Part 11
"Poverty Causes Crime" — The First False Liberal Argument
It's worth mentioning that poverty cannot be the root cause of the disparity between Black and White rates for violent crime. According to the US Census, 11.2% of American Whites and 29.0% of American Blacks lived in poverty in 1995. Yes, a higher percentage of Blacks than Whites are poor. But how many poor Whites and poor Blacks are we talking about? Obviously poverty can't motivate anybody who is not poor to commit a violent crime. In 1995, there were 218.3 million American Whites and 33.1 million American Blacks, which shows (after multiplying by the respective percentages) that there were 24.4 million poor Whites and 9.5 million poor Blacks living in the United States that year. Wetbacks to one side, poor "Americans" were 72% White and 28% Black in 1995. Poor Whites outnumbered poor Blacks by a ratio of 2.57 to one. If poverty were the fundamental cause of violent crime, as the liberals say it is, then for each 100 murders in the US committed by Blacks, about 257 murders would be committed by Whites. But that is not what happens. The fact is that about 55% of the murders in the United States are committed by Blacks. In other words, for each 100 murders committed by Blacks, only 82 murders are being committed by non-Blacks.
Even if you were to assume that Whites commit all the murders in the United States that Blacks do not commit, the Whites could only be responsible, at most, for 82 murders for each 100 murders perpetrated by Blacks. And keep in mind that there were 6.8 times more Whites than Blacks in America in 1995. These facts are in conflict with a prediction that can be reasonably drawn from the liberal theory, which is therefore wrong. Poverty isn't the cause of Black violence, and the famous "poverty causes crime" hypothesis is a liberal myth.
Just to check, in 1998, 10.5% of American Whites and 26.5% of American Blacks lived in poverty. The Census Bureau estimates that there were were 223.0 million White Americans and 34.4 million Black US residents on July 1 of that year. At that time, then, there were 23.4 million poor Whites and 9.1 million poor Blacks living in the United States in 1998. The poor were once again 72% White and 28% Black, setting aside poor people of all other races. In 1998 as in 1995, poor Whites outnumbered poor Blacks by a ratio of 2.57 to one.
Liberals have a multi-layered onion of deceptive rhetoric:
(1) Deny that there's such a thing as race.
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Liberals like to use a slippery slope argument involving the smooth graduation of genetic change among human population groups. That is, between any two tribes separated by a significant genetic distance, there will usually be a third tribe intermediate between them. Liberals have for that reason gone so far as to deny the existence of race (in between calls for Affirmative Action, of course). But that's like saying that color does not exist because it is hard to draw a line in the spectrum where the light stops being more blue than green and starts being more green than blue. You could extend the argument without difficulty until every color, from red to blue, were all "one kind of light," as a liberal might say. Let's make a quantum mechanical comparison. A photon having an energy equal to, or greater than, the work function of a bound electron will kick that electron free of the atom. A photon having less energy than the work function will not do so. (And it is not possible for two photons, each with insufficient energy, to "strike at the same time" or otherwise combine to get the job done.) The proportion of times that an ionization event will depend on difference of 20 Angstroms in the wavelength of an incident photon will be FEW. Likewise, the proportion of times that the successful handling of an environmental challenge will depend on a genetic distance of 20 will also be FEW. However, the proportion of times that an ionization event will depend on a difference of 2000 Angstroms in the wavelength of an incident photon will be MANY. Likewise, the proportion of times that the successful handling of an environmental challenge will depend on a genetic distance of 2000 will also be MANY. Or consider the fact that you can put a piano into the back of a pickup truck, but the same piano will not fit into a compact car - and the fact that it is possible to build any number of intermediate kinds of vehicle does not remove the cargo limitations of the compact car. (Or the cargo limitations of most of the intermediates!) So whereas it makes a small difference to the character of Ireland that the original Celtic stock is today mixed with Germanic or Scandinavian blood, it will make a HUGE difference tomorrow, if the Irish start breeding with Blacks. And, if history is any guide, this intermixture WILL happen unless Ireland gets rid of the Blacks. The same is true, naturally, for all other European countries with a non-White immigration problem. |
(2) When forced (by medical/biological evidence) to admit the existence of different races, deny that there are any behavioral differences between them.
(3) When forced (e.g., by FBI crime statistics) to admit that there are racial differences in behavior, deny that race is the cause of those differences by asserting that poverty is the cause of them.
(4) When forced (by correlating crime rates with socio-economic status) to admit that poverty is not the cause of the statistical excess of Black violent behavior, assert that class-envy is the cause.
(5) When forced (by controlling for urban-rural factors in addition to socio-economic status) to admit that class-envy is not the cause of the statistical excess in Black violent behavior, assert that the other guy is a bigot, refuse to argue with him further, and begin all over again at step (1) the next time somebody else brings up the subject.
Liberals worship the egalitarian doctrine: it is the one religion that they actually believe in, and they defend the idea that the races are equal in precisely the same way that Christians defend the idea that Jesus was the Son of God. The more the evidence piles up against the doctrine of racial equality, the more dogmatic the liberals will become in its support, and the harsher will be their criticisms of the proponents of racial truth. I'm not a Christian, but I'll say this: it is much more likely that Jesus was divine than that the races are equal, since in the latter case we at least have positive evidence that the races are not equal.