Socioeconomics?

It is widely believed that black Americans commit violent crime at substantially higher rates than whites due to socioeconomic factors. This is a falsehood. By examining raw data provided by officially recognized institutions, it becomes clear that this is not the case.

In 1999, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published an economic policy review titled ‘Unequal Incomes, Unequal outcomes? Economic Inequality and Measures of Well-Being.’ It is shown on table 5 of page 93 that people belonging to black families in the top income bracket committed up to 5 times the rate of crime whites did of the same income bracket. Moreover, from 1976 to 1995, offenders from the highest income bracket from black families committed a higher rate of violent crimes than the lowest income white families, at between 2 to 20 times the rate.

An analysis based on data provided by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics also proved something similar. The study ‘Race, Wealth and Incarceration: Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth,’ released in the academic journal ‘Race and Social Problems,’ reveals that “although higher levels of wealth were associated with lower rates of incarceration, the likelihood of future incarceration still was higher for blacks at every level of wealth compared to the white likelihood, as well as the Hispanic likelihood, which fell below the white likelihood for some levels of wealth.” It is also notable that Native Americans have generally had higher levels of poverty over the last 30 or so years, according to a study published by The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, yet still commit lower crime rates than blacks.

A Washington Post article titled ‘Poor white kids are less likely to go to prison than rich black kids’ examines the data and suggests “discrimination against people of color is more complicated and fundamental than economic inequality,” implying that institutional racism is behind the phenomenon. The problem with this argument, is that the black crime rate has gotten progressively worse since segregation. Similarly, the black out-of-wedlock rate has gotten far worse since segregation.

We should also consider the fact that Asians had less rights than blacks for many years, yet still commit the absolute lowest crime rate of any racial group in the United States. While blacks were granted constitutional rights of citizenship in 1865, Asians could only apply for citizenship after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Despite this, in many studies Asian people do not even have their own category in race-crime studies, often lumped in with other ethnic groups under the negligible ‘others’ crime rates.

Similarly, the argument for inter-generational trauma caused by slavery does not conclusively explain causation either. Both Native Americans and Jewish immigrants have experienced trauma as a result of violence and marginalization, yet crime rates for both groups are far lower than that of black Americans. The same could be said for refugees from South East Asia that arrived in the U.S during the Vietnam War. https://theredelephants.com/black-crime-is-the-biggest-problem-america-faces-not-racism/