the provision of gifted education programmes is subject to many difficulties. From my 5 minute Wikipedia lesson about Canadian gifted programmes, it seems that both Canada and Singapore have only certain schools that offer gifted programmes. That has led to severe inequality between schools as parents clamour to send their kids to those schools, and better teachers are redirected there. However, OP your suggestion that all schools should have gifted programmes may be accurate, but does society really have enough teachers to ensure that the gifted programme in all schools are kept at the same level? Ultimately, some gifted programmes will be better than others if we spread teachers so thin, and that will again lead to further inequality.
By the way, I should like to doubt very much that gifted education students have difficulty integrating with the general population
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10670.aspx
Reading through this thread has been somewhat sad for me. It seems more people than I would have guessed feel that their education wasn’t able to sufficiently challenge them. The reality that the education system does not serve all students equally is an unfortunate one in and of itself, but I do think that a certain proportion of people here claiming that they were under-stimulated and languished as a result are mistaken and have in fact been misled (especially those who claim that it led to problems as an adult or in college). I wonder if and how the demographics of reddit users may be playing into the response to this CMV.
A lot of posters seem to be operating under the unspoken conception that their perceived above-average intellectual abilities were innate. We’re still learning about how genes and environment interact to produce unique individuals. However, the idea that people with enhanced cognitive abilities are the way they are entirely due to intrinsic factors such as genetics doesn’t seem to have much credence. I know that no one in this thread claiming to be “gifted” has explicitly made this claim, but it seems like mostly everyone has this belief. If you acknowledged that some part of your own intellectual ability is the result of exposure to environmental factors (ex: someone taking an interest in your development and exposing you to critical thinking from a young age) then you shouldn’t really be arguing that such children should be separated from others, because nothing innate to those children made them “gifted”. What really might be happening is that other students who do not display such talents are not being served by an enriching environment outside the classroom. To me, the idea that plenty of students who could have developed into “gifted” children aren’t even getting the chance is far more distressing than the idea that some children who have been lucky enough to have this early exposure aren’t getting further educational resources on top of that.
If my perception that for educational achievement down the road, early developmental exposure is as important or more important than innate factors is accurate, then “gifted” programs like the ones being described in this thread merely serve to perpetuate preexisting inequalities to education access. Sure, it’s better for the students in the programs, but those students may have had an advantage before they even set foot in their first day of pre-kindergarten.
So how do I explain the “gifted” underachiever that seems a big part of this thread’s readership? I would say that some people posting that their schooling was not challenging enough for them were really suffering from attention and executive functioning deficits. That is, they have more trouble than most kids paying attention and managing their time/organization. These deficits tend to have an adverse affect on educational achievement because as a lot of people have said, much of early education is about “busywork” and “jumping through hoops” and what helps people be good at that are the things I mentioned: attention/focus and executive functioning. Some kids might get early developmental exposure to learning, but may also have trouble focusing on certain tasks and getting their work done within a deadline. These kids are often seen as “gifted” underachievers. So intellectual ability isn’t necessarily the most important predictor of achievement, I know we all agree on that. But, not all intellectually advanced students get mediocre grades. Some “gifted” students do very well in the standard class and set the curve. What’s the difference between these two kids with the same intellectual ability? It’s their ability to focus on something that doesn’t necessarily interest them. What might be the difference between an “unchallenged” kid who get’s C’s and a kid who tries really hard to get C’s? It might be a difference in innate ability, or it could be a difference in early developmental exposure.
In the United States, the fact the the “underachiever” is more likely to be white/from a more affluent background, while the “remedial” student is more likely to be non-white/from a less affluent background has not escaped my notice. Places with elaborated “gifted” programs don’t tend to be the best or most equally served by the education system. In those places the “gifted” program just seems like a life raft fleeing the sinking ship, and there are definitely more white kids on the raft than black kids. Some of the best school districts I’m familiar with do not have any such elaborated program, but do allow students who display proficiency to take higher level classes.
That is a great comment. I’m so glad others are pointing out the obvious.
So to conclude, programs like this are possibly acceptable in places where there is more equal access to education for everyone, because this is the only type of environment in which innate intellectual ability can really be measured. This is not the case in most of the US. The other major issue I have is with calling such programs “gifted”. This is an incredibly unhealthy idea to place into children’s heads at a young age, both for the children in the program and those left behind. There’s no reason to call it that when the biggest “gift” these kids got may have been being born into a household with the spare money and time to invest in their intellectual growth. There are so many alternative names with less emotional weight. I can’t even imagine a contemporary educator who would have thought that “gifted” would be a good name for a program like this. Most educators I know believe that there is a huge reservoir of untapped potential out there that can only be accessed by improving education and access for everybody, not just a few kids.
All that being said, I’m not really against the types of programs we’re discussing. I have issues with certain aspects and there are definitely implementations that do more harm than good. In places where a kid is clearly miles ahead of their peers there is little to no harm in accelerating them in subjects in which they’re proficient. But there is also no reason that this needs to take the form of anything more elaborate than quietly taking some advanced classes. There’s no need to shuffle a subset of students into a whole different track. That’s isolating at best and breeds unhealthy attitudes towards the normal students at worst, and these ideas can easily endure into adulthood.
There’s also a role for personal and parental responsibility in all this. Classroom learning has never been meant to exist in a vacuum. In an era of libraries (and now the greatest library of all, the internet), there is near unlimited capacity for parents and students to enrich their own learning. If a student ever wants to know more about something than a class is teaching them, they should go look into it on their own. That’s a sign of true intellectual curiosity. I question the idea that any student who doesn’t do this to correct the feeling that they’re unchallenged is truly “gifted” or even exceptional in any way. This is why I don’t generally buy the whole “gifted underachiever” thing when people claim that they’re actually disadvantaged for it as adults. At a certain point, you become responsible for your own enrichment and if you feel that you haven’t been adequately educated then you may share some of the blame. Not every student who displays above average intellectual ability needs these programs to succeed, only those who seem to have other deficits. If a young student really doesn’t seem to be getting enough of a challenge, I think the parents should be making an effort to seek out stimulating activities, rather than demanding that the school conceive of special classes and curriculum at the possible expense of other less fortunate students.
I am fully aware that what I am saying may not apply to everyone in this thread. Perhaps you were in a “gifted” program despite the fact that your parents were drug addicts that took no interest in you or your learning. Maybe you never read a single book before coming to school and were still somehow placed in the “gifted” program. So please don’t respond to tell me that you didn’t have any environmental help in becoming “gifted”, if that’s truly the case then clearly I’m not talking about you. Also, a lot of what I said is specific to the United States or other places with high levels of economic/social inequality. There are definitely countries with more equitable education systems that are less applicable to what I am saying.
This a pretty good comment, but it leaves out a major point:
“There’s no reason to call it that when the biggest “gift” these kids got may have been being born into a household with the spare money and time to invest in their intellectual growth.”
It isn’t just resources. In a race-obsessed and class-based society, people are treated differently in every aspect of life. The media portrays them differently and indoctrinates stereotypes into the tender minds of young children. The entire society is inherently biased with a tilted playing field.
This goes deep. It is systemic with the school-to-prison pipeline and other such things. It is also psychological with implicit biases, Pygmalion effect, golem effect, stereotype threat, etc.
Resources are important, but just one small piece of the puzzle.
The problem with gifted programs is that the “gifted” students only perform well because they’re told they are gifted. A small amount of an early lead at a young age puts you in a different category of value as a human being.
There was a study where they told underperforming students they were gifted and the better performing students that they were average. Their grades changed go reflect that. So either tell everyone that they’re gifted or don’t tell anyone. Because it’s bullshit.
I’ve only met one “gifted” student who wasn’t an arrogant bully. I know that’s anecdotal, but I don’t think we need many more opportunities for students to be “better” than one another with teen suicide rates so high now.
As it stands, a simple majority of students could handle an accelerated course, but the bottom proportion will drop behind. It’s not just the “fuck-ups” you plan to abandon, it’s the kids that didn’t do much reading as a child and don’t understand the importance of what they’re doing, and so fall further and further behind. This is neither moral nor practical.
A better solution would be to accelerate the main classes and put those who can’t handle it into a slower class. That way, the ordinary students can get things done but the slower students can at least be taught the basics, if not the details.
I see “Gifted” students as being kids with greater potential than the average student, either through greater intrinsic motivation or natural talent.
You have an artificial view about human potential and learning. Natural talent may exist in an extremely rare few where brains are wired differently much like Autism’s effect on memorization, but the idea that some children/people are just better off – have a knack for it, etc. – is mostly a snapshot circumstantial bias. Life experience, emotions, household stability – just a few of the major issues that can effect someone in short or long-term learning potential, but none of these will be around for a lifetime. Everyone can grow throughout their lifetime, and they will if they are taught to grow, learn, and enjoy education.
So, a society has more to gain by exploiting their potential than that of the average student.
Where do you think power lies in this world? Where do you think work is accomplished? All of this lies in the hands of the masses. Who do you think grew your food, delivered your clothes to that store, regulated the food industry to make sure we don’t eat people parts anymore (eww)? Who writes the software for all these computers? Who are the journalists, the teachers, police officers, politicians? Do you really think that the weight of nations is carried by a few? I don’t think so. The systems we are a part of are too big for small groups of people to run and to make meaningful impacts consistently. Think of it like a statistical issue. Would it be better to have a majority population of smart people, or some geniuses surrounded by dimwits? Or maybe sports works better as an analogy: we pick teams of 11; you pick the first 3 rounds then I pick 11 rounds then you get what is left over. Let’s see who wins. Teams stacked with one or two great players cannot overcome the difficulties they face when their team cannot help them.
Secondly, there is danger in leaving any students unchallenged.
Your first point, without proper evaluation of students IMO, has already written of a huge number of potential bright students and left them to a decade or more of education where they will forever be unchallenged. All this simply by labeling them average due to a likely short term circumstance. Challenge all your students. Treat all of them as if they are gifted. I once heard a professor say, “You will rarely get anything out of a student that you didn’t ask of them.” People rise to the challenge. Set the bar high, and that is where they will go.
I believe you are looking at intellect, potential, and education very much within a small confined box that is the current (terrible) schema used in education around the world.
Check out This Ted Talk about Khan Academy that really points out how our concept of education and gifted students is far from reality.
Systematic education needs a global overhaul, I think we can both agree on that one. Educating greater numbers is the most effective thing you can do for society. “Flipping the classroom” is a term you should look up. It is a popular term for Higher Ed. right now. It is IMO part of the solution to challenge everyone at appropriate levels.
Exactly! “Systemic Education needs a global overhaul”… yes!
omg, this conversation is hilarious. mrlowe98 is everything wrong with the world
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/2l3adj/cmv_gifted_programs_in_schools_should_be_seen_as/clrsfl0
Who likes homework, ever?
”One major reason why well-designed self-contained gifted programs are valuable is that when gifted kids are taught separately, they can be taught at a pace and depth that not only makes slacking off less attractive (because the work isn’t boring) but also makes it have immediate negative consequences (because there’s a real chance they could fall behind and fail a test if they don’t do their work and study).
There’s absolutely no way for gifted kids to learn to associate effort and learning in the context of a mainstream classroom. You can force them to do (some) homework by making it a huge part of their grade so they can’t pass without it, but you can’t force them to value homework.”
As a Canadian student who went through my school district’s Gifted program I would disagree. Now don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the program, I met a lot of smart kids and friends, and I learned a lot of things that I wouldn’t have learned or wasn’t taught in school for several more years. But as a method of helping individuals with greater potential to reach that potential I would say that it is not as effective as it could have been and inefficient.
I’ve lost touch with most of the people that I went through the program with but those that I have remained in some contact with or have heard of since graduation have achieved little. They certainly haven’t capitalized on the greater potential that they should have. Not yet anyways. It’s been 6 years since I graduated high school and the program catered to a range of ages meaning those that I was with are anywhere from 3 to 10 years out, give or take some, so that could change.
I always looked at it as a coping mechanism for mal-adjusted children. Most of the students while bright had problems. Inability to focus, attention trouble, couldn’t follow through on things, attitude problems. I had such an easy time with so many different kinds of problems that when I came up against something I didn’t get immediately I would basically shutdown. I had no ability to work things through. My teacher had a way of helping us overcome these problems, at least to some degree. Helped us cope. We all had potential but there was something blocking us from reaching that potential. That, to me, was the value of the program. It had nothing to do with people having more or less potential, it was overcoming your own issues to reach that potential.
I should point out that most of the people that I went to school with that did the best in school and did the best after school were rejected from or were never interviewed for the program. Given there was only one teacher for the entire school district between grades 3 and 8, it is highly probable that not everybody that has that potential can get in, but still those that passed through the system should have displayed that success if not in school then beyond school certainly.
I would also like to say that the vastness of the range of ages that was in the program, while I dont recall it obviously being so, was likely to be a challenge in devising and running the program.
The program is more a highlight of the difficulties of the modern school system. I don’t think that not promoting them encourages mediocrity because I’ve seen those who did not pass through them achieve more both career-wise and intellectually than those who did. And before you ask, I don’t think that those people would have benefited any more or achieved any more if they had been part of the program. Like I said, to me it was about helping those who were incapable of reaching their potential (whatever it was) to overcome their deficiencies. The tools should be available to everyone to further challenge themselves and they should be encouraged but not at the expense of other students. I feel like the “Gifted” program puts a wall around learning and challenge. That it excludes or includes people whereas all students should be encouraged to pursue that challenge if they so wish and they should be encouraged to so wish. I was one of two kids from my class who was tested, the other being my best friend. While he was easily just as smart as me if not smarter he was not accepted (iirc there was some trauma in his life just beforehand and he said that he was unable to focus, take that as you will). He felt cheated by the experience, that I was accepted where he was not, and failed to achieve what he was capable of for some time. Prior to that we had been challenged by our teacher to do extra assignments, research projects in the second grade. Its difficult for every teacher to do and thats why a resource beyond the standard system is needed but the Gifted program isn’t it and it certainly should be available to everyone.
One interesting thing about gifted kids is the label itself. I personally think it can be toxic, as it leads to a serious superiority complex. I was the smartest child in my elementary school classes, so I was pulled to the Gifted and Talented school for 3rd grade. There were many beneficial aspects, such as:
More experienced teachers
More intellectual environment
Excelled rate of learning
Emphasis on creativity
However, there were also many negative things that us students faced:
Major egotism
Large divide between the gifted and not gifted students
Many of the students left with the understanding that they were “gifted,” and wouldn’t have to study as hard.
The mindset that things would turn out okay since they were “gifted,” which results in the kids working less.
The interesting thing to note would be a follow up of the kids through High School. Many ended up dropping the IB Diploma (an advanced program for high schoolers), since we felt that we didn’t need the extra stress, because we were already “gifted.” We generally had alright GPAs, but many of us felt school wasn’t important (typical behavior for gifted children). We also tend to work smarter, not harder.
This all might be because we attended one of the top school systems in America, and were chosen for a full time GT (Gifted/Talented) School. I have some friends who went to part time GT classes, and they were pretty much jokes.
So, to answer your question, yes, it is important to challenge children in their elementary education. But, is a GT program really the best way to do that? My problem lies with labeling children as “Gifted.”