midnight Target: So it would be wrong to call it "African American Gun Crime" wouldn't it. The descriptive adjective could read "Poor American" or "Disenfranchised American" or .. you fill in the blank.
Absolutely - saying that without clarifications would imply that AAs are somehow more "evil" than other races - and there are no indications that "moral values" are genetically encoded. Actually, temperament like impulse control or level of aggressivness is genetically determined to a high degree but not nearly enough to account for huge discrepancy of crime rates.
But saying "Poor" or "Disenfranchised" is also very wrong as those are mostly secondary effects of other factors and when everything else is being held equal, being poor has little influence on antisocial behavior.
What has a huge effect on antisocial behavior is level of intelligence. Less intelligent people are more likely to be antisocial as well as poor, "disenfranchised", etc. - for obvious reasons. And we are not talking about corellation here but easily understood causal relationsip.
Since human races noticeably differ in distribution of intelligence (15+ IQ points), realising that and coming up with practical explanations and solutions would dispell a lot of rasist stereotypes.
Saying we have an African American crime problem today is no different than saying there was an Irish crime problem in the 1910's, or an Italian crime problem in the 1920's, or a Jewish crime problem in the 1930's.
It is very different. The irish, italian and jewish organised crime was highly publicised, but the numbers and character of crime were much different than what is going on in black communities now. Those groups were marginalised by discrimination, not inborn lack of abilities. The former can be remedied.
lazs2: I have heard that there is no correlation between economics and homicide for whites.
Thatd depends wether intelligence was factored out. Blackd do not really differ from whites or other races in that respect though the total effect can be aggravated by concentration.
It is NOT a genetic problem with a whole race of people...
Of course it is. And it explains matters much better. So many groups were discriminated against in US - practically every single one besides WASPs. So many countries experience problems - but nowhere similar to Africa.
miko