Quote:
Originally posted by St. Charles
I hate how people always use that statistic "Blacks take up X% of the population, but X% of our jail cells"
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I'm not saying I agree with the following, but:
I recently read somewhere that SOME African-Americans might be more prone to steal because of the ancestry. Africans sold some of their slaves (who were thieves, rapists, etc.) to America, and since personality is 50% genetic, some people say that rape, theft, etc. can run through generations.
Do you buy it?
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No. No one is inherently prone to commit criminal acts. If that were the case, Whites would be inherently prone to genocide and property theft due to their own history of global imperialism complete with lovely foot notes like small pox blankets, international slave trading and gas chambers. NO one group of people are inherently bad.
Black communities are disproportionately impoverished; crime is typically a by product of poverty. And it's no coincidence that so many in the Black community are in such a state taken into consideration hundreds of years of institutionalized racism in America beginning with slavery.
It was against the law for slaves to be literate; a slave could be hung if it was found that they could read or write. So when slavery ended, the slaves were just sent packing and told "do you" with no assistance, education we were left with a 98% illiterate population with very few prospects. And it didn't stop there; lovely things like the Jim Crow era and even post civil rights movement when Black children were integrated into white schools where they weren't wanted and the National Guard had to walk them into the doors -- I wouldn't consider an environment where you need a military escort because you're so deeply unwanted due to your race one that is conducive to learning and success.
These things have carried for generations and it's incredibly difficult to turn that around when the cards are always stacked against you in some way. Many have done well for themselves to break the cycle -- I'm a fourth generation college graduate and know plenty like myself, but many are still stuck. And it's not something so simple and easy as pulling one's self up by their boot straps when they don't have boots to begin with. Long winded post, but time killer for the 3:00am reset.
Oh, plus look up the statistics on likelihoods of minorities to be arrested and then prosecuted and jailed after an arrest vs. Whites. The disparities in numbers are tremendous -- that plays a big part as well.
