“Asians don’t generally live in multi-generational poverty or in ghettos for many generations. Black people do.”
That is both false and misleading. It’s false because in the 19th century, Chinese-Americans *largely* came from multi-generational poverty in China. The men who came over in the mid-19th century to mine and to lay railroad track were from backgrounds that were almost consistently poor by our standards, and once here, they were kept in poverty by a series of laws and taxes that specifically targeted and punished them because of their ethnicity. They were confined to living in ghettos, barred from access to any civic infrastructure including public schools, hospitals, voting, courts, etc. — much of which blacks already had access to — up until WWII. And during that 80-year period, at least four generations of Chinese-Americans had grown up in that environment.
AND YET Chinese-Americans today surpass *whites* (much less blacks) in every positive demographic marker — income, education, savings, lack of criminality, lack of unwed parenting, etc.
And it’s misleading because it implies that someone is forcing black people to live in multi-generational poverty when the real driver is that people who are too poor to provide for their children are having them anyway. THAT is what perpetuates that cycle; irresponsible reproduction. Obviously, if a group stopped having children, there would be no multi-generational *anything*. But as long as that continues (and in fact, the rate has been steadily increasing) there will be “black people living in multi-generational poverty”.
“White people in the rural parts of Appalachia are rural, and obviously, crime is going to be far more widespread in urban neighborhoods where poor people are clustered together in shabby rat cages, i.e., housing projects, etc., constantly bumping into each other every day in both positive and negative ways, hanging out on street corners, etc. When you live in a rural neighborhood, you’re sitting at home watching t.v. or sitting on your front porch and maybe occasionally seeing others drive by. That’s not an environment in which crime is going to take place.”
Now, hold on: you’re trying to redraw the borders. First you said that poverty causes crime. Now you’re saying that it’s density of the population. Again, that doesn’t wash, since the densest cities in America (one of which I happen to live in) don’t have anything even remotely like the highest crime rates. Are you now saying that it’s poverty AND density? Are there going to be more qualifiers thrown into the mix to defend the narrative?
It’s also worth pointing out that in Appalachia (which is predominantly white), very little exists in the way of government support. In the parts of urban America with high concentrations of black people, there are far more services available, from Section-8 housing to vouchers for utilities, to public libraries and free athletic facilities, to public transport for getting around.
Appalachia’s residents are considerably more isolated than those in cities; just getting to school or a grocery store — even things like getting mail — often requires driving many miles, which again, produces a much higher economic burden on rural-dwellers than urban-dwellers. There’s also far less of a law enforcement presence, so protection and discouragement against crime is much lower than in urban areas. So in many real ways, rural life imposes far more difficulties upon its poor than urban life does, and yet you choose to say that it’s the “constant bumping into each other” in urban life that is actually to blame for crime. Really? To me, this reads as a classic “correlation = causation” fallacy.
But if you don’t like the rural v. urban issue, you can instead look at entire states and their relative poverty levels, crime rates and ethnic make-ups. West Virginia is the 4th “whitest” state in the US(about 94%) and is the 2nd poorest, but, yet it is ranked #13 on the “safest states” list. Mississippi has the largest concentration of black people (40%), and is just ahead of WV as the poorest state, but in contrast, it is dead-last on the “safest states” list (no pun intended).
“You you have to compare apples to apples…”
But the narrative will not allow that, because everything is couched in the notion of black exceptionalism — that no group out there has suffered what blacks have, therefore there *are* no other “apples” with which to compare them. Any anytime someone puts forward what looks like an apple (say, Chinese-Americans), it’s dismissed as “the model minority” and therefore unfit for comparison.
It’s curious: you reject the BLM narrative as being at odds with objective reality (and rightly so), and yet you seem to be perpetuating most of their claims about the supposed drivers of black inequality in America (except for the racist component). I would encourage you to apply that same objectivity and skepticism to the drivers. And I find it curious that you didn’t even mention the other points I made about how women, an historically oppressed and financially disadvantaged group who comprise over half of the population, are vastly underrepresented in criminality, compared to men. If ever there was a test case of the “poverty produces criminality” narrative, that would be it. And yet it clearly shows *the opposite*: women tend to be poorer than men, and yet are far less criminal.
The “poverty produces criminality” narrative is also at odds with the claims often made by BLM supporters — that white men of the middle-class and higher, are the “real criminals” of the nation, committing everything from rampant white-collar crime to being the big-league drug distributors to being the serial killers and mass-murderers. Well, you can’t have it both ways. If those white men are criminals, and it’s not due to poverty, then the claim that black people commit crimes because of poverty simply isn’t tenable.
