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Notes -
Something can be both racist and true.
There is a sub-population of white people in my country, called Travellers (other names were used in the past and, via the euphemism treadmill, are now considered slurs). They do have a worse life than settled people. They are victims of discrimination. They do have a reputation as criminals, scammers, and the likes. This is unfair because indeed not all Travellers, and judging someone solely on their ethnic/racial/outcast background means you can condemn someone who is not guilty.
But at the same time, it is true that Irish Travellers do engage in welfare fraud, theft, petty and large-scale crime, both here in Ireland and in countries where they've immigrated. Construction fraud is an old reliable (they'll turn up, often to the homes of the elderly, and through a mixture of persuasion and coercion get them to agree to unwanted home renovations, spend lots of money on this, and when they've got as much as they can squeeze out, then decamp leaving shoddy work and often need of proper rebuilding behind).
That latter scam happened to a family member of mine. I've got war stories from a job about Traveller scams.
At the same time, I have known since childhood respectable Travellers, many of them settled.
So yeah: it's unfair to judge all Somali-Americans as scammers and low-IQ thieves, but at the same time, scams and crime are likely to happen in the Somali-American communities. Any group which is set apart from the mainstream of society will develop a "them and us" mindset where 'we' are the only real people, and it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all.
The key thing to understand is that it really can be any group. I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic cheating, fraud, and petty theft were. If you weren't trying to game the system in innumerable little ways you were viewed as a rube or a mug. If you called out a fellow student for shoplifting from the corner store or rifling through an unattended bag you'd get a reputation as a scold. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of available "opportunities".
In my experience "it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all." describes the attitude our elite just as much as it does our underclass.
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Fun fact: I frequently see low level welfare fraud and manipulation. The only time I've seen a white person do it, he was a "Traveller". Just openly admitted it to me, too.
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