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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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No. There is a massive difference between a group of young Asian guys and black guys hanging out. Basic stats will tell you this.

Advanced stats will tell you otherwise. Do you not know what a factor analysis is?

being black is highly predictive in the same way being male is.

It literally isn't though. If you keep everything constant except sex, male vs female is still HUGELY predictive of criminality. If you keep everything constant except race, the relationship is much, much weaker. Your counterargument is going to be that things are not, on average, kept constant-- but that's still not a convincing reason to look at mostly proxy factors for criminality (like race) rather than much more causitice factors like SES.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11868975/

Black women murder at a rate higher than Asian men. Black women murder rate similar to white male rate.

It literally isn't though. If you keep everything constant except sex, male vs female is still HUGELY predictive of criminality. If you keep everything constant except race, the relationship is much, much weaker.

Are you sure? I don't have a link, but I remember saying breakdowns by sex, age, and race, where the criminality statistics for blacks looked pretty dismal (black women coming out worse than white men).

but that's still not a convincing reason to look at mostly proxy factors for criminality (like race) rather than much more causitice factors like SES.

Again, I'm pretty sure SES is also just a proxy, and actually a poorer one than race.

So I went out and tried to find a study about this and found a reddit comment that links to a study you might be interested in:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/4957dc/are_there_studies_comparing_us_crime_rates_by/d0p7aqn/

Sampson, R. J., Morenoff, J. D., & Raudenbush, S. (2005). Social anatomy of racial and ethnic disparities in violence. American Journal of Public Health, 95(2), 224-232.

Abstract: We analyzed key individual, family, and neighborhood factors to assess competing hypotheses regarding racial/ethnic gaps in perpetrating violence. From 1995 to 2002, we collected 3 waves of data on 2974 participants aged 8 to 25 years living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods, augmented by a separate community survey of 8782 Chicago residents. The odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for Blacks compared with Whites, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10% lower. Yet the majority of the Black–White gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino–White gap were explained primarily by the marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and dimensions of neighborhood social context. The results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence.

I can see the outline for a counterargument that goes, "race is causative of ethnicity (meaning: race linked culture), which is causative of marital status of parents, immigrant status, etcetera, which are causative of violence." Again, though... You can just filter on the direct causes instead. Fatherless behavior looks similar regardless of race, and regardless of race I would discriminate against young men engaged in it.

Just think about base rates here. People are very unlikely to commit violent crimes in general, regardless of race. But there are particular adjectives that you can apply to people that significantly raise their threat level. Imagine you have a database of every person (on earth/in your country/in your city/whatever), and a query that filters that database to only the subset that matches all adjectives in a list. Your goal is to minimize the average likelyhood of the people returned by that query committing a crime against you. In which order would you prioritize removing adjectives from the following list?

[Black fatherless poor druggie young male]

I would go for either "druggie" or "male" first, then after those two are gone "poor", then either "young" or "fatherless".

Plausibly there are some co-correlations, where the intersection of two adjectives interact to make things particularly bad... But I'd guess that in most of the cases where that happens with "Black", that's more attributable to discrimination than to afroamerican culture.

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