Aesop and Jesus

“The Life of Aesop and the Gospels”
by Mario Andreassi
p. 164, Holy Men and Charlatans in the Ancient Novel

While individually heterogeneous, the analogies so far highlighted show the similarities in narrative structures of the biographies of Aesop and Jesus. However, analogy certainly does not mean textual interdependence, but it does led to the thesis that the authors of the Life of Aesop and the Gospels aimed, where possible, to place the life of the protagonist in a literary and narrative context known to the public and variously attested in the lives of the philosophers and in the Christian aretalogies. Apart from its complex editorial genesis and notwithstanding many severe judgments in the last century, the Aesop Romance belongs within a wider and consciously literary production: it is no paradox to maintain that ‘those who wrote the Gospels were likely influenced by the same literary model that gave rise to the Life of Aesop’.

‘Aesop’, ‘Q’ and ‘Luke’
by Steve Reece

The last chapter of the gospel of Luke includes a story of the risen Christ meeting two of his disciples on their way from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus and chastising them with the poetic expression ὦ ἀνόητοι καὶ βραδεῖς τῇ καρδίᾳ ‘O foolish ones, and slow in heart’ (Luke 24.25). No commentator has ever observed that Jesus’ expression occurs verbatim, in the same iambic trimeter metre, in two poetic versions of animal fables attributed to the famous Greek fabulist Aesop. It is plausible that Luke is here, as at least twice elsewhere in his gospel, tapping into the rich tradition of Aesopic fables and proverbs that were widely known throughout the Mediterranean world in the first century ce.

The Fisherman and his Flute
from Wikipedia

Commentators have seen a likeness to the story, although only in the detail of dancing to the pipe, in Jesus’ parable of the children playing in the market-place who cry to each other, “We piped for you and you would not dance; we wept and wailed and you would not mourn” (Matthew 11.16-17, Luke 7.31-2).^[8] There is an echo here too of the criticism of unresponsive behaviour found in Herodotus.

[8] Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-latin Fable 3, Brill 2003, p.20 (“The proverb in the Gospels may be compared with the fable in that it uses the same musical metaphor of dancing accompanied by flute-playing.”)

Aesop’s Fables in the Bible
by Kent West

About five-hundred and fifty years before Yeshua was born, Aesop collected and/or created many fables, one of which was “The Fisherman and His Pipe”:

There was once a fisherman who saw some fish in the sea and played on his pipe, expecting them to come out onto the land. When his hopes proved false, he took a net and used it instead, and in this way he was able to haul in a huge catch of fish. As the fish were all leaping about, the fisherman remarked, ‘I say, enough of your dancing, since you refused to dance when I played my pipe for you before!’

[…] Nearly six hundred years later Yeshua makes reference to this same fable, having probably learned it as a child:

To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other:
“We played the flute for you,
and you did not dance….”
Luke 7:31-32

Aesop as Context for Matthew 7:15-23
by Brandy Vencel

The passage begins with “beware of false prophets.” We must consider the entire passage in light of this introductory phrase. We are given a metaphor, in order to better understand false prophet: they are wolves which get in amongst the sheep by dressing up in sheep skin. {This is a direct reference to Aesop’s The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, but we will come back to that.} […]

What makes me so sure that this is an entire passage is its perfect parallelism with Aesop. It is said that Aesop lived around 500 years before Christ. His fables were so powerful, they were the first principle of the progymnasmata writing and rhetoric curriculum, which we know was formalized as early as 100 BC. Because Aesop was utilized not only to instruct in wisdom, but to teach writing and storytelling, and because almost every student would have had to retell Aesop’s fables, we can safely assume that this idea of a wolf in sheep’s clothing had slipped into the culture and provided a frame for discourse for at least 150 years, if not half a millenia, before Christ said these words.

Please realize that He was taking a universally known cultural story, and applying it those who would hurt His sheep.

Aesop’s tale of The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing has two parts. In the first part, the wolf has trouble getting any sheep to eat because the shepherds are so good at protecting them. The wolf’s problems are solved when he discovers a discarded sheepskin and puts it on. Almost immediately, he manages to snag a sheep for lunch. This is the fist half.

The second half takes an interesting turn. In this half, one of the shepherds decides that he’s in the mood for mutton broth for dinner, and heads out to the flock. He grabs the first sheep he finds…which just happens to be the wolf. The wolf becomes soup, not unlike the fool of Proverbs, who falls into his own pit.

Depending on your version of Aesop, you will have different morals attached {the morals were added much later}. One is: Appearances are deceptive. The other is: The evildoer often comes to harm through his own deceit. {There may be others, of which I am unaware.}

Jesus recasts the wolves as false prophets, and instructs His followers in how to pull the sheepskin off {look at the fruit}.

In the first half, Jesus covers deceptive appearances, and in the second half he covers the harm that comes to the evildoer in the end, as a result of his own choices and actions.

Just like Aesop.

Humor in the Gospels
by Terri Bednarz
pp. 208-209

Whitney Shiner (1998) gives interesting insights on humor when he compares The Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark. Both of these works, the argues, were built by editing together various independent narrative episodes. These episodic narratives share common features: 1) their writing style lacks sophistication, 2) they were concise and short, and 3) their main characters persistently outwit antagonists. The main characters tended to be populist tricksters who succeed in unmasking the foibles of the elites, thus making them appear ridiculous. The tricksters target their antagonists with satirical barbs.

Shiner writes that The Life of Aesop advances its plot much more simply than the Gospel of Mark. Aesop merely outwits his antagonists in episode after episode. In hearing the stories of Aesop, one would more likely say, “Not again!” The Gospel of Mark has a more complex plot in which Jesus must repeatedly perform miracles, relate wise dicta, and outwit opponents in order to convince the audience of his ability to get the better of his antagonists. With the Markan Jesus, the hearer would more likely say, “Prove it!” Both the Markan Jesus and Aesop succeed in making their antagonists look foolish.

Shiner details other similarities in the Aesopic and Markan plots. Aesop’s rank and success increase in accord with the mounting hubris that leads to his eventual death at Delphi (Herodotus 2.136). The Markan Jesus also increases in stature, entering Jerusalem as a king (Mark 11:19-11), which also comes at great cost. Like Aesop, Jesus will meet a political death. Shiner notes another similarity: the use of divine causation. For Aesop, there is divine intervention in disputes, in posing and solving riddles, and even in his death. For the Markan Jesus, there is a divine plan that keeps unfolding until it culminates with Jesus’ death.

Shiner examines the ancient practice of intercalation, where an episode is woven into the middle of another episode. He argues that intercalation increases tension in the audience. This technique is found in both the Aesopic and Markan narratives. He gives an example from the Gospel of Mark where Peter stands in the shadows as Jesus is led into council. The audience is led to suspect that Peter follows Jesus in order to watch for an opportunity to express his bravery (Mark 14:53-54). Then Mark inserts the intercalation (14:55-65), which recounts Jesus’ courageous testimony, but then Mark jerks back to Peter where the audience hears Peter’s own bravery melt into a dramatic account of cowardliness (Mark 14:66-72). Shiner then presents an example of Aesopic intercalation. As Aesop cooks his lentil, there is an interruption in which Aesop and Xanthus engage each other in agonistic rhetoric, after which the scene of the cooking of the lentil resumes (Aesop 39, 41).

Shiner stresses that the episodic narratives and the intercalations are designed to keep the audience engaged, but not in the modern sense. Modern audiences anticipate that characters will break from their characterizations, and evolve into more complex figures. Shiner argues that this is not the case with ancient audiences, which expect characters to be static and predictable. For example, Xanthus will always be the butt of Aesop’s witty barbs. For ancient audiences, the episodic narratives do not produce tension by introducing the unexpected but by fulfilling what they anticipate will happen. In other words, the tension builds because the moment of comic recognition is delayed. Aesopic and Markan episodes and their intercalations simply postpone what the ancient audience expects will happen. They know that the antagonists will always receive Jesus’ witty or barbed riposte, or that Peter will stumble yet again, or that Aesop will once more outwit Xanthus.

Whitney Shiner, “Creating Plot in Episodic Narratives: The Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark”
by Matthew W. Ferguson

Shiner (pg. 155) begins her analysis by noting that there are “two distinct ways” that the Gospels have been read. One approach, following the from critics, is to view the Gospels as a conglomeration of self-contained episodes that have been stitched together from oral tradition. The other approach is to view the Gospels as a continuous narrative. Shiner argues, however, that these approaches can be harmonized through an “extended episodic narrative.” As Shiner (pp. 155-156) explains:

“In reading the Gospels as episodic narrative, one must see the narrative as simultaneously episodes and as extended narrative. The extended narrative is built from more or less self-contained blocks. Continuity in the extended narrative is found not so much in the continuity of detail in action and characterization between episodes as in continuity in the overall impact of the episodes. To take an analogy from art, extended episodic narrative is like a mosaic.”

Shiner goes on to note that the Life of Aesop, much like the Gospels, is built around narrative episodes that are largely independent. These independent episodes, however, are organized to advance the plot of the macronarrative. As Shiner (pg. 156) explains:

“This is especially true of the most extensive section of the Life, in which Aesop repeatedly outwits his master, the philosopher Xanthus. Much of the macronarrative structure of Aesop, such as Aesop’s sale to the philosopher, his manumission, and his entering into service to Lycurgus, serve to move the narrative from one type of episode, appropriate to Aesop’s earlier situation, to a different style of episode, appropriate to the new plot situation.”

Shiner (pp. 169-174) identifies eight different narrative strategies shared between the Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark that are used to weave episodes into a continuous plot:

1. Similar episodes are repeated to develop a point […]
2. Within the plot as a whole discrete sections are created that are, in terms of size and content, amenable to episodic development […]
3. The discrete sections are ordered to suggest a coherent plot development from one to the other […]
4. Sustained conflicts between the hero and another person or group are established and episodes are used to illustrate conflict […]
5. Episodes of various lengths are presented to create variety […]
6. Narrative within episodes is elaborated to enhance the narrative quality of the whole […]
7. Discrete episodes are interwoven to extend narrative tension or to provide keys for interpretation […]
8. Similar episode plots are presented at different places in the narrative to recall earlier episodes and to suggest an underlying unity of theme or plot […]

Through these narrative strategies, therefore, Shiner argues that the episodic structure of the Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark does not conflict with a continuous narrative. Instead, these strategies are employed to weave continuity within the narrative and a continuous plot.

Lawrence Wills: “The Life of Aesop and the Hero Cult Paradigm in the Gospel Tradition”
by Matthew W. Ferguson

After identifying novelistic biography as the best analogical model for the Gospels, Wills goes on to argue that the anonymous Life of Aesop makes for the best comparison. Wills (pg. 23) explains:

“The tradition of Aesop as a teller of barbed fables … is found as early as the fifth century B.C.E., and the account of his life, which circulated in multiple versions, may derive from narrative traditions that are as old. The extant versions, however, are dated to about the turn of the era, that is, roughly contemporary with the gospels…”

The process of composition described above is very similar to The Certamen of Homer and Hesiod, where an anonymous editor compiles multiple earlier accounts into a single episodic narrative (which then circulates with multiple textual variations). As I explain in my essay “Why Scholars Doubt the Traditional Authors of the Gospels,” the NT Gospels are also better described as edited volumes, rather than the unique work of a single author, based on how they borrow and redact earlier materials (often verbatim), with the editor of the text remaining anonymous.

Beyond these structural observations, however, Wills also notes a number of thematic similarities between the Gospels and the Life of Aesop. As Wills (pg. 23) explains about the subject of the biography:

“Aesop is introduced in the Life as an ugly and misshapen slave who is in the beginning unable to speak. He is devoted to Isis, however, and after he shows kindness to one of the priestesses, falls into a sleep and is granted by the goddess the power of speech. This gift he uses to the utmost–he never stops talking, but with an acid wit skewers the pretensions of his new owner, a philosopher, and also the owner’s wife and fellow philosophers.”

Aesop is prominent for teaching in fables, a form of fiction quite similar to the parables used by Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. On this point, it is also worth noting John Dominic Crossan’s recent book on the subject, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus. For his teachings, Aesop, like Jesus, runs into problems with the authorities and is executed. As Wills (pp. 23-24) explains:

“Through his cleverness he manages to help both his master and the citizens of Samos, and ultimately attains his freedom. Once free, however, he soon runs foul of the citizens of Delphi, and rebukes them with his sharp-pointed fables. They condemn him to death on a trumped-up charge, and he is executed. When a plague strikes the city, they consult an oracle of Zeus and learn that they must expiate their sin through sacrifice.”

Here, Wills draws a major parallel with the life of Jesus, namely the wrongful execution of the subject, followed by divine vindication. As Wills (pg. 28) argues:

“The relationship of blame, violent reaction, impurity, expiation, and immortality of the hero are drawn close together. Similarities to the expiatory death of Jesus can be seen here, especially if we begin to consider the latter in terms of ambivalent worship with his people, that is, to Jews, Israel, or Jerusalem.”

Wills (pg. 29) also notes that the length of the Life of Aesop is a bit longer than Mark and John, and and about the same length as Matthew and Luke. Wills points out, however, that in terms of structure the Life is more similar to Mark in John, particularly in how the text does not begin with a narrative of the subject’s birth (though Aesop is briefly said to have been born a slave in Amorium of Phrygia, without discussion of the circumstances), or his early growth and development, but is instead focused on his adult life.

 

“The Aesop Tradition”
by Lawrence M. Wills
pp. 223-224, The Historical Jesus in Context

The Aesop tradition is important for the study of the Gospels for two reasons. First, Aesop’s fables can be formally compared to Jesus’ parables. Readers will recognize in some of the fables below individual motifs that re also found in the Gospel parables, as well as the use of ideal scenes that provoke reflection, even if the point to be taken from them is quite different. Second, the Life of Aesop is roughly contemporary with the Gospels and bears some remarkable similarities. These similarities may derive from the fact that the Life and the Gospels both dramatize the life and death of the ostracized hero, told in an age of prose novels and novelistic histories. (Later Christian tradition [Acts of Peter 24; Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor 3.1] even adds that Jesus was ugly, based on a reading of Isaiah 53:2.) The Life is about the same length as the Gospels, written in a relatively low style. Like the Gospels, it gives the sense of being a longer text composed of many originally independent episodes. If Jesus in the Gospels is more prophet than sage, and Aesop is more sage than prophet, the difference is minor compared with the overall similarity in structure:

1. The protagonist has lowly beginnings but experiences a deity’s favor.
2. The protagonist has a period of ministry with a salvific message.
3. The protagonist is despised as a result of the message.
4. Trumped-up charges involving blasphemy of the deity are brought forward.
5. The protagonist is executed as a result.
6. A cult of the protagonist is instituted.

Within some of the general similarities, we can perceive even closer parallels in the details. The Life of Aesop begins with a visitation by the goddess Isis and the bestowal of powers on Aesop, not unlike the scene of Jesus’ baptism at the beginning of the Gospels with the voice from heaven. At the end of the Life there is a geographic shift from Samos to Delphi, that is, from the periphery to the center of the worship of Apollo, just as there is a shift in the Gospels from the periphery of Galilee to the center at Jerusalem. Finally, at the transition at the end of these texts from ministry to a trial and passion, the process by which this shift occurs is also similar. In both groups of texts, conflicts that are punctuated by the use of a special kind of discourse arise. and this leads directly to the trial and execution of the protagonist […]

In addition, in all three texts the charge of “blasphemy” figures heavily in the conspiracy to execute the protagonist (Life of Aesop 132; Mark 14:64; John 10:33). This is true even though the charges of blasphemy n the three cases are not clearly stated and may be quite different. In Aesop, the protagonist is accused of being a temple robber; in Mark, blasphemy is often discussed by scholars in terms of Jewish law on this subject (Leviticus 24:16), but the charge seems to focus instead on Jesus’ implication that he himself is the coming Son of Man; in John the Jewish authorities tell Jesus that the charge of blasphemy arises because “you are making yourself God.” Blasphemy should thus be seen in its literary context as the “standard” false charge that separates the wise hero from his people. It is also roughly equivalent to the false charge of impiety leveled against Socrates. In Socrates’ case the charges were corrupting the young, neglecting the gods, and introducing new ideas (Plato, Apology).

The difference in tone between the Gospels and the Life of Aesop — urgent and demanding in the case of the Gospels, broadly satirical in the case of the Life of Aesop — can be attributed to the difference in the protagonists’ message. Jesus brings the good news of God’s plan of salvation at the end time, while Aesop the Cynic sage preaches a gospel of liberation from human convention and complacency and an awareness of the true nature of things. (Some scholars would argue that this places the Life of Aesop closer in religious outlook to the sayings source Q or the Gospel of Thomas. If that is the case, then the Life of Aesop is structurally closer to one part of the Gospel tradition, and thematically closer to another.) This overall literary similarity between the Life of Aesop and the Gospels indicates that the genre “gospel’ was not as unique as some have thought, and the particular motifs of the Gospels may owe more to the general background of reverence for philosophers than has been previously acknowledged.

My Flesh Is Meat Indeed
by Meredith J. C. Warren
pp. 54-55

In addition, Berenson Maclean points out the generic compatibility found by other scholars such s Lawrence Wills between the biography of the poet-hero and the Gospel of John in particular. Wills’ study argues that the novelistic pattern of the poet-hero’s life and death, including the poet’s antagonistic relationship with both the city and a deity, makes it appropriate for comparison with John’s structure. Specifically, Wills suggests that The Life of Aesop fits the same pattern as Mark and John; for instance, all three begin at the adulthood of the main character rather than with his birth and all three involve, close to the outset, an experience from heaven. Jesus’ ambivalent relationship with the Temple and oi ioudaioi also make John’s comparison to Life of Aesop appropriate.

Nagy’s work on the hero now becomes very relevant to the discussion: “by losing his identification with a person or group and by identifying himself with a god who takes his life in the process, the hero effects a purification by transferring impurity.” The expiatory understanding of Jesus’ death is apparent in early Christian works such s 1 Corinthians 15:3, Romans 3:25, 1 Corinthians 5:7, and Mark 10:45. For Wills, this further locates the early Christian understanding of Jesus in the context of the Greco-Roman hero, though he cautions that the paradigm of the hero is more variable than a single genre could contain. Gunnel Ekroth concurs with this point, saying, “a characteristic of heroes and hero cults is their heterogeneity.” Rather, for all three of the texts Wills examines, the paradigm of the hero is narrated in a way that establishes the cult even if not all the elements are present in any given text and with the reservation that there is no single paradigm that encompasses all of early Christianity’s understanding of Jesus’ life and death.

pp. 209-212

Nagy’s treatment of the Aesop tradition is significant for this study of John because in it, Nagy is careful to pint out the feedback loop present in the myth and ritual: Aesop’s death is the cause of the ritual institution he critiques while at the same time, his death in the narrative is caused by his critique. That is, everything is occurring at the level of narrative. It is this relationship that establishes the association of Aesop with Apollo. Thus Life of Aesop, too, reflects the understanding of the relationship between chosen human and god that is recorded in literature from the time of the epics to the turn of the millennium and after. In particular, the complicated cause-and-effect relationship between the antagonism, the ritual, and the divine identification found in Aesop as observed by Wills and Nagy is also found in the Greek romances. As I have illustrated above, this feedback loop of antagonism — sacrifice/cannibalism — divinity is a key manifestation of the type of relationship Nagy finds between heroes and gods in Homer’s epics. Likewise, I argue that this “antagonism in myth, symbiosis in cult” is also found in John.

Further, Wills notices similarities with the ways in which Jesus and Aesop die. In Life of Aesop, the Delphians put him to death in a way that makes him a pharmakos, a scapegoat. The act of putting a person to death is polluting, and the only way for this act to be purified is with the establishment of the hero’s cult. Wills’s outline of Jesus’ death shows the parallels between his sacrifice and the trope of heroic death in the Greco-Roman world. He points out that (likely pre-Pauline) formulas speak of Jesus or Christ as one who has died for the sins of others — in other words, as an expiation. In particular, Wills observes that the oracle uttered unwittingly by Caiaphas in John 11:50 makes a significant point of contact with the heroic death narratives, where frequently the “sacrifice of the hero is demanded or predicted by an oracle.” Caiaphas’s words, “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the whole nation not perish,” make it clear to the readers (though ironically not to Caiaphas himself) that Jesus’ death is on behalf of the nation and can therefore be seen as expiatory. Jesus’ death at the request of certain factions of oi ioudaioi results in his worship by certain other factions of that same community.

Wills also observes that Jesus’ death in John occurs at the same time as sacrifice of the Passover lambs in the Jerusalem temple. As I have observed earlier, John’s Gospel avoids discussion of the expected Christian rituals of baptism and Eucharist and yet maintains a concern for the practice of ritual; Nagy, too, notices this feature in the heroic epics that are the focus of his work, the Odyssey and the Iliad. The fact that John shares his concern for right ritual practice with Homer suggests that the leap from literary death to cultic concern is indigenous. Likewise, John’s location of Jesus’ death at the time of that other, ordinary expiatory sacrifice further establishes Jesus’ death in a sacrificial, and therefore heroic, context. In other words, John’s concern with right ritual practice combined with the manner and timing of Jesus’ expiatory death, as prophesied by Caiaphas, creates an image of Jesus that shares significant points with the hero of the epic and with Aesop. Jesus’ and Aesop’s manners of death are therefore comparable; in this way, Jesus can also be viewed as heroic pharmakos.

Wills also points out that there seems to be striking similarities between Aesop’s characterization and Jesus’: the travelling distributor of pithy wisdom is persecuted and eventually executed as a kin of scapegoat/pharmakos. Clearly much of Jesus’ narrative follows a very similar pattern, especially, Wills observes, if we consider Jesus’ relationship to his own community, oi ioudaioi. It is especially appropriate for the current study that Wills there quotes Nagy:

By losing his identification with a person or group and identifying himself with a god who takes his life in the process, the hero effects a purification by transferring impurity. . . . In such a hero cult, god and hero are to be institutionalized as the respectively dominant and recessive members of an internal relationship.

This method of establishing such an eternal relationship can also be observed in the romance novels we have been discussing so far. In each case, the protagonists have experienced alienation from their communities. There are some differences worth articulating: whereas in the novels, the great beauty of the heroines gave them away as divine creatures, Aesop’s disfiguring ugliness is remarkable. John Winkler calls this satirical characterization of the main character the trope of the Grotesque Outsiders, one who is more capable of penetrating humanity’s veneer because of his or her marginal status. As such, this characterization marks the novel as satirical, but this, Wills is quick to point out, in no way effaces its usefulness in examining the finer points of the genre as a whole, especially since Leucippeand Cltophon might well fall into the satirical camp itself. The overarching theme of alienation and execution in both Aesop and John also plays out in the romances; Aesop’s satirical ugliness functions has a reversal of the goddesses’ beauty, but further, the trope of the outsider is clearly visible in all the examples. In short, while Wills compares just Aesop and John for his comparison, for the purposes of this project, where consumption is also a factor, it is significant that the romances also follow this narrative pattern in which the protagonists experience exile.

Paul and the Rise of the Slave
by K. Edwin Bryant
pp. 57-58

I also employ The Life of Aesop as a resource for conceptualizing how Paul’s construction of messianic life reclaimed slaves from the deadening violence imposed on conquered peoples. This investigation makes full use of Aesop as a hero who, in grotesque disguise, utters critical truths and contests the legal and political definitions imposed on slaves. Aesop is a common man’s Socrates who “cloaked his wisdom in foolishness.” We suggest that Rom 6:12-23 demonstrates how slaves of Messiah Jesus re reclaimed from the sinful domination of Empire, and subsequently illustrates how Paul’s polemical construction of messianic life provides eschatological comfort to the “vanquished.” Paul’s language in Rom 6:12-23 has more in common with the theatrical representations of slavery in the mine, than with the elite philosophical discourses of wisdom. Locating Paul’s description of himself as a Slave of Messiah Jesus in the language of comedy, jest, and the mime maybe controversial. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Paul’s description of himself as a Slave of Messiah Jesus was formulated from a grotesque perspective, in response to violence, and to facilitate an upsurge of the human spirit that challenged slaves to rise above the profane and juridical conditions imposed upon them. […]

The life of Aesop provides suggestive parallels between Aesop’s fables and Paul’s characterization of his calling as that of a slave, particularly in the ways that both resisted and contested power relationships. That Aesop is presented as a hero who is ugly, deformed, and disabled contests the Hellenic picture of wisdom and intellect. The Life of Aesop frequently portrays Aesop’s wisdom as disconcerting elite persons and challenging them as subjects. Yet, at times, Aesop is unable to transcend his grotesque appearance. On other occasions, Aesop consciously employs his wit and ingenuity to create anxiety in members of his master’s social class. The Life of Aesop is polemical in that Aesop ruptures the legal and social definitions of the slave as a subject, and annuls the impact of the power imposed upon him. Xanthus’ students marvel as to how Aesop’s intellect is greater than their professor’s. That Aesop constantly brought about a reversal of expectations indicates that the problems associated with his grotesque appearance were intermittent. Nevertheless, it would have been difficult for most slaves to subvert the continuum of power without the help of a construct like Paul’s ethic of messianic life. […]

pp. 65-66

It may be that the grotesqueness of The Life of Aesop, and the positive valuation of the slave as a subject, will infuriate the “modern bourgeois readers.” Such a reading will undoubtedly elicit scandalous remarks and reactions. In contrast to the bourgeois reactions, the staging of Aesop’s many reversals “provide the only defense, and occasional revenge, for those who routinely suffered maltreatment.” Now let us imagine the implications for slaves in Rome, if they too, had an encounter with the divine and awakened to a new way to conceptualize their existence. This analysis does not suggest that Paul’s readers had access to The Life of Aesop, but does highlight the fact that a contemporary non-Christian source portrayed slaves with the capability to transcend power relationships; one can only imagine how Roman slaves could replicate the same conditions by participating in the death of Messiah Jesus through baptism. The Life of Aesop presents a literary source contemporary with Paul that, in a similar way, challenges slaves to subvert how institutions and power structures imposed identity on slaves as subjects. Paul’s theological concept of identity formation subverts how the Empire imposed identity on subjects. Such a reading also asserts that Paul’s description of himself as a Slave of Messiah Jesus resonates with aspects of the slave Aesop’s identity that had been silenced by conquest. The Life of Aesop suggests how Paul’s polemical construction of messianic identity may have facilitated a role reversal that generated the acceptance of one’s new calling as a Slave of Messiah Jesus. On the one hand, this reversal of fortune annuls the negative implications of social cohesion and formation. On the other hand, we suggest that Paul’s polemical construction of messianic life contributed to an upsurge of the human spirit.

Second, the reclamation of identity generated the courage for slaves to resist aspects of the identity that Roman rule imposed on conquered peoples. After receiving his gifts from Isis, Aesop became aware of the maltreatment of slaves and contested how the propertied class exploited the ambiguities of slavery. Aesop was also conscious of how Xanthus attempted to exploit his intellect. In ways similar to the Life of Aesop, Paul’s description of himself as a slave of Messiah Jesus facilitated an awakening of Christian identity. The final episode in The Life of Aesop reveals Aesop’s willingness to be hailed by the deity in order to thwart the attempt of the men of Delphi’s to kill him. Instead, Aesop accomplishes his own fate to prevent dying at the hands of moral slaves. That Paul describes himself as a Slave of Messiah Jesus serves as an invitation to auditors who were slaves to realize their calling by participating in the death of Messiah Jesus. We posit that the grotesque perspective generated the grammar required for urban slaves to imagine an existence apart from their legal condition.

p. 76

To contest the ways that dominium ideology facilitated violence required slaves to employ a grammar of resistance that permitted them to subvert the identity that Rome sought to impose on its subjects. Our exploration of The Life of Aesop revealed a representation of a slave who possessed the intellectual prowess to negotiate, and in some ways transcend violence, and subvert how masters understood the legal and political definitions of the slave as subject. Thus, The Life of Aesop provides a helpful resource for appreciating the language of Paul’s letters, at the same time that it illustrates how slaves tried to imagine an existence apart from the identity that Rome imposed upon them. In this context, we may form an impression of how Paul’s description of himself as a Slave of Messiah Jesus was understood by members of urban slave congregations. We propose that Paul crafted Rom 6:12-23 to convince Slaves of Messiah Jesus, who were restricted to conditions similar to modern ghettos, that they might awaken to a new messianic life. Thus, Paul’s description of himself as a Slave of Messiah Jesus functioned to reclaim slaves from the negative implications of subjectivity and generated a positive valuation of the slave as subject.

p. 200

Turning now to Paul, it is impressive how closely Paul’s requirements for slave participation in messianic identity parallel Aesop’s decision to take his own life rather than allowing the men of Delphi to force a meaningless death upon him. Paul’s exhortation to slaves in the “now” time signals that the only way to “rise” from the profane verdict assigned to slaves involved the willingness to share in the death of Messiah Jesus — only then can one generate a new meaning for life that transcends the imposition of Rome’s demonic rule. Paul’s repeated use of the word vuv (now, present time) in Rom 6:19, 21, and 22 confirms our exegesis of Rom 6:18-20. The process of interpelation awakened slaves to a new messianic consciousness that facilitated an awareness of how humiliation, torture, and violence were employed to reinforce the subjectivity of slaves as subjects. Thus, the positioning of “now” in Rom 6:19-23 announces an end to the domination, humiliation, and torture produced in a context of shame. Paul’s reference to the “now time” of salvation signals that slaves encountered “new ethos that had ethical and theological implications.” Roman Imperial ideology assigned slaves as weapons of wrongdoing: slaves can now participate in community with a “messianic consciousness.” Based on Paul’s use of […], we can say that slaves who participate in messianic community are able to reimagine their existence in positive ways without shame (cf. Rom 1:16).

A Story of Walking Away

Back during the early Bush era, American imperialism was rearing its ugly head. I was in a group at the time where I met a guy who would become a close friend. The group read a story by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story written a in 1973 which was a couple of years before I was born. Those were the waning days of Nixon’s reign, another dark time right before his fall from power. I had forgotten about Le Guin’s story, until my friend mentioned it the other day. We are once more at a moment of societal angst. And the story remains relevant.

As told by the narrator, there is a utopian world, a supposedly wonderful and perfect society in all ways but one. A single innocent child must suffer alone as the price to be paid for the greater good. “The central idea of this psychomyth,” Le Guin explains in a preface, is “the scapegoat.” In giving the story further thought, my friend suggested: “I considered the central idea could be empire–that some would live very well off the misery of others (only 1 other in the story, but could be any number). Is one basis of empire, scapegoating?” I suspect Le Guin would accept that as a background influence to the central idea, if not the central idea itself. She says the inspiration came from William James (“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life“):

“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”

This story is about the belief in substitutionary sacrifice, a narrative frame that gives meaning and purpose. It has ancient roots and took its present form by way of Judeo-Christian theology. The scapegoat is at the heart of our civilizational project. Ultimately, it’s a form of dark magic. And its power comes from telling a compelling story. But the exact details of the story are a distraction, pointing away from whatever is the real issue.

The real issue, one way or another, is always the social order. To anchor a social order, a story has to be viscerally embodied within collective experience. It’s not enough that someone is sacrificed for it must be known and accepted, must be felt as real and necessary by those within the social order. It makes them complicit and so binds them to the social order. It is a social contract written in blood. Dark magic is blood magic.

Le Guin is using counter-magic by telling her own story. It appears as mere fiction to allow it to slide below our psychological defenses. By doing so, she slips in a seed of potential awareness. The story isn’t about some other place. It is about our own society. The belief in substitutionary sacrifice as having magical power is what makes this kind of society possible, the shining city on a hill of corpses. Imperialism or any such authoritarian regime comes at great costs and those must be rationalized as necessary for the greater good. Le Guin describes that the young people of Omelas, upon learning of the suffering child, are moved by compassion as any good person would be in a good society:

“Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.”

Let me bring this into present realities of our own society. This ritualized suffering of the condemned is why even rich, powerful white men can occasionally be sacrificed in order to maintain the status quo. Anyone can be sacrificed, as long as the system itself is protected and unquestioned. The one thing that can’t be sacrificed is the social order itself.

That is what makes spectacles of publicly shaming individuals a safe outlet, whereas the greater and more pervasive realities of collective victimization must remain unspoken. This is why the overwhelming problems of lead toxicity and pollution, primarily harming poor dark-skinned people, has never led to the same level of moral outrage and media judgment as has the sexual scandals. And this is why those sexual scandals mostly focus on well off white victimizers and well off white victims. Millions of the poor and powerless being harmed far worse would never get the same amount of attention and concern.

Such media spectacle maintains the focus on those in power and privilege, their suffering and their wrongdoing. And so this keeps the public mind locked within the ideological structure of power and privilege. The rest of us are supposed to be spectators sitting silently in the dark as the actors entertain us on the stage. A few people will be sacrificed and then, as a society, we can fall back into unconsciousness. With substitutionary sacrifice, our collective sins once again are atoned for.

The only thing most of us have to do is passively submit to the public ritual. So we watch in silence. And the story being told is burned into our psyche, our soul. To tell a different story, as does Le Guin, is a danger to the world as we know it. And to read such a story threatens to break the magic spell, invoking a state of anxiety and discontent by reminding us that our way of life (and way of death) is and always has been a choice.

We are reminded that there are those who choose to walk away. What they walk away from isn’t only that society but, more importantly, the story of that society. They can only do that by walking toward a different story, even if another society hasn’t yet fully taken form. First, a story has to be told about the walking away:

“At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Violence: Categories & Data, Causes & Demographics

Not all violence is the same. There are specific demographics for specific kinds of violence and other harmful behaviors: homicide, suicide, drunk driving, accidental shootings, hate crimes, rapes, etc. But one category that stands out in the public mind is that of mass violence, specifically mass murder. And mass violence, depending on how it is defined and measured, does have a specific demographic profile. Before I get to that, let me take a broad approach.

Most violent crime correlates to social problems in general. Most social problems in general correlate to economic factors such as poverty but even moreso inequality. And in a country like the US, most economic factors correlate to social disadvantage and racial oppression, from economic segregation (redlining, sundown towns, etc) to environmental racism (ghettos located in polluted urban areas, high toxicity rates among minorities, etc) — consider how areas of historically high rates of slavery at present have higher levels of poverty and inequality, impacting not just blacks but also whites living in those communities.

The main difference among the races is that privilege within the racial order makes it easier for poor whites to escape poverty (and hence escape the related health problems, social problems, and criminal problems) because of a long and continuing history of racialized housing and employment practices, as seen in how more poor minorities than poor whites face intergenerational poverty in being trapped within poor communities. Compare this to the higher percentage of poor whites living in economically well off communities, one way that racial privilege allows whites to take advantage of wealth and resources unavailable to others by using their whiteness to cross class boundaries.

Historical legacies, intergenerational trauma, and epigenetic effects powerfully shape our entire society. Bad conditions lead to bad results. It’s unsurprising that poor minorities have experienced the worst oppression and have experienced the worst social problems, have been the most disadvantaged in the economy and most impoverished, have been most affected by the violence and have been more likely to get caught up in a racially-biased criminal system. When external factors are controlled for, racial disparities in violent crime mostly disappear as do racial disparities in IQ and much else — for similar reasons such as how racially disparate rates of lead toxicity is a proven contributing factor to racially disparate rates of aggressive behavior and neurocognitive impairment.

But what stands out is that specific categories of violent and dangerous behavior are to a greater extent found among whites, such as abuse and bullying, not to mention drunk driving and suicide. Even more interesting is that not all of it can be explained by economics, in scapegoating poor ‘white trash’ (related to this, it was middle-to-upper class whites and not poor whites who were the strongest, loudest, and largest group of supporters for Donald Trump). It is specifically middle class whites, not poorest of the poor, who appear to be predisposed to becoming violently radicalized in American society (militias, neo-Nazis, etc) and committing violent rampages, specifically public mass murder. By the way, it isn’t only middle class whites who join right-wing militant groups as was seen with the Second Klan for middle class whites also join left-wing militant groups like the Weather Underground, although the latter never sought to kill people. Middle class whites in general are the most politically engaged demographic and, when they become outraged, they are the most politically violent demographic. The violence of poor people, on the other hand, doesn’t tend to be politically-oriented and so is less often publicly enacted as terrorism.

Speaking more generally, no one knows the actual racial breakdown of total crime and other dangerously deviant behavior. What we do know is that minorities are disproportionately targeted and more harshly treated by the police and judicial system. FBI statistics only show arrests and not convictions or anything else. Besides, most crimes including most violent crimes (along with most mass killings) don’t lead to arrest or conviction. And because of racial profiling and greater police patrolling in minority areas, whites more easily get away with crimes. Whites, especially middle-to-upper class whites, are less likely have to deal with legal and criminal consequences such as the low prosecution rate of whites for drug addiction, white collar crime, and other illegal behavior.

Even many crimes that whites commit at higher rates (e.g., per capita of whites using, carrying, and selling illegal drugs) are prosecuted at higher rates among non-whites. Studies show that police are more likely to perceive blacks as carrying guns when they’re not and more likely to perceive whites as not carrying guns when they are, which unsurprisingly leads to large numbers of innocent blacks being victimized, brutalized, and killed by cops (and no official records are nationally kept for homicides by police, maybe the single largest category of serial killers, whether or not one thinks it is justified serial killing). Some data from stop and frisk shows that whites are more likely to carry illegal weapons just as they are more likely to carry illegal drugs, likely for the reason that whites for good reason are less afraid of being targeted by police. Also, even when arrested for homicide, whites are more likely than blacks to be deemed justified in their killing others such as with stand your ground laws, in particular when those killed aren’t white. This relates to how white killers tend to be portrayed positively or sympathetically by the media — called mentally ill rather than thugs or terrorists, although sometimes called heroes depending on who they kill such as the race, religion, or politics of their victim (e.g., right-wing media praised and celebrated the targeted assassination of Dr. George Tiller, a doctor at a women’s clinic).

The main thing I was thinking about is the varieties of violence, how we label crime and how we divide up the data. The US is a more violent country than comparable Western countries. It’s not that there is more overall crime in the US but that crime is more likely to end in violence, partly because US laws incentivize criminals to kill their victims so as to leave no witnesses — one of the sad consequences of emphasizing punishment over rehabilitation. But such general criminal violence is in some ways less interesting because the motivations are more obvious.

Large-scale violence tends to get more attention. There is gang violence and drive-by shootings, of course. Some prefer to separate that out from other forms of major violence: school attacks, homicidal rampages, terrorist bombings, etc. Does the purpose and method matter or should all violence be thrown together? Are harmed bystanders to be treated as the same as intended victims? Is the focus on mass acts of violence in how many are targeted or in how many are actually killed? Should we exclude violent actions that lead to large numbers of injuries but few if any deaths? Yet if it is specifically the success rate of killing we are concerned about, then how many victims do there need to be: 2 or more deaths, 3 or more deaths, 4 or more deaths? Also, does it matter if it is a private act such as someone killing their family versus a public act such as someone plowing their car into a crowd?

Much of the decrease in killings, individual and mass, has to do with improved emergency healthcare. And emergency healthcare has improved the most in wealthy white communities and the least in poor minority communities, which is to say for the exact same injury a poor minority is more likely to die than a wealthier white, a significant issue considering minorities have a higher rates of poverty and residence in poor communities. Racial disparities in criminal victimhood in terms of mortality rates is directly correlated to racial disparities in healthcare, which is to say that our society considers some people more worth saving, and that would directly contribute to the violent crime data since it isn’t a homicide or mass murder when the victims don’t die. That is ignoring the issue that higher rates of lead toxicity among poor minorities also contributes to brain damage and violent crime, a lack of healthcare being exacerbated by a lack of public health concern. And on top of that, the poor are also less likely to get the mental health services to deal with the consequences. So, both victimizers and victims among the poor are affected by physical and mental health issues, which contributes to the victimization cycle.

Depending on the focus of concern and frame of interpretation, depending on how violence is being defined and measured, depending on the source of data and how it is analyzed, the demographic breakdown varies immensely. There is rarely any media reporting on the inaccuracy and unreliability of much of the data itself, such as the bias in the very criminal system that records the data. This goes beyond who the police primarily target and who the courts treat unfairly. It also is about how the arresting officer records the details, such as they’re more likely to list the race of a black suspect than the race of a white suspect since in a racist society being black is central to being accused of a crime, which affects how the accused is perceived such as more likely to be seen as threatening and so to get shot or more likely to be judged guilty and so arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Even black jurors are more likely to deem blacks to be guilty and more likely to do so the darker their skin. Racism is pervasive not only within the system but also within our psyches, all of it probably more often than not operating unconsciously.

Here is a clear example. The New York Times used the loosest definition of mass shooting possible and found the majority of alleged shooters who had their race recorded were black. They took the data at face value and concluded that most mass shooters were black. But if we were to be honest, all this can tell us is that blacks are the majority of people arrested, whether or not convicted, who are then judged according to their race. This says nothing at all about those within communities that are less heavily policed, those who weren’t arrested, weren’t convicted, or didn’t have their race recorded which is to say the majority of shooters and alleged shooters. We should keep in mind that most violent victimizations remain unreported (3.4 million from 2006 to 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics) and much that is reported goes unsolved because in most cases no one is caught in the act and so little of gets investigated; the proportion of violent crime investigated in poor minority communities is even lower as the victims are considered of low value in our society (the higher rates of black arrests is caused by higher rates of patrolling in black communities, not higher rates of investigating crime in black communities). The fact of the matter is most violent criminals aren’t arrested and a large number of the arrested are innocent, even though many take plea deals because of immoral and anti-democratic threats made by prosecutors in their piling on charges that they know won’t stick, while few of the accused ever get legal counsel (studies have found that upwards of 7% of prisoners are innocent of the crimes they were convicted of).

Furthermore once in the criminal system, the lives of ex-cons are under careful scrutiny which increases the likelihood of further arrests. And because of discrimination, ex-cons have a hard time finding work which leads to recidivism. And because ex-cons are legally disallowed to receive welfare or live in assisted housing, they are often faced with the option of turning to the black market or becoming homeless. That combined with the fact that poor minorities, even compared to poor whites, are already disproportionately affected by high unemployment, economic segregation, environmental racism, heavy metal toxicity, inadequate healthcare, lack of public funding, etc. To add insult to injury, blacks without a criminal record are less likely to get hired than whites with a criminal record, similar to how blacks with a college degree are less likely to get hired than whites with only a high school diploma. This is a sad state of affairs since unemployment is an obvious risk factor for criminal activity. So, it is easier for a white person to escape poverty and to escape their own criminal pasts, while blacks even when they do everything right have lower rates of socioeconomic mobility.

About a specific category of violent crime, consider serial killings that is defined by the FBI as “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” That is so broad as to be meaningless, as it has no correlation whatsoever to how most people think about serial killers. Someone living in a dangerous neighborhood who kills two people in separate acts of defense but gets convicted of homicide because of racism will be categorized as a serial killer, whereas a white person who does the same thing is less likely to get arrested, convicted, and labeled in the same manner (it is a similar problem to including someone with a public exposure charge for publicly urinating on a sex offender list along with pedophiles and rapists; labels socially construct public perception with those controlling the former controlling the latter). One set of data from Radford University found that most serial killers were blacks according to this broad definition, although it should be noted that other analyses of data shows the complete opposite pattern with the vast majority of serial killers being white (see below: African Americans and the Criminal Justice System by Marvin D. Free). Depending on what purpose or bias one has, it will determine the results one finds for there is a lot of data out there that can be diced and spliced in so many ways. And as researchers admit, there is little agreement about how to define specific categories of violence: mass murder, serial killing, terrorism, etc. What definition one uses will determine which data one uses and how one analyzes it.

That is even more problematic considering that homicides committed by whites, specifically against minorities, are more likely to be deemed as legally justified within the criminal system (along with socially and morally justified within the media) and so less likely to lead to a criminal charge, not to mention white criminals being less likely to be arrested in the first place. But if all killings were included and if whites were policed and arrested, prosecuted and convicted to the same degree as blacks for the exact same crimes, the percentage of whites in the violent criminal data would increase drastically no matter the definitions and measure used.

A violent crime is still a violent crime, even when it doesn’t lead to prosecution and punishment. If a loved one was killed by a white guy who isn’t arrested or else isn’t convicted such as his claiming justification through racially-biased stand your ground laws, would you feel better than a loved one having been killed by a black guy who was imprisoned? Probably not. Yet according to the data, the former is perfectly legal and only the latter is a violent crime. That is why a violent killer like George Zimmerman is still walking free. All of us should be worried about this for we are all less safe with violent people out in the general population, as seen with the continued violence that Zimmerman has been involved in. This is the moral hazard of racial privilege.

Some would like to dismiss the fact that violent crime taken as a whole is largely caused by whites, arguing that it is comparable to their proportionate numbers. Nonetheless, it remains problematic that, in a white dominant society, most of the violence is committed by whites. What doesn’t get acknowledged or appreciated is that these white dangerous perpetrators, for the most part, aren’t only whites but almost entirely white men who as a demographic are less than a third of the total population and represent an even more specific sub-group(s) among white men. Besides, it’s not just any violence we are talking about since this white male violence includes several of the largest terrorist attacks in US history and involves political and religious radicalization, from bombings of abortion clinics to bombing of the trade center, not to mention the likes of the Ted Kaczynski and Joe Stack. One might note that these are part of the same general white male demographic that is primarily responsible for passing, enacting, and enforcing laws; not to mention that is disproportionately culpable for most state-sanctioned violence, from police committing brutality on the public to politicians starting wars of aggression against poor brown people.

That isn’t to say we should use this as an excuse to instead overlook violence found in other demographics (besides violent neocon politicians like Hillary Clinton, women as mothers and caretakers do commit high rates of child abuse and neglect which no doubt contributes to the system and cycle of victimization). Still, we aren’t likely to improve our society by focusing on the lesser problems caused by the rest of the population with the least representation, advantages, and influence — specifically racial, ethnic, and religious minorities but also in terms of gender (and all of those within an intersectional understanding). No one is denying that poor minorities are dealing with problems and when involving crime should be held accountable, but even then many of those problems are part of a larger history of problems caused and benefited by mostly white men from the comfortable classes: colonial imperialism, genocide, slavery, re-enslavement through trumped-up charges and chain gangs, Jim Crow, KKK, sundown towns, redlining, housing covenants, racially-biased New Deal programs, race wars, COINTELPRO, war on drugs, tough-on-crime laws, mass incarceration, school-to-prison pipeline, ghettoization, environmental racism, neoliberal exploitation, and the list could go on and on. More importantly, it is an issue of leverage and impact. Because of the white majority and white dominance, white male violence has a greater and wider impact across society and so decreasing white male violence would decrease overall violence more than decreasing any other demographic of violence.

The fact remains that most Americans aren’t white men, even as most violent criminals are white men. It is hard for the rest of the citizenry to not notice this fact. And pointing out per capita isn’t always helpful, even though it is certainly relevant, specifically when we consider the total violence including slow violence and state violence. As a white man myself, I take racial problems as a personal issue. But the consequences are far beyond the mere personal. It’s about responsibility, not blame. Since white men have most of the power and authority, privilege and influence, resources and opportunities in our society, white men also have the most capacity to effectively deal with the problems of our society when those problems primarily involve white men like themselves. And if you are one of the many white men far from the echelons of the ruling elite, don’t make excuses for those seeking to manipulate you to their own advantage.

I must admit that I’m wary about putting too much emphasis on the male aspect, as it isn’t limited to men being the majority of violent criminals but also the majority of police, soldiers, firemen, paramedics, etc; any activity or occupation involving the risk of life, one’s own or others, including while saving lives. If men in general get most of the blame, then men in general also get most of the credit. But such simplistic generalizations aren’t entirely helpful, albeit sometimes necessary to emphasize in making a point about systemic patterns and biases.

The issue is that, no matter how it is analyzed, white men in particular including the wealthier are far from being above these problems of violence and other crimes even as they are better positioned to evade consequences. Not that white male privilege is all that much of a comfort to poor white guys. The purpose isn’t to scapegoat white men, even as it is to clarify the historical legacies of racism and patriarchy. I realize, as a working class white guy, I have little direct influence over systemic problems and yet I also realize that if enough white guys spoke out along with others speaking out then the systemic problems would begin to change. Still, let’s be honest in acknowledging that the system is rather shitty all around, including for most white guys which is all the more reason for the average white guy to not defend the system.

Data is a great thing when used well. But what is the purpose of the data we are keeping? And does the data we keep say more about specific sub-populations described in the data or does it simply express the biased worldview of the data-keepers along with the vested interests of the system that is being served? White men are disproportionately found among professional positions within police forces, courts, the FBI, academia, think tanks, corporate media, etc  — all of the places where data gets collected and disseminated, analyzed and interpreted. That might be a relevant detail to consider in discussing that data.

I’m not arguing you can’t find some data that supports any particular argument, including prejudices of race realists and white supremacists. It is unsurprising to find all kinds of social problems in a problematic society and it is equally unsurprising to find those social problems disproportionately found among those disproportionately oppressed, victimized, and disadvantaged. We live in a society that has been continuously racist, not to mention sexist and classist, for centuries and that is going to leave massive consequences on the victimized populations, such as being caught up in every aspect of violence coming from within and outside specific communities.

The question is what does any of this mean. Ignoring the most horrific public violence typically committed by more economically comfortable whites such as radicalized terrorism and state violence, most general violence happens in the most impoverished and desperate communities — as true for poor whites as for poor blacks. But that is like pointing out that Afghanistan and Iraq are violent places, after the US destroyed the government, infrastructure, and economy through mass bombing and ongoing military actions, one of those wars clearly being an internationally illegal war of aggression and crime against humanity. Why don’t the millions of innocent people killed in those countries by the US get counted as victims of violent crime with the politicians behind it prosecuted as war criminals? And why doesn’t the 40% of worldwide deaths of mostly poor dark-skinned people by pollution get labeled as violence? The same goes for the high mortality rates of racial minorities in the US not only because of similar problems but also because of toxicity, poverty, lack of healthcare, police violence, and much else.

Who keeps the data gets to decide what data gets kept and how it gets kept. The same system of power and authority decides who is guilty and who is innocent, who is a victimizer and who a victim. They decide whose suffering gets recorded, whose existence even gets acknowledged. They control the media narrative and political debate. As such, what does the data show and what does it hide? What does it distort and spin toward what end?

* * *

Study shows disparity in how media portray mass shooters of different races
by Brendan Crowley

She studied 170 stories printed from 2008 to 2017 that focused on lone, mass shooters. The stories came from the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and USA Today. She defined a mass shooter as someone who kills four or more people in a public place.

Frisby’s study broke the stories into four possible frames: the shooter was mentally ill; the shooter was a thug; the shooter was a terrorist; and the shooter was heroic, meaning the violence was portrayed as a justified way to resolve conflict and blame wasn’t put on the shooter.

The study showed how often each frame was used to talk about shooters of different races.

• Mental illness: 80 percent referred to white shooters, 16 percent to black shooters, 4 percent to Muslim shooters.
• Thug: 53 percent referred to black shooters, 28 percent to Hispanic shooters, 16 percent to white shooters and 3 percent to Muslim shooters.
• Terrorist: 37 percent referred to Muslim shooters, 34 percent to black shooters, 17 percent to white shooters, and Hispanic and Asian shooters were each referred to in 6 percent of the stories.
• Hero: 75 percent of stories referred to white shooters, 16 percent to black shooters and 9 percent referred to Hispanic shooters.

Frisby said how the news media frames a story may cause readers to make false associations.

Killings of Black Men by Whites are Far More Likely to be Ruled “Justifiable”

by Daniel Lathrop and Anna Flagg

When a white person kills a black man in America, the killer often faces no legal consequences.

In one in six of these killings, there is no criminal sanction, according to a new Marshall Project examination of 400,000 homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014. That rate is far higher than the one for homicides involving other combinations of races.

In almost 17 percent of cases when a black man was killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian over the last three decades, the killing was categorized as justifiable, which is the term used when a police officer or a civilian kills someone committing a crime or in self-defense. Overall, the police classify fewer than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable.

The disparity persists across different cities, different ages, different weapons and different relationships between killer and victim.

[…] killings of black males by white people are labeled justifiable more than eight times as often as others. This racial disparity has persisted for decades and is hard to explain based solely on the circumstances reported by the police data.

In comparison, when Hispanics killed black men, about 5.5 percent of cases were called justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, it was 3.1 percent. When blacks killed whites, the figure was just 0.8 percent. When black males were killed by other blacks, the figure was about 2 percent, the same as the overall rate. […]

Still, the disparities in how police classify these cases remain across widely different circumstances and causes of death. Whether the killer and victim were married, lovers, neighbors or complete strangers, whether they were shot, stabbed or beaten, the trend holds. The killings of black men by whites were two to 10 times as likely to be called justifiable.

Even after adjusting for the ages of the killer and victim, their relationship and the weapon used, the likelihood of a white-on-black-male case being called justifiable was still 4.7 times higher than in other cases.

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

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

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

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

Black And White Homicide Rates: Who’s Killing Whom?
comment from steven tucker

update:
why is nobody apparently aware that the fbi data is for ARRESTS, and is not the number of crimes or criminals? Just arrests.

In 2014, a full 1/3 of murders (higher percentage for other violent crimes) did not even result in a known suspect. of ~12,500 murders (reported to fbi…) only 8200 arrests were made.

of these, only 5800 convictions were had, and 4100 of those were plea bargains. a full 30% of arrestees, race undocumented, were acquitted or case dismissed…

So – 35% of murderers unknown. 30% of supposedly known murderers arrested but not convicted. That means we have stats showing that of 12,500 homicides in 2014, 4100 people plea bargained, 1700 were convicted in court, 2450 were arrested and released, and so (at least) about 6700 killers are still at large, race unknown.

5800 killers in jail. A few no doubt wrongly, but 5800 nonetheless. but 6700 unknown.

The conclusions being drawn about crime and race from such data are, in total, without the slightest validity. They are neither right nor wrong, they are pure nonsense.

Why Counting Mass Shootings is a Bad Way to Understand Gun Violence in America
by Lois Beckett

Counting “mass shootings” is notoriously complicated and contested, since there is no standard definition of what they are. Is it best to count shootings that injure or kill a certain number of people? Or should the definition focus more narrowly on attacks in which the motivation of the shooter “appears to be indiscriminate killing”?

Which race does the most mass shootings per capita in the US?
by Brady Postma

There is no generally accepted definition of a “mass shooting.” Without one, we can’t count how many there are or the races of the shooters

The most obvious definition is a certain number of deaths from a single shooting; three perhaps, or four. But should a shooting with 20 victims none of whom die be excluded from the definition? What if two people are shot and two are stabbed; does that count as a shooting with four deaths? Is a case where someone kills their whole family in their home the same as a shooter killing strangers in a public place? Should a shootout between rival gangs count?

These questions alter the answer to your question, so they must be answered first.

School shootings are primarily (though not exclusively) white, as data from Mother Jones’ list of mass shootings by their definition shows. Gang shootings tend otherwise. There are other clusters of mass violence with different perpetrator demographics. Scaling perp counts to racial proportions of the population, as you’ve asked for, skews the data away from whites and toward minorities.

Ultimately, though, the results depend on your methodology

What makes a ‘mass shooting’ in America
by Christopher Ingraham

For starters, it’s important to realize that there has never been one universally accepted definition of a “mass shooting.” The government has never even defined “mass shooting” as a stand-alone category.

The FBI used to consider someone a “mass murderer” if they killed four or more people during one event, regardless of weapons used. But starting in 2013, federal statutes defined “mass killing” as three or more people killed, regardless of weapons. And unlike the tracker, the tally doesn’t include the killer if he or she is eventually killed by law enforcement or takes his or her own life.

But, according to the tracker’s users, that definition has a bit of a problem. It includes non-gun killings, for instance, and it excludes cases in which a lot of people are shot but few of them die.

Most victims of US mass shootings are black, data analysis finds
by Lois Beckett

A new analysis of 358 mass shootings in America in 2015 found that three-quarters of the victims whose race could be identified were black.

Roughly a third of the incidents with known circumstances were drive-by shootings or were identified by law enforcement as gang-related. Another third were sparked by arguments, often among people who were drunk or high.

About one in 10 of the shootings were identified as related to domestic violence. In these shootings the majority of victims and perpetrators were white. Domestic violence incidents were also much more likely to be fatal. The 39 domestic violence cases represented 11% of the total incidents but 31% of victims who died.

The analysis, conducted by the New York Times with data collected by Reddit’s mass shooting tracker and the Gun Violence Archive, used law enforcement reports on shootings that left four or more people injured or dead in 2015.

Few of the incidents resembled the kinds of planned massacres in schools, churches and movie theaters that have attracted intense media and political attention. Instead, the analysis, defined purely by the number of victims injured, revealed that many were part of the broader burden of everyday gun violence on economically struggling neighborhoods.

Nearly 90% of the zip codes that saw mass shootings had higher-than-average poverty rates. […]

Only about half of the mass shootings had been solved, the Times found. In some cities, the number was lower. Chicago had made arrests in only two of 16 mass shootings, while Baltimore had 11 incidents in 2015 and had not solved one.

Mass Shooters Aren’t Disproportionately White
by Daniel Engber

According to the study, white and Asian mass murderers perpetrated crimes with more victims, on average, and they were more likely to carry out those crimes in public places. Nearly one-fourth of the white mass murderers and one-fifth of the Asians in the group engaged in public killings. Among the black mass murderers, this proportion was just 6 percent. Lankford suggests the relative whiteness of public killings, in particular, could indeed result from structural advantage and “aggrieved entitlement.”

MASS SHOOTERS HAVE A GENDER AND A RACE
by Tiffany Xie

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.

White-On-White Crime Strikes Again In Waco
by Julia Craven

Around 83 percent of white victims in 2011 were murdered by other whites, based on the most recent FBI homicide data.

As many as 3,172 white people were killed in 2011 — and 2,630 of them lost their lives at the hands of another white person. This is compared to 2,695 black people, 2,447 of whom were killed by another black person. […]

Whites lead when it comes to gang violence too: 53.3 percent of gang-related murders between 1980 and 2008 were committed by white people, according to the Justice Department, compared to 42.2 percent committed by blacks. Victims of gang-related violence were also mostly white.

White on White Crime: An Unspoken Tragedy
by Kerry Coddett

In America, whites commit the majority of crimes. What’s even more troubling is that they are also responsible for a vast majority of violent crimes. In 2013, whites led all other groups in aggravated assault, larceny-theft, arson, weapons-carrying, and vandalism. When it comes to sexual assault, whites take the forcible rape cake. They are also more likely to kill children, the elderly, family members, their significant others, and even themselves! They commit more sex-related crimes, gang related crimes, and are more likely to kill at their places of employment. In 2013, an estimated 10,076 people died in the U.S. due to drunk driving crashes. Driving while drunk is almost exclusively a white crime because everyone knows black people prefer to drink on their porches or inside their homes.

So why is white on white crime so prevalent, one may ask? Is it the music they listen to? Is it the white divorce rate, resulting in more white children coming from broken homes? Perhaps it’s the TV shows they watch or the violent sports they play. More than likely, it is a combination of all of those things, with the exact root cause unclear. What is clear, though, is that not enough people are talking about the crime plaguing the white community. We need to spread the word, holding protests and demonstrations that call attention to this growing matter. Because, after all—-white lives matter, too.

White Men Commit Mass Shootings More Than Any Other Group — Why Aren’t We Talking About That?
by Cate Carrejo

Yet there is little public discourse about how to address this longstanding problem, because in large part, people aren’t ready to fully admit the problem exists. White men commit more mass shootings than any other demographic, but their white privilege prevents people from approaching the problem from a systemic perspective. […]

But the narrative surrounding white men are simply different than that of other groups. Even after the anecdotal and statistical evidence connecting white men to violence, people are disinclined to readjust their thinking about white men, in part because it would be so triggering all the time. If Americans walked around being as terrified of white men as many are of Muslims, society wouldn’t be able to function.

Arguably though, people, and particularly women, have every reason to walk around being terrified of white men. It’s proof positive of white men’s privilege that people still go about their lives under the constant threat of white men as a whole. White men commit the vast majority of rapes and murders, and according to some studies, they commit the most violent crimes in this country. Six in 10 sex offenders are white men, and white men kill more people in America every year than international terrorists. You can say all you want that it’s “Not All (White) Men,” but the statistics point to white men being the most dangerous of all other groups in the country.

How common are African-American mass shooters?
by TheGrio

Of the approximately 62 mass shootings (in which four or more people were killed) in the U.S. since 1982, including 25 since 2006 (and seven in 2012 alone), according to figures compiled by Mother Jones, “more than half of the cases involved school or workplace shootings (12 and 20, respectively); the other 30 cases took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings. Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman.”

The percentage of black assailants who kill on a scale such as Monday’s Navy Yard shootings is about equal to the percentage of black Americans, says former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt.

“African-American shooters tend to at least represent their statistical portion of the U.S. population and include past killers like like Omar S. Thornton, Maurice Clemmons, Charles Lee Thornton, William D. Baker, Arthur Wise, Clifton McCree, Nathan Dunlap, Colin Ferguson, and the DC Snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo,” Van Zandt told theGrio.

Hunting Serial Predators
by Grover Maurice Godwin

[…] most likely victims of serial murderers are White (Caucasian). This finding is given importance when coupled with the fact that in this study of 107 serial murderers, 81% of the offenders were White. This finding supports the claims by other researchers that suggest that serial murder is primarily intra-racial. […]

82% of the serial murderers in this study were White. In research by James, he found that 86% of his offender sample was White (Caucasian).154 Also, in Hanfland’s study of child murderers, 80% of the child killers were White.

Race Matters: Study Claims White Men Are More Likely To Commit Mass Murders Than Blacks Or Any Other Racial Group
by Bossip Staff

Is there something about the white, male, middle-class experience that makes it easier for sick young men to turn schools and movie theaters into graveyards? Some studies say, yes.

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.

Historically, the focus on serial killers and mass murderers has been on the individual motives for the crimes, and little on the overarching trend. It’s plausible that the elevated social status of white males combined with isolation, desperation, opportunity, and mental illness has led the white men who have gone on rampages to make their pain felt by those around them in a very violent way.

Of course, it isn’t just male privilege that makes men more prone to violent crime than their female counterparts. From the time they are toddlers, men are socialized to express their emotions through violence. Western culture – and especially American culture – teaches boys that emotional intelligence and expression is worthless and effeminate, and that the acceptable masculine response to anger, sadness, and/or frustration is to act out physically. If this mentality is particularly deeply rooted in an individual man, he may find it incredibly difficult to form an emotional support system, leading to more self-inflicted and outwardly motivated violence among men.

 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…Via MotherJones reports:

Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass murders* carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. We’ve mapped them below, including details on the shooters’ identities, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed.

*Mass Murder- The shooter took the lives of at least four people. An FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—as opposed to a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself), and typically in a single location.

Here is a sample of the timeline of mass murders. Only 6 of the 62 mass muderers featured were people of color…

Why Are So Many Mass Shootings Committed by Young White Men?

by Josiah Hesse

When trying to decipher gun violence, it’s tempting to focus on impoverished minority neighborhoods defined by structural woes like mass incarceration, poverty, lack of education, and so on. But research shows that mass shootings are primarily committed by white males—the most privileged class in society. So why are they the ones who snap? And is calling them “mentally ill” a way to avoid talking about race?

“If you look at how the James Holmes case has played out, it’s amazing how the themes [of other shootings] line up,” true-crime author Stephen Singular, who collaborated with his wife, Joyce, on the new book The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth, tells VICE. “Most of these young white shooters—they’re not underprivileged, they have so many advantages, particularly in the Holmes case. He was dealing with an inner reality that he didn’t know how to contend with.”

As Mother Jones reported, “Since 1982, there have been at least 70 mass shootings across the country… Forty four of the killers were white males. Only one of them was a woman.” So white men have been responsible for about 63 percent of mass shootings in that span, despite comprising a far smaller portion of the total population. And while the motives for mass murder vary from perpetrator to perpetrator, since the Columbine school shooting in 1999, there has been a remarkable consistency—if not uniformity—in the age, gender, and race of the people who carry out these egregious crimes. […]

A 2013 study at the University of Washington looked at the disproportionately high numbers of mass killings—defined as having at least three or more victims during a single episode—committed by young white men in America, and found a correlation between feelings of entitlement among white males and homicidal revenge against a specific demographic.

“Among many mass killers, the triple privileges of white heterosexual masculinity which make subsequent life course losses more unexpected and thus more painfully shameful ultimately buckle under the failures of downward mobility and result in a final cumulative act of violence to stave off subordinated masculinity,” the authors wrote. […]

“There’s a feeling of entitlement that white men have that black men don’t,” Alan Fox, a professor at Northeastern University and co-author of Extreme Killing, told the Washington Post in a 2012 interview. “They often complain that their job was taken by blacks or Mexicans or Jews. They feel that a well-paid job is their birthright. It’s a blow to their psyche when they lose that.”

African Americans and the Criminal Justice System
by Marvin D. Free
pp. 58-60

The preceding theories also tend to ignore the possibility that some of the discrepancy in black-white rates of offending may be due to differential patrolling by the police. Because many lower-class African Americans live in heavily patrolled ares of the city, any transgression of the law is more likely to result in a police contact than a similar violation of the law occurring in suburban or rural areas. Using arrest data for 1975, Hawkins (1983, p. 410) observed that African Americans living in rural areas comprised 10 percent of the rural population and 10 percent of the arrests for all types of crimes. African Americans living in suburbs were actually slightly underrepresented in arrest statistics (15 percent of the suburban population and 12 percent of all arrests). Only in the heavily patrolled urban areas were African Americans disproportionately arrested.

Coramae Mann (1993, p. 103), in commenting on mainstream theories of minority crime, notes the irony “that so many of the explanations of minority crime focus on minority violence when American history is filled with violence, particularly as directed against its minority citizens.” And despite the preoccupation of some sociological theories with African American violence, Hickey (1991, p. 77) found that black serial murderers constituted only 10 percent of the offenders in is study. In fact, 97 percent of the female serial killers and 85 percent of the male serial killers were white (pp. 110 & 133). […]

Despite these condemnations of the theory, conflict theory (along with labeling theory) has helped criminology to overcome its preoccupation with criminal actors by redirecting its attention to the role of law enforcement in the creation of crime. It has also served the purpose of reminding criminologists of the fallacy involved in assuming that laws always reflect a consensus in society. Moreover, there is some empirical support for the basic tenets of the theory. Jackson and Carroll (1981), for example, examined the relationship between race and police expenditures for 90 nonsouthern U.S. cities. Because conflict theory asserts that the law is an instrument of oppression used by the dominant group against subordinate groups, they hypothesized that “the amount of resources devoted to policing will vary directly with the threat posed by subordinate to dominant groups (p. 293). If African Americans (the subordinate group) are viewed as a treat by whites (the dominant group), then conflict theory would predict that expenditures for police should be related to the racial composition of the city, the number of race riots during the 1960s, and the level of civil rights mobilization activity. The authors found general support of their hypothesis.

Violent Offenders
by Matt DeLisi and Peter J. Conis
pp. 106-17

It is plausible to suggest that race predicts homicide offenders and victims because African American and Caucasian boys differ on predictive risk factors. According to this hypothesis, race should not predict homicide offenders and victims after controlling for predictive risk factors. Indeed, after entering the eight significant explanatory risk factors in a logistic regression analysis, race did not significantly predict homicide offenders. After entering the nine significant explanatory risk factors in a logistics regression analysis, race was still a significant predictor of homicide victims (LRCS=4.61, p=.032). However, the predictive power of race was considerably reduced after controlling for other risk factors. It might be concluded that race predicts homicide offenders and victims primarily because of racial differences in predictive risk factors. The most important risk factors that were significantly associated with race and that predicted homicide offenders and/or victims were a bad neighborhood, a broken family, the family on welfare, and a young mother.

* * *

The Moral Arc
by Michael Shermer
Kindle Locations 6724-6737

[C]riminals— especially psychopathic criminals (which, recall, make up at least half of the prison population of violent offenders)— show different physiological responses to such emotions as distress or sadness when compared to noncriminal brains. “They failed to show the emotions required; they failed to show the physical response. It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy.” Brain scans revealed that “Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and their immoral behavior.” 26

One avenue of treatment for these neurologically impaired psychopaths is neurogenesis, or the birth of new neurons in the adult brain. Take mice. If you raise them in a prison-cell-like environment devoid of stimulation, they lose their capacity to form bonds with their fellow mice when they are reintroduced to them. But if you raise mice in an enriched environment, they not only form normal attachments with their fellow group members, they also experience the growth of new brain cells and connections, which not only leads them to “perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks,” says Reisel, but also “their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior.” Reisel then draws the analogy with prison: “When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with dysfunctional amygdalas is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth.” Of course, our natural propensity to punish wrongdoers results in a system of retributive justice, but Reisel would like us to also consider the treatment of these broken brains through rehabilitation programs and restorative justice programs,

Neuronal depletion of the amygdala resembles the learning deficits induced by low level lead exposure in rats.
Munoz, Garbe, Lilienthal, and Winneke

The behavioral deficits observed after lead exposure have been related to limbic system dysfunction. In a previous study it was shown that the neurotoxicity of lead could not be explained by the damage of the hippocampus alone. The purpose of the present investigation was to use behavioral comparisons to test the hypothesis that the intrinsic neurons of several nuclei of the amygdala, where lead has been found to accumulate, can be a target of the effects of the metal as well. A group of rats were maternally and permanently exposed to lead (750 ppm in the diet as lead acetate). Another group of equally aged and housed rats, never experimentally exposed to lead, were injected ibotenic acid into the amygdala. All groups plus sham-operated and unoperated controls were tested in the open field, the radial arm maze, and a passive avoidance task. The results showed that lead exposure (both permanent and maternal) and amygdalectomy produced a) no effect on locomotor activity, b) impairments in the acquisition phase of the radial maze, and c) impairments in passive avoidance. These results suggest an involvement of the amygdala in the neurotoxic action of lead, but not as the only brain structure. The deficits in permanently lead-exposed rats are more pronounced than in only maternally-exposed animals suggesting a longlasting, but not totally irreversible effect of early lead exposure.

Regional distribution of lead in human brains
by Philippe Grandjean

Brains from four adult males without occupational exposure to lead have been analyzed for lead. The highest lead levels were found in the hippocampus and the amygdala, while lower lead concentrations were present in the medulla oblongata and the cerebellum. The corpus callosum and the optic tract were lowest in lead. The lead concentrations were significantly correlated to the potassium concentrations in the regions studied. This indicates that lead is mostly accumulated in cell-rich parts of the brain. Differences in the vulnerability of brain regions in lead poisoning is, therefore, possibly a result of differences in cellular sensitivity to lead.

Environmental Policy As Social Policy?
by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes

This paper argues that the removal of lead from gasoline in the late 1970s under the Clean Air Act is an additional important factor in explaining the decline in crime in the 1990s. The main result of the paper is that changes in childhood lead exposure are responsible for a 56% drop in violent crime in the 1990s. This paper argues that the removal of lead from gasoline in the late 1970s under the Clean Air Act is an additional important factor in explaining the decline in crime in the 1990s. The main result of the paper is that changes in childhood lead exposure are responsible for a 56% drop in violent crime in the 1990s.

The decline in crime among black youths
by Max Brantley

In the last 20 years in particular, the FBI reports, rates of crime among African American youth have plummeted: All offenses (down 47%), drug offenses (down 50%), property offenses (down 51%), serious Part I offenses (down 53%), assault (down 59%), robbery (down 60%), all violent offenses (down 60%), rape (down 66%), and murder (down 82%).

New, 2012 figures from California’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center reveal that the state’s black youth show the lowest level of homicide arrest since statewide racial tabulations were first assembled in 1960. Nearly every type of offense—felony, misdemeanor, and status—is much rarer among black youth today than in past generations.

Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?
by Dominic Casciani

Dr Bernard Gesch says the data now suggests that lead could account for as much as 90% of the changing crime rate during the 20th Century across all of the world.

Crime Is at its Lowest Level in 50 Years. A Simple Molecule May Be the Reason Why.
by Kevin Drum

If this curve were the only bit of evidence we had, the connection between lead and violent crime would be pretty thin. But it’s not. You should read the story to understand just how many different studies confirm this relationship. In addition, over the last decade there’s been a tsunami of new medical research about just what lead poisoning—even at very low levels—does to children. […]

We now have a huge amount of evidence linking lead to violent crime. We have evidence not just at the national level, but also at the state level, the city level, and the international level. We have longitudinal studies that track children from birth to adulthood to find out if higher blood lead levels lead to more arrests for violent crimes. And perhaps most important, this is a theory that just makes sense. Everything we now know about the effects of lead on the brain tells us that even moderately high levels of lead exposure are associated with aggressivity, impulsivity, ADHD, and lower IQ. And right there, you’ve practically defined the profile of a violent young offender.

Lead and Crime: Some New Evidence From a Century Ago
by Kevin Drum

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.

Red Barns and White Barns: Why Rural Crime Skyrocketed in the Late 1800s
by Kevin Drum

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.

Are Big Cities More Dangerous Than Small Ones?
by Kevin Drum

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.

Children, Brain Damage and Lead
from The Franklin Institute

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.

Violent Behavior: A Solution in Plain Sight
by Sylvia Onusic

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.

Environmental racism
from Wikipedia

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]

Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks
by Terrence McCoy

“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.

* * *

The Desperate Acting Desperately
Are White Appalachians A Special Case?
Opportunity Precedes Achievement, Good Timing Also Helps
Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope
Society: Precarious or Persistent?

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistance of Racial Inequalit in America
by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
by William Julius Wilson

Worse Than Slavery
by David M. Oshinsky

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
James W. Loewen

Slavery by another Name: the Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civll War to World War II
by Douglas A. Blackmon

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy
by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen

Who Are the Criminals?: The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan
by John Hagan

Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse
by Todd R. Clear

The Many Colors of Crime
by John Hagan

Race, Incarceration, and American Values
by Glenn C. Loury

Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma
by Michael Tonry

Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration
by Devah Pager

Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
by Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind

Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America
by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
by Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Daedalus 140:2 (Spring 2011) – Race, Inequality & Culture, Vol. 2

Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs
by Doris Marie Provine

Race to Incarcerate
by Marc Mauer

Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America
by Donald Braman

When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry
by Joan Petersilia

Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture
by Michael Tonry

Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics
by Katherine Beckett

Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America
by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert

The Culture of Punishment
by Michelle Brown

Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe
by James Q. Whitman

The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime Control
by Lisa L. Miller

The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders
by Vanessa Barker

American Homicide
by Randolph Roth

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race
by Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
by Loic Wacquant

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
by Glenn C. Loury

Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality
by Patrick Sharkey

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
by Victor M. Rios

Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America
by F. Michael Higginbotham

Daedalus 139:3 (Summer 2010) – On Mass Incarceration

The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide
by Barbara J. Robles, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Rose M. Brewer, Rebecca Adamson and Meizhu Lui

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in the Twentieth-Century
by Ira Katznelson

The Segreated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State
by Mary Poole

Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
by Annette Lareau

The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades
by Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson

The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets
by Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do About It
by Claude M. Steele

Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know About Our Biological Diversity
by Guy P. Harrison

Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History
by Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson and Catherine Lee

Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice
by Catherine Bliss

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century
by Dorothy Roberts

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the New Millennium
by Joseph L. Graves Jr.

Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth
by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in Ameican Life
by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields

White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism
by Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States
by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao Costa Vargas and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
by Tom Burrell

What Is Intelligence?
by James R. Flynn

Intelligence and How to Get it: Why Schools and Cultures Count
by Richard E. Nisbett

The Myth of Inteligence
by Patrick Winn

What Causes the Poor Health of the Poor?

What is the cause of unhealthy eating? Richard Florida attempts to answer that, based on new research. He makes some good points, but maybe he is missing some of the context.

Let me begin with one thing that seems correct in the analysis. He points out that food deserts are found in poor areas. Dietary health is an issue of socioeconomic class. Yet even when better food is made available, either by grocery stores opening or people moving, the habits of foods bought don’t tend to change. That isn’t surprising and not particularly insightful. If changes were to happen, they would happen across generations as they always do. It took generations to create food deserts and the habits that accompany them. So, it would take generations to reverse the conditions that created the problem in the first place.

Florida sort of agrees with this, even though he doesn’t seek to explain the original cause and hence the fundamental problem. Instead, he points to the need for better knowledge by way of educating the public. What this overlooks is that in generations past there was much better eating habits that were altered by a combined effort of government dietary recommendations and corporate advertising, that is to say an alliance of big government and big business, an alliance that did great harm to public health (from the largely unhelpful food pyramid to the continuing subsidization of corn and corn syrup). The bad eating habits poor Americans have now come from what was taught and promoted over the past century, diet info and advice that in many cases has turned out to be harmfully wrong.

Florida sees this as being more about culture, as related to knowledge. It’s those dumbfucks in rural middle America who need to be taught the wisdom of the coastal elites. It’s a liberal’s way of speaking about ‘poor culture’, a way of blaming the poor while throwing in some paternalistic technocracy. The healthy middle-to-upper classes have to teach the poor how to have healthy middle-to-upper class habits. Then all of society will be well. (Not that the conservative elite are offering anything better with their preference of maintaining oppressive conditions, just let the poor suffer and die because they deserve it.)

Florida’s solution ignores a number of factors, such as costs. When I lived under the poverty level, I bought the cheapest food available which included some frozen vegetables but lots of cheap carbs (e.g., Ramen noodles) and cheap proteins (e.g., eggs) along with cheap junk food (e.g., Saltine crackers) and cheap fast food (e.g., 2 egg and sausage biscuits for $2). Crappy food is extremely inexpensive, a motivating factor for anyone living hand-to-mouth or paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s about getting the most calories for the buck. The healthiest food tends to be the most expensive and least filling (e.g., kale). I couldn’t afford many fresh fruits and vegetables back when I was barely making ends meet, a time when I was so lacking in excess money that I was forced to skip meals on a regular basis. Even when there isn’t a drastic difference in costs, saving a few bucks when shopping adds up for the poor.

Someone like Florida is unlikely to understand this. Maybe the middle-to-upper class could use some education themselves so as to comprehend the lived reality of the poor. But no doubt more and better knowledge should be made available to everyone, no matter their class status. We have way too much ignorance in this society, sadly with much of it to be found among those making public policies and working in corporate media. So, yes, we have room for improvement on this level for all involved. I’m just not sure that is the fundamental issue, as the state of knowledge at present is a result of the state of society, which is to say it is more of a systemic than individual problem.

Anyway, some of the data in the research cited seems a bit off or misleading. Florida’s article includes a map of “Average Health Index of Store Purchases by County.” It doesn’t entirely match various other mapped data for health such as infant mortality. The Upper Midwest, for example, looks rather mixed in terms of the store purchases by county while looking great according to other health indicators. Also, the Upper Midwest has low rates of food deserts, which is supposedly what Florida was talking about. Even though there are poor rural areas in the Upper Midwest, there are also higher rates of gardening and farmers’ markets.

Also, it must be kept in mind that most people in rural states don’t actually live in rural areas, as would have been the case earlier last century. Mapping data by county is misleading because a minority of the population visually dominates the map. The indicators of health would be lower for that minority of rural county residents, even as the indicators of health are high for the entire state population mostly concentrated in specific counties. In that case, it is socioeconomic conditions combined with geographic isolation (i.e., rural poverty) that is the challenge, along with entire communities slowly dying and entire populations aging as the youth and young families escape. That is no doubt problematic, although limited to a small and rapidly shrinking demographic. The majority of Upper Midwestern lower classes are doing fairly well in their living in or around urban centers. But of course, this varies by region. No matter the data, the Deep South almost always looks bad. That is a whole other can of worms.

That set of issues is entirely ignored by Florida’s article, which is severely limiting for his analysis. Those particular Middle Americans don’t need the condescension from the coastal elites. What is missing is that poverty and inequality is also lower in places like the Upper Midwest, while being higher elsewhere such as the Deep South. Socioeconomic conditions correlates strongly with all aspects of health, physical health and mental health, just as they correlate to with all aspects of societal health (e.g., rates of violent crime).

I applaud any attempt at new understanding, but not all attempts are equal. Part of my complaint is directed toward the conservative-mindedness of much of the liberal class. There is too often a lack of concern for and lack of willingness to admit to the worst systemic problems. Let me give a quick example. Florida wrote another article, also for City Lab, in which he discusses the great crime decline and the comeback of cities. Somehow, he manages to entirely avoid the topic of lead toxicity, the single most well researched and greatest proven factor of crime decline. This kind of omission is sadly common from this kind of public intellectual. In constantly skirting around the deeper issues, it’s a failure of intellect and morality going hand in hand with a failure of insight and imagination.

To return to the original topic, I suspect that there are even deeper issues at play. Inequality is definitely important. Then again, so is segregation, distrust, and stress. Along with all of this, loss of community and social capital is immensely important. To understand why inequality matters, an analysis has to dig deeper into what inequality means. It isn’t merely an economic issue. Inequality of income and wealth is inequality of education and time, as the author notes, while it is also inequality of political power, public resources, and individual opportunities. A high inequality society causes dysfunction, especially for the poor, in a thousand different ways. Inequality is less of a cause than the outward sign of deeper problems. Superficial attempts at solutions won’t be helpful.

In response to why the poor eat less well, one commenter suggested that, “It’s literally because they have less time” and offered supporting evidence. The article linked was about data showing the poor don’t eat more fast food than do the wealthier, despite more fast food restaurants being located near the poor, which implies the wealthier are more willing or more likely to be travelling further distances in their eating fast food at the same rate. What the article also shows is that it is busy people, no matter socioeconomic class, who eat the most fast food.

That is a key point to keep in mind. In that context, another commenter responded with a disagreement and pointed to other data. The counter-claim was that the lower classes have more leisure time. I dug into that data and other data and had a different take on it. I’ll end with my response from the comments section:

A superficial perusal of cherry-picked data isn’t particularly helpful. Show me where you included commute time, childcare, eldercare, housework, house maintenance, yard work, etc. The linked data doesn’t even have a category for commute time and it doesn’t disaggregate specific categories of non-employment work according to income, occupation, or education.

Also, what is called leisure is highly subjective, such as the wealthier having greater freedom to take relaxing breaks while at work or eating a healthy meal out at a restaurant for lunch, none of which would get listed as leisure. Wealthier people have lives that are more leisurely in general, even when it doesn’t involve anything they would explicitly perceive and self-report as leisure. They are more likely to be able to choose their own work schedule, such as sleeping in later if they want (e.g., because of sickness) or leaving work early when needed (e.g., in order to bring their child to an event). They might be puttering around the house which they consider work, as the nanny takes care of the kids and the maid cleans the house. What a wealthier person considers work a poor person might consider leisure.

None of that is accounted for in the data you linked to. And it doesn’t offer strong, clear support for your conclusions. Obviously, something is getting lost in the self-reported data in how people calculate their own leisure. It shows that the poorer someone is the more they are likely to go to work at a place of employment on an average day (and apparently for some bizarre reason that includes “single jobholders only” in terms of income): 93.9% of those making $0 – $580, 90.6% of those making $581 – $920, 85.4% of those making $921 – $1,440, and 78% of those making $1,441 and higher. Imagine if they included all the lower class people working multiple jobs (the data doesn’t list any categories that combine income bracket and number of jobs).

About those formally working on an average day, to put it in context of occupation, this is: 75.5% of management, business, and financial operations, 76.9% of professional and related, 90.1% of construction and extraction, 93.2% of installation, maintenance, and repair, 91.2% of production, and 88.7% of transportation and material moving. Or break it down by education, which strongly correlates to income brackets: 85.5% of those with less than a high school diploma, 89.8% of those with high school graduates, no college, 85.4% of those with some college or associate degree, 77.2% of those with bachelor’s degree only, and 70.7% of those with advanced degree. It is even more stark separated in two other categories: 85.6% of wage and salary workers and 49.9% of self-employed workers.

No matter how you slice and dice the data, non-professionals with less education and income are precisely those who are most likely to do employment-related work on an average day. That is to say they are more likely to not be at home, the typical location of most leisure activities. It’s true the wealthier and more well educated like to describe themselves as working a lot even when at home, but it’s not clear what that might or might not mean in terms of actual activities. Self-report data is notoriously unreliable, as it is based on self-perception and self-assessment.

Besides, anyone who knows anything about social science research knows that there are a lot of stresses involved in a life of poverty, far beyond less time, although that is significant. There is of course less wealth and resources, which is a major factor. Plus, there are such things as physical stress, from lack of healthcare to high rates of lead toxicity. Living in a food desert and being busy are among the lesser worries for the working poor.

To return to the work angle, I would also add that the poor are more likely to work multiple shifts in a row, to work irregular or unpredictable schedules (being on call, split or rotating shifts, etc), to work on the black market (doing yard work for cash, bartering one’s time and services in the non-cash economy, etc), along with probably having a higher number of family members such as teens working in some capacity (paid and/or helping at home, formal and/or informal work). There is also the number of hours spent looking for work, a major factor considering the growing gig economy. Also, what about the stress and uncertainty for the increasing number of people working minimum wage (many employees at Walmart and Amazon) who make so little that they have to be on welfare just to make ends meet.

None of this is found in the data you linked. In general, it’s hard to find high quality and detailed data on this kind of thing. But there is plenty of data that indicates the complicating and confounding factors.

Survey: More Than One-Third Of Working Millennials Have A Side Job
by Renee Morad

“majority of workers taking on side gigs (68%) are making less than $50K a year.”

Millennials Significantly Outpacing Other Age Groups for Taking on Side Gigs
by Michael Erwin

“Workers of all income levels are taking on side work. Nearly 1 in 5 workers making more than $75k (18 percent) and 12 percent of those making more than $100k currently have a gig outside of their full time job. This is compared to a third of workers making below $50k (34 percent) and 34 percent earning below $35k.”

Who Counts as Employed? Informal Work, Employment Status, and Labor Market Slack
by Anat Bracha and Mary A. Burke

“Among informal participants who experienced a job loss or other economic loss during or after the Great Recession, 40 percent report engaging in informal work out of economic necessity, and 8.5 percent of all informal workers report that they would like to have a formal job. However, about 70 percent of informal work hours offer wages that are similar to or higher than the same individual’s formal wage.

“[…] informal work participation complicates the official U.S. measurement of employment status. In particular, a significant share of those who report that they are currently engaged in informal work also report separately that they performed no work for pay or profit in the previous week. In light of such potential underreporting of informal work, the BLS’s official labor force participation rate might be too low by an economically meaningful (if modest) margin, and the share of employed workers with full-time hours is also likely to be higher than is indicated by the official employment statistics.”

What Is the Informal Labor Market?
by Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria

“Survey of Informal Work Participation within the Survey of Consumer Expectations revealed that about 20 percent of non-retired adults at least 21 years old in the U.S. generated income informally in 2015.2 The share jumped to 37 percent when including those who were exclusively involved in informal renting and selling activities.

“When breaking down the results by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment categories, about 16 percent of workers employed full time participated in informal work. Not surprisingly, the highest incidence of informal work was among those who are employed part time for economic reasons, with at least 30 percent participating in informal work. Also, at least 15 percent of those who are considered not in the labor force by the BLS also participated in informal work.

“[…] Enterprising and Informal Work Activities (EIWA) survey, which revealed that 36 percent of adults in the U.S. (18 and older) worked informally in the second half of 2015.3 Of these informal workers, 56 percent self-identified as also being formally employed, and 20 percent said they worked multiple jobs (including full-time and part-time positions).

“[…] There were slightly more women than men among informal workers, though the share of women was much larger in lower income categories.

“The majority of informal workers were white, non-Hispanic (64 percent), while the share of Hispanic workers tended to be slightly higher than that of African-Americans (16 and 12 percent, respectively). The racial breakdowns were consistent across most income categories, with a higher incidence of informal work among minorities in the lowest income categories.”

Irregular Work Scheduling and Its Consequences
by Lonnie Golden

– “By income level, the lowest income workers face the most irregular work schedules.”
– “Irregular shift work is associated with working longer weekly hours.”
– “Employees who work irregular shift times, in contrast with those with more standard, regular shift times, experience greater work-family conflict, and sometimes experience greater work stress.”
– “The association between work-family conflict and irregular shift work is particularly strong for salaried workers, even when controlling for their relatively longer work hours.”
– “With work hours controlled for, having a greater ability to set one’s work schedule (start and end times and take time off from work) is significantly associated with reduced work-family conflict.”

How accurate was the movie “The Founder” about Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers?

“Up until the time we sold, there was no mention of Kroc being the founder. If we had heard about it, he would be back selling milkshake machines.”
~ Richard McDonald, The Wall Street Journal, 1991

How accurate was the movie “The Founder” about Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers? That is a question someone asked at Quora, to which I offered a response.

There is criticism and disagreement, some of it quite strongly held, although mostly about minor details. An example is which person came up with using powder mix for milkshakes and when that happened. But the overall story about the business appears to be accurate. One of the few major points of contention is whether or not there ever was a royalty agreement based on a handshake, as the two sides told different versions. So, it partly depends on which side one considers more credible and trustworthy. Though some claims can be verified from documents, much of what the film is based on comes from various personal accounts.

Other debates are more philosophical, such as the meaning of being a founder. The McDonald brothers founded the business model and franchised it before Kroc partnered with them. They had gone so far as to have already sold franchise rights in Kroc’s hometown, which Kroc had to buy out. What Kroc founded was a real estate empire in owning the land upon which franchises were located, this having been the source of wealth behind McDonald’s becoming an international megacorporation.

See below for more info:

Is the McDonald’s Movie ‘The Founder’ True?
by Lena Finkel

So is the film true-to-life? Well, that’s debatable upon who you ask. Kroc and the McDonald brothers had, shall we say, disagreements about whose idea it was to franchise and use the now-infamous golden arches. Kroc also claims that after he officially took over the franchise, he ran the McDonalds brothers out of business at their original location (which they maintained per their agreement) by opening a brand new McDonald’s across the street — a fact which the McDonald brothers vehemently disagree with.

But the bare bones of the story seem to be accurate. As for the details, it looks like the movie is following Kroc’s account of the events, which makes sense since we’re guessing The Founder had to get certain permissions from the fast food restaurant in order to use his name, etc.

How Accurate is ‘The Founder’? The True Facts About McDonald’s Will Surprise You
by Kayleigh Hughes

[P]retty much everything biographical about Kroc is true. […]

Other details in the film aren’t quite accurate, though. For example, though the film indicates that Kroc himself came up with the idea of franchising McDonald’s, in fact the McDonald’s brothers had already begun franchising the restaurant before they met Kroc. Money reports that they had about six locations by 1954. And while the film suggests Kroc also gave the brothers the idea of the iconic “golden arches,” Business Insider notes that the brothers had architect Stanley Clark Meston design them in 1952. […]

One thing that had to be accurate in The Founder, though, was any representation of McDonald’s, including branding, iconography, and restaurant designs. That’s because, as the New York Times explains, the makers of The Founder were allowed to use McDonald’s iconography as long as it was accurate and did not misrepresent the company. So, production designer Michael Corenblith was meticulous about the set design, using “old photographs, blueprints and other archival material” as well as “under the radar” visits to older McDonald’s restaurants to get exact measurements. The final representations, including two full-sized working McDonald’s restaurants maintained “absolute high fidelity.”

You can rest assured that The Founder is a film whose crazy story is in fact pretty darn accurate.

New Movie ‘The Founder’ Explores Entrepreneurship’s Dark Side Through McDonald’s Origins
by Joan Oleck

The movie starts with the message, “Based on a true story.” How close to the real thing was this?

Very close. The one thing you should know is that every single movie that comes out today that is a true story, historical, is going to say “based on a true story,” for legal reasons. Because, for instance, I’ve got Michael Keaton playing Ray Kroc; I don’t have Ray Kroc playing Ray Kroc. And there are certain scenes where there was no stenographer in the room, so you’re making up dialogue. So, from the legal standpoint, they always say “based on a true story.”

[The Founder, though, was very close to what happened]. The most harrowing lines that come out of Kroc’s mouth are his actual lines: ‘If a competitor was drowning, stick a hose down his throat.’ ‘Business is war.’ ‘Dog eat dog, rat eat rat.’ Those are actual quotes.

The Founder Movie vs True Story of Real Ray Kroc, Dick McDonald
from History vs. Hollywood

Did Ray Kroc renege on his handshake deal to pay the McDonald brothers a percentage of the revenue from the franchises?

Yes. After the brothers refused to give Kroc the original restaurant, he supposedly cheated the brothers out of the 0.5 percent royalty agreement they had been getting, which would have been valued at $15 million a year by 1977 and as high as $305 million a year by 2012 (according to one estimate). In his book, Kroc wrote, “If they [the brothers] had played their cards right, that 0.5 percent would have made them unbelievably wealthy.” Relatives of Richard and Maurice McDonald say that Maurice (Mac) was so distraught that it attributed to his eventual death from heart failure a decade later. -Daily Mail Online

Did Ray Kroc really credit himself with being the founder of McDonald’s?

Yes. After the McDonald brothers sold the company to Ray Kroc in 1961 for $2.7 million, he began to take credit for its birth. “Suddenly, after we sold, my golly, he elevated himself to the founder,” said Richard McDonald in a 1991 interview (Sun Journal). Kroc reinforced his claim of being the founder in his 1977 biography, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, in which he largely traces McDonald’s origins to his own first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois (it was actually the ninth restaurant overall). However, he does include Dick and Mac and their original restaurant in his book. Kroc didn’t open his Des Plaines restaurant until April 15, 1955, roughly seven years after the McDonald brothers opened the original San Bernardino location in 1948 (The New York Times).

‘The Founder’ and the Complicated True Story Behind the Founding of McDonald’s
by Kerry Close

The sale left Kroc bitterly angry with the McDonald brothers for keeping the original location. He opened a McDonald’s location across the street from the brothers’ original restaurant, forcing them to rename the original burger joint, which didn’t stay in business much longer.

“I ran ’em out of business,” he gleefully told TIME.

That was an angle with which Dick McDonald didn’t exactly agree: “Ray Kroc stated that he forced McDonald Bros, to remove the name McDonald’s from the unit we retained in San Bernardino, Calif. The facts are that we took the name off the building and removed the arches immediately upon the closing of the sale of our company to Kroc and associates in December 1961,” he stated in a letter to the editor that ran several weeks later. “Kroc must have been kidding when he told your reporter that we renamed our unit Mac’s Place. The name we used was The Big M. Ray was also being facetious when he told your reporter that he drove us out of business. My brother and I had retired two years previous to the sale, and were living in Santa Barbara, Calif. We had turned the operation of the San Bernardino unit over to a couple of longtime employees of ours who operated the drive-in for seven years. Ray Kroc was always a great prankster and probably couldn’t resist the temptation to needle me.”

Nevertheless, Kroc proclaimed himself McDonald’s founder. Indeed, the company honored him on its Founder’s Day (and wouldn’t include the McDonald brothers until 1991).

Kroc’s version of the story upset the McDonald brothers after the publication of his 1992 autobiography Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. In the book, he named the first franchise he opened—in Des Plaines, Ill.—as the first McDonald’s restaurant ever opened.

“Up until the time we sold, there was no mention of Kroc being the founder,” Dick McDonald told the Wall Street Journal in 1991. ”If we had heard about it, he would be back selling milkshake machines.”

Grandson of McDonald’s founder sees film on restaurant chain
by Ray Kelly

He said he was impressed with the film and the portrayals of Kroc (Michael Keaton) and Dick and “Mac” McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch).

“They took a little creative license, but they stuck very close to the story,” French said. “(Offerman and Lynch) were spot on. They conveyed the charismatic New Englanders that they were.”

The real “Founder”
from CBS News

Jason McDonald French takes pride in what his grandfather created. He reflected on the nostalgic quality of the San Bernardino McDonald’s, and what it means to him: “It’s something that my grandfather over tireless years came up with.”

But there’s something the family rarely talked about: the handshake deal in which Ray Kroc promised the McDonald brothers a half-percent royalty on all future McDonalds proceeds.

The family says he never paid them a cent.

“I think it’s worth, yeah, $100 million a year,” said French. “Yeah, pretty crazy.”

“Is there bitterness about that in your family?”

“No, No. My grandfather was never bitter over it. Why would we be bitter over something that my grandfather wasn’t bitter over?”

“Well, there’s 100 million reasons you could be!” said Tracy.

“Yeah,” French smiled.

For French, seeing his family’s story told on the big screen is its own form of payback.

“We were overjoyed with the fact that the story’s being told the right way and that it’s being historically accurate,” he said. “They did create fast food. They started that from the beginning, and I don’t think they get enough credit for what they actually created.”

How Universal Is The Mind?

One expression of the misguided nature vs nurture debate is the understanding of our humanity. In wondering about the universality of Western views, we have already framed the issue in terms of Western dualism. The moment we begin speaking in specific terms, from mind to psyche, we’ve already smuggled in cultural preconceptions and biases.

Sabrina Golonka discusses several other linguistic cultures (Korean, Japanese, and Russian) in comparison to English. She suggests that dualism, even if variously articulated, underlies each conceptual tradition — a general distinction between visible and invisible. But all of those are highly modernized societies built on millennia of civilizational projects, from imperialism to industrialization. It would be even more interesting and insightful to look into the linguistic worldviews of indigenous cultures.

The Piraha, for example, are linguistically limited in only speaking about what they directly experience or about what those they personally know have directly experienced. They don’t talk about what is ‘invisible’, whether within the human sphere or beyond in the world, and as such they aren’t prone to theoretical speculations.

What is clear is that the Piraha’s mode of perception and description is far different, even to the point that what they see is sometimes invisible to those who aren’t Piraha. There is an anecdote shared by Daniel Everett. The Piraha crowded on the riverbank pointing to the spirit they saw on the other side, but Everett and his family saw nothing. That brings doubt to the framework of visible vs invisible. The Piraha were fascinated by what becomes invisible such as a person disappearing around the bend of a trail, although their fascination ended at that liminal point at the edge of the visible, not extending beyond it.

Another useful example would be the Australian Aborigine. The Songlines were traditionally integrated with their sense of identity and reality, signifying an experience that is invisible within the reality tunnel of WEIRD society (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic). Prior to contact, individualism as we know it may have been entirely unknown for Songlines express a profoundly collective sense of being in the world.

If any kind of dualism between visible and invisible did exist within the Aboriginal worldview, it more likely would have been on a communal level of experience. In their culture, ritual songs are learned and then what they represent becomes visible to the initiated, however this process might be made sense of within Aboriginal language. A song makes some aspect of the world visible, which is to invoke a particular reality and the beings that inhabit that reality. This is what Westerners would interpret as states of mind, but that is clearly an inadequate understanding of the fully immersive and embodied experience.

Western psychology has made non-Western experience invisible to most Westerners. There is the invisible we talk about within our own cultural worldview, what we perceive as known and familiar, no matter how intangible. But even more important is the unknown and unfamiliar that is so fundamentally invisible that we are incapable of talking about it. This doesn’t merely limit our understanding. Entire ways of being in the world are precluded by the words and concepts we use. Our sense of our own humanity is lesser for it and, as cultural languages go extinct, this state of affairs worsens with the near complete monocultural destruction of the very alternatives that most powerfully challenge our assumptions.

* * *

How Universal Is The Mind?
by Sabrina Golonka

So, back to the mind and our current view of cognition. Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological) aspects (Wierzbicka, 2005). While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of “the mind” and the modern view of cognition. But, how universal is this conception? How do speakers of other languages think about the psychological aspect of personhood? […]

In a larger sense, the fact that there seems to be a universal belief that people consist of visible and invisible aspects explains much of the appeal of cognitive psychology over behaviourism. Cognitive psychology allows us to invoke invisible, internal states as causes of behaviour, which fits nicely with the broad, cultural assumption that the mind causes us to act in certain ways.

To the extent that you agree that the modern conception of “cognition” is strongly related to the Western, English-speaking view of “the mind”, it is worth asking what cognitive psychology would look like if it had developed in Japan or Russia. Would text-books have chapter headings on the ability to connect with other people (kokoro) or feelings or morality (dusa) instead of on decision-making and memory? This possibility highlights the potential arbitrariness of how we’ve carved up the psychological realm – what we take for objective reality is revealed to be shaped by culture and language.

Jayarava 9 December 2011 at 11:0

I recently wrote a blog about a related topic. In Pāli and Sanskrit – ancient Indian languages – there is no collective term for emotions. They do have words for all of the basic emotions and some others, but they do not think of them as a category distinct from thought. I have yet to think through all of the implications of this observation but clearly the ancient Indian view on psychology must have been very different to ours.

Han 21 December 2011 at 17:06

Very interesting post. Have you looked into Julian Jaynes’s strange and marvelous book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”? Even if you regard bicameralism as iffy, there’s an interesting section on the creation of metaphorical spaces — body-words that become “containers” for feelings, thoughts, attributes etc. The culturally distinct descriptors of the “invisible” may be related to historical accidents that vary from place to place.

Simon 9 January 2012 at 06:33

Also relevant might be Lakoff and Johnson’s “Philosophy in the Flesh” looking at, in their formulation, the inevitably metaphorical nature of thought and speech and the ultimate grounding of (almost) all metaphors in our physical experience from embodiment in the world.