Comment by bschne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bschne | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> When the real problem is significantly harder. Social, governmental, institutional and systemic racism.

While I don't question that systemic racism is real, I don't quite see the link here. Isn't the kind of violence video games get blamed for more commonly committed by non-minority people who have mental health issues and/or were "social outcasts" rather than racially motivated? I mainly remember the topic as coming up in connection with school shootings and the likes, not potentially racial hate crimes.

100% agree on the looking for simple (and comfortable to admit!) fixes though. It is so much easier to say "we made a mistake letting kids play these games" than it is to face the truth that some people are either completely left behind by society or descend into incomprehensible madness for no comprehensible reason.

I believe what they mean is the majority of violent crimes committed by youth in the United States is committed by kids in historically redlined, segregated neighborhoods where the school system is non-existent, public services and infrastructure is falling apart if there at all, all the fathers have been arrested, the police and citizenry are openly antagonist to each other, so drug trade and criminal gangs are the best shot they have at participating in any kind of a community at all.

Solving that will go a lot further than worrying about the comparatively tiny number of suburban white kids shooting up their schools.

Note that "systemic racism" here doesn't need to mean any individual involved in this is still racist. It can just mean the lasting after-effects of institutional racism from decades ago that we never bothered trying to actively undo and just hoped everything would get better when we told the institutions they could no longer legally be racist.

Thanks, that makes sense — where I live most of the talk around video games was about school shootings, not "regular" violent crime among young people, that's why I was a bit confused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com