I agree with much of what you’ve written here, but I have to object to this notion: “…blacks are far more likely than whites to be involved in criminal behavior (this is because blacks are disproportionately poor in America, not because they’re inherently violent or any other nonsense like that).”

I think you’re seeing correlation without causation. If poverty “caused” crime, one would expect to see consistency across ethnic lines. But no such consistency exists; poor Asian neighborhoods in urban America aren’t anything like as criminal as poor black neighborhoods. The poorest parts of America are actually rural towns in Appalachia that are predominantly white, and yet their crime rates are surprisingly low. Furthermore, if poverty inspired crime, one would reasonably expect to see crimes of property (fraud, burglary, robbery, embezzlement, etc.) in disproportion to crimes that did not involve financial gain. And yet, the opposite seems to be true. Homicide, rape, assault — those crimes are actually more pronounced among black perpetrators than property crimes.

There are also well-established correlations between dropping out of high school and criminality, and having no father at home and criminality. Both of these rates are extremely high in the black community (74% unwed mothers, 31% dropout rate). Contrast this with Asian-Americans: just 17% of Asian-American children are born to unwed mothers, and the Asian-American high school dropout rate is about 1%. Not coincidentally, those numbers very closely track the per-capita incarceration rates for those two ethnic groups. Blacks comprise 13% of the US population but 37% of the prison population; Asians comprise 5% of the population, but less than 1% of prisoners.

Furthermore, women have been economically disadvantaged since . . . ever! We tend to be paid less than men in the same positions, and we certainly had it far worse in the past, when we weren’t even allowed to own property. So if poverty led to crime, we would reasonably expect to see women committing crimes at a greater rate than men. Do we? Of course not! Despite comprising 51% of the population; fewer than 7% of prison inmates are women.

Finally, the 50-year trends in black violent crime are in an opposite vector to the trends in the economic status of most blacks (including government assistance). And anecdotally, that fits the picture I grew up with. My mother is half-black and her older black relations (who came of age during or soon after WWII) are by and large a very law-abiding generation who have thinly-veiled contempt for the failings of subsequent generations.