Transcription
While there are few doubts about the extent of African-American involvement in violent crime, there is intense disagreement over the explanation for that violence.
So, nobody in their right mind doubts that this group has a reputation for a lot of violent crime. That's not even a topic for debate. But what is up for debate is the reason behind all the violence, which is what we are discussing now. Three factors seem particularly relevant to heightened post 1960s African-American violence. The first two of which are the least controversial.
Let's hear what they are. First is the great migration itself which relocated blacks to northern cities where compared with the rural south, informal and formal racial restraints were relaxed and more valuables were available to steal. The Great Migration deals with Negroes or colored people leaving the South to go north so they can get away from southern whites and to find higher paying jobs. The South had strict separation between Negroes and whites. They had different restaurants, different bathrooms, different drinking fountains, different schools, and other things. Now, the North wasn't nearly as strict with its segregation practices. It had segregation, but it wasn't as strict as the South, which Dr. Latzer is saying opened up more opportunities for robbery and other violent crime. In the 1960s alone, over 800,000 African-Ameans left the South for urban settings in the North and West. In the succeeding decade, another 1.5 million relocated, the biggest decodile migration of African-Americans in US history. The black population in the northeast nearly doubled, rising 93% between 1950 and 1970. Chicago went from 23% African-Amean in 1960 to 40% in 1980. The urbanization and northernization of African-Ameans provided extraordinary benefits, including significantly higher standards of living, but they also presented new opportunities for violent crime, especially robbery, which increased beyond all expectations. So, economically, it was a win for Negroes. In the north, they experienced a higher standard of living compared to the South, and they were paid more. But as far as crime goes, it was a loss because there was more opportunity for violent crime and also there were more Negroes willing to act on those opportunities. So Negroes moving into this new northern urban environment was the first factor that explained the increase in crime after the 1960s.
The second factor was the enormous increase in black youth due to the coming of age of the baby boomers. Blacks in the 15 to 29 age bracket increased by 46% in the 1960s and another 42% in the 1970s.
In the previous commentaries, we discussed how the young men were the groups that committed the most violent crimes at the highest rates. These are the ones that do the most stealing and the most killing. And according to Dr. Later, the black youth from 15 to 29 increased by 46% in the60s and another 42% in the 1970s. So, we know that more than a fair share of violent individuals popped out of this group. This is the group responsible for the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles. This group was also responsible for the black disciples out in Chicago at that time. So, in many ways, it was the baby boomers that set many of the urban patterns for the generation X and the millennials afterwards.
Clearly, neither migration nor the youth bulge, nor both together are sufficient to explain the extraordinarily high African-Amean crime rates.
Uh-oh, that's not enough. Beyond these two factors, however, consensus seems unlikely. Analysts tend to divide between economic and cultural explanations for high rates of crime among blacks.
So for this third factor, some analysts lean on the economic explanation and others lean on the cultural explanation for high black crime. However, explanations founded simply on economic adversity, though favored by many criminologists and liberals generally don't align with the historical record. It sounds sweet and soothing in the ear that people commit high violent crimes because they're poor or don't have jobs. And that's the mainstream explanation because it doesn't push blame on people doing the crime. It leaves the control in the hands of all these outside forces. We live in a time now in America where it's unpopular to allow people to take accountability and become responsible for their own actions. So instead they blame all these external things like poverty and oppression and they use that to explain all of the high violence in a group and they take away the autonomy of the group. And there's many issues with that explanation. The first is the one that we've seen already that blacks were economically better off in the 60s,7s and 80s compared to the 20s, 30s, and 40s. And they also had more rights, but they also had more violent crime. Right? We talked about that in previous commentaries. Second, we can go to other places like uh cities in Vietnam, cities in India, and even some areas in Africa where they are magnitudes more impoverished than blacks and they still have low violent crimes, which tells us what? That people can be poor and peaceful. That's why the economic argument isn't strong enough on its own to explain high levels of black violence.
African-Americans have suffered adversity for most of their history, and white bigotry has been the cause of much of that suffering. However, no consistent correlation between their economic stress and violent misconduct is apparent. If there were, then one would expect there to have been more negro violence when they were more impoverished and openly oppressed. But that wasn't the case. It was the opposite where they were less oppressed and had less poverty but more violence.
Measures of black economic inequality simply do not correlate with African-American crime. Nor does a consistent correlation between adversity and violent crime exist for other groups.
So basically being poor or more disadvantaged does not by itself predict how much violent crime a group will have. In other words, the magnitude of violent crime by impoverished populations does not necessarily bear any relationship to the depths of their disadvantage. More hardship doesn't always mean more violence. They don't always rise and fall together. You could have group A that is extremely poor and then you can have group B that isn't. And you might expect group A to be more violent, but that isn't always the case because the relationship of poverty to violence isn't always consistent. Furthermore, there is no correlation between trends in black economic conditions and black offending. Most pertinently, in the 1960s, despite enormous economic gains accompanied by marked declines in white race prejudice, black rates of violence skyrocketed.
We talked about that not too long ago. Blacks had major civil rights and economic improvements in the 60s, but the violence still went through the roof. And what that shows is that economic progress and less white prejudice by themselves did not stop blacks from committing high levels of violence.
But if economic disadvantage and its delletterious side effects are not to blame, then what is?
That's what we want to know, right? If it can't be explained by poverty and oppression, then what was it?
In the late 1960s, criminologist Marvin Wolf Gang and psychologist Franco Farrakudi presented a new theory of crime, the subculture of violence theory.
Come on with it. This blend of psychological and sociological perspectives seemed to provide a plausible explanation for high black violence.
Plausible means that it's reasonable or believable. So, Dr. Later sees this subculture of violence theory as a believable explanation that makes sense. Even if it is not proven beyond all doubt. According to this theory, in any society, there may be groups with exceptionally high rates of homicide. Such groups are likely to share values that support violence.
Meaning the group sees violence as a valid way to solve disputes. someone calls you the b- word, then it's okay to punch them in the mouth or respond in some other violent manner and the group accepts that behavior as appropriate. Or if someone's in a heated argument and the people around them antagonize it by saying things like, "I bet you won't hit him. I bet you won't do nothing." things like this where violence is culturally accepted as a normal response, a normal response to disrespect or or petty disputes. And so the theory is saying that violent groups are likely to share these values. Homicide is most prevalent or the highest rates of homicide occur among a relatively homogeneous subcultural group in any large urban community. Similar prevalent rates can be found in some rural areas. The value system of this group we are contending constitutes a subculture of violence. Values are what guides priorities and behavior. A person's actions are generally filtered through their values. So when it's normal for a group to have a set of rules and attitudes that treat violence as a normal response to conflict, disrespect, and disputes, then he's saying that the group constitutes a subculture of violence.
Wolf Gang and Farerrakuti elucidated the meaning of subculture. While this term ordinarily suggests individuals sharing common values and socially interacting in some limited geographical or residential isolation, they explain that value sharing does not necessarily require social interaction. Consequently, a subculture may exist widely distributed spatially and without interpersonal contact among individuals or whole groups of individuals, meaning they don't have to live next to each other or even know each other as long as they share the same beliefs and values, then he's saying that they can still belong to the same subculture.
Delinquent gangs spread throughout a city fall into this category. They share, despite their isolation from one another, a delinquent subculture. Wolf Gang and Farrakuti also seemed to have had racial, ethnic, and even national groups in mind as they identified subcultural traditions of violence in Colombia, Sardinia, Mexico, Albania, and small Italian communities near Naples. Lots of violence with these groups with many members that are quick with the knife. I went to Tulum, Mexico two years ago and all throughout the city were armored trucks manned with machine guns. They had to be all the way on guard to protect the tourists because at any moment un Mexico could pull out a knife or a gun to rob someone. Colombia is also known for super high levels of violence. So all of these named areas have groups within them that share similar values which they lump into the subculture tradition of violence. And they expressly referred to lowerass African-Ameans stating that they expected to find a large spread to the learning of resort to and criminal display of the violence value among minority groups such as Negroes.
which wasn't hard to find. This theory came under heavy fire partly because of its circular reasoning. Violent behavior alone cannot prove the existence of a subculture of violence. Absent independent evidence of distinctive norms that are shown to cause violence, the existence of a subculture of violence is only an inference from the violent behavior of group members. It was criticized as circular reasoning because it says that they're violent because they have a violent culture and then it tries to prove the violent culture by pointing to the fact that they're violent. So the problem is that the theory needed independent evidence of some type of norms or values that support violence, right? They needed evidence of violent behavior being taught and reinforced. And that was what was missing from the theory.
And yet the theory remains intriguing because through the lens of modern social science, we tend to see mankind as a creature of groups, national, religious, ethnic, and racial, for example, with each group engaging in unique and significantly different types of behaviors. How can these behaviors be explained in an era that has repudiated racial or biological ration?
So basically he's saying that if modern society rejects genetic explanations for these behaviors then what else is there left to explain them? Only values or some other mental construct seem credible.
Only the ideas, beliefs and principles operating in someone's mind are left. We already saw that poverty and hardship couldn't fully explain it. He's saying that society rejects genetic explanations. So the only explanation left that society will accept as credible is the content in someone's mind. Indeed, social science commonly asserts that culturally distinctive values provide meaningful explanations for all sorts of group behaviors. Some of these behaviors, saving one's earnings or seeking advanced education, for example, are considered socially beneficial to both the specific group and society at large. Other behaviors, violent crime obviously, are viewed in a very negative light. Reluctant as we are for fear of stereotyping to focus on negative group behaviors when such behaviors have persisted over long periods of time, perhaps over multiple generations, we are presented with a prima fatier, if not a conclusive case for a causal connection between the behavior and the distinctive culture.
So he's saying that since the issue of violence has persisted over multiple generations, it stops looking like something that's just random and then it becomes more plausible that it's the group's culture that's causing the violence. Wolf Gang and Farrakott's theory would have been more compelling if they had stressed the importance of the historical persistence of violence by certain groups. For proof of such persistence adds credence to the claim that the behavior is supported by a particular group culture. In the case of African-Americans, compelling evidence shows persistently high rates of criminal violence since the late 1880s, and it is widely acknowledged that American blacks share a distinctive subculture.
and still going strong today, well over a hundred years later. But there have been few efforts to link the two observations to show that the African-American subculture, or more narrowly, the lowerass African-American subculture is causally connected to high levels of criminal violence. One such effort was Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, a product of four years of ethnographic research in Philadelphia's inner cities.
That's the book here. And he's basically breaking down how inner city blacks operate through a code that produces violent outcomes. The code was a set of unofficial rules of conduct for the streets of poor black neighborhoods. Its essence is a display of violence or a predisposition to violence designed to ward off the all too common attacks and assaults in these communities. As Anderson described it, the code hearkens back to the honor codes of Italian and Mexican immigrants and even more pertinently 19th century white southerners. And we know the white southerners were violent. You have to be violent to enslave people and keep them oppressed in the manner that they did and to destroy the mind like they did. you have to be violent, right? And blacks were raised by white southerners. So, the idea is that Negroes picked up their violent habits from them, or at least a good portion of them from them. And you can read about the violent habits of white southerners in a book called The Cracker Culture by Dr. Grady Mcuiny.
More than swagger is involved. Denisens of the Black Ghetto, Anderson insisted, steal from one another to obtain trophies, objects of symbolic value, sneakers, a pistol, even somebody else's girlfriend that enhanced the worth of the taker.
That's referring to the conduct of inner city blacks. In this often violent give and take, raising oneself up largely depends on putting someone else down. The level of jealousy and envy underscores the alienation that permeates the inner city. There is a general sense that very little respect is to be had and therefore everyone competes to get what affirmation he can from what is available. The resulting craving for respect gives people thin skins and short fuses.
Real short fuses and very thin skin that's for sure. This explains the resort to violence sometimes lethal. That seems senseless to middle class people as it is wildly in excess of the objective which may be little more than obtaining an article of clothing. But for black ghetto residents, it's young people particularly.
There is an especially heightened concern about being disrespected. Many inner city young men in particular crave respect to such a degree that they will risk their lives to attain and maintain it. Is that still true today? Or is that some behavior that died out already? You tell me.
This obsession with respect and the readiness to resort to violence to maintain and enhance it puts one in mind of certain honor cultures such as that of white southerners in the 19th century. Thomas Soul has argued that the similarity is not fortuitous that African-Ameans adopted the southern white culture and lowerass blacks transported some of its worst features to northern cities.
Uh-oh. Locked in with Dr. Thomas Soul again. The book he's referencing is black rednecks and white liberals. And essentially Dr. Thomas Soul is saying that the lowerass inner city blacks were basically rednecks because they carried the redneck culture with them to the northern cities. Much of the cultural pattern of southern rednecks, so wrote became the cultural heritage of southern blacks more so than survivals of African cultures with which they had not been in contact for centuries. That's because a black or a negro was no longer an African. That was long in the past. The African was whipped out of them in order to convert them into negroes, a people with a completely different mind and a completely different culture. And part of that culture came directly from the violent white southerners who controlled them. Half a century after Myrtle, another study of racial attitudes noted the intimidating ethnic style of many underclass black males and noted that nearly half of all murder victims in America were black and that 94% of them were killed by other blacks. Many of these killings were due to gang members who killed for such reasons as
cuz he look at me funny cuz he give me no respect and other reasons reminiscent of the touchy pride and hair trigger violence of rednecks and crackers in an earlier era.
Let this all sink in. Good people go over this video multiple times if you have to move the emotions out of the way and observe with clarity. That's what we do here and that's what we're going to continue to do in the next commentary. All right, I thank you for your time and attention. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael and I'll see you in the free.