I'm terribly sorry, but you're making a huge leap here. The fact that "massive numbers" of blacks are incarcerated does not automatically imply pervasive racism. The one does not necessarily imply the other.
re: stats please provide some if you'd like some in return because you've made a huge generalization and I'd say that it's your bias speaking (not racism). In response to your question, if it is true that black men commit more crimes I'd say that the situation of blacks in america is directly tied racism, slavery and the like so yes, it is due to racism too.
You're going to have to do better than citing stats that are 44 years old. All this proves is that 44 years ago, there was a problem, which is not exactly a point of contention among most sentient beings at this point.
"you've made a huge generalization and I'd say that it's your bias speaking (not racism)."
Seriously? These are not obscure statistics I'm talking about here. Here, check this one out:
"As of 2005, statistics show that offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites."
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Char...
Or how about:
"These specific facts about the Bell shooting are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of data points that reveal a hard truth: any given violent crime in New York is 13 times more likely to have a black than a white perpetrator. While most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection, the incidence of criminal activity among young black males is off the charts."
Taken from http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-04-02hm.html
And that was with five minutes of Googling. I'm not making some wild, off the wall assertion here. This is a well known and exhaustively documented fact.
"I'd say that the situation of blacks in america is directly tied racism, slavery and the like so yes, it is due to racism too."
I figured you would. Slavery ended 150 years ago, so if you want to assert that some 7 generations later it's still having effects, I welcome you to provide data to that effect. This, right here, is the problem in a nutshell - the minute these facts are mentioned, the hue and cry of racism and slavery goes up, and all further thought on the matter stops. The causes of this situation are complex, and reducing them to one dimensional truisms does no one any favors.
As for your wiki cite, first of all you're talking about murder when your first comment was regarding the total number of black people incarcerated. Which would you like to discuss? You pulled that quote (as of 2005) off of a graphic, had you read the text to the left you would have seen this: "As of 2008, statistics report that of 16,277 murders, 10,568 were committed by males, 1,176 were by female, and 4,533 were committed in which the offenders sex was unknown. Likewise, 5,334 murders were committed by white offenders, 5,943 were committed by black or black and Hispanic offenders, 273 were committed by offenders of other races, and 4,727 murders were committed by offenders whose race is not known. [12]" So white people murder about the same as black people. There are less black people in the united states, what do you think the reason behind this is? You think black people just have more bad apples in their bunch than whites? Are blacks just more prone to be criminals? Or is it based on the conditions of their community? How did their community get that way? Was it their own doing or did it have anything to do with Jim Crow laws, were those laws racist?
Your other statistic is NY specific therefore I will not address it because I am talking about a systematic problem, not NYC which is a major metro area and therefore likely to have more crime.
"Slavery ended 150 years ago" But how long ago was it that Jim Crow was in effect? How long did it take for Jim Crow to be completely abolished? There are still signs up that say whites only because they haven't been removed--I've seen some with my own two eyes.
It's unfortunate that you cannot see the connection between the current state of the black community and the trans-atlantic slave trade, hundreds of years of enslavement followed by legal racial segregation that just ended 40 years ago--I know plenty of people who went to segregated high schools.
"The causes of this situation are complex, and reducing them to one dimensional truisms does no one any favors." I don't believe I ever said it was due to one thing. Racism in itself is highly complex and in no way one dimensional.
I really have no interest in continuing this debate with you. I'll agree to disagree.
It depends on what numbers you look at. In terms of raw imprisonment numbers the plurality of prisoners are serving time for drug and drug-related crimes and those prisoners are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. However when you look at SAMHSA surveys and other research whites and blacks use & sell drugs at about the same rates.
Looking at violent crime on the other hand (murder in particular) blacks to appear to commit those crimes at higher rates, but in terms of raw numbers, those results are minuscule compared to the number of folks imprisoned every year (something like hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand per year IIRC).
I'm doing this from memory so I can't point you to the exact sources of this information (I'm one of the several thousand Massachusetts residents who lost power last weekend and I'm writing this via smartphone) but it comes from SAMHSA and BJS data (and to a lesser extent UCR although that's not quite as useful for these discussions). If you want citations I can provide them after power is restores on Saturday or Sunday.
Maybe I can recommend Tim Wise, if you wish to delve deeper? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2mjvFNOwmc&feature=relat...)
But I do not think racist attitudes account for everything. Far more important is institutional racism. (Institutional analysis is by nature impersonal: if you replace all the individuals, the institutions will operate pretty much the same. Same racist outcomes.)
For example, I grew up on the Pacific coast and went to high school in the Seattle area. I didn't observe what I would call overt acts of racism (whether it was lack of awareness or lack of incidence is another argument). There were enough people of every ancestry possible that racism seemed like a silly idea.
Later (in my 20s) I lived in and visited many places in the Rocky Mountain area. In many communities there was a significant population of Hispanics. Too often, they were poor, typically as a consequence of recent immigration (generationally) or education. However, the social environment was unfortunately such that it reinforced negative stereotypes. By this I mean that if the only people of another race you encounter on a daily basis were poor (and everyone successful looks like you), subconsciously your behavior with regard to that population will change. There aren't enough teachers and school leaders (for example) of Hispanic descent in areas with high Hispanic populations. Research shows that this is because those that go to college choose not to teach because the salaries put them in near poverty conditions—something many are trying to escape via higher education.
(To this point, we in the U.S. have created self-reinforcing discriminatory environment years ago with segregation, which limited educational attainment to a large population. By doing so, policy and practice practically ensured poverty and its associated ills. We're getting over it, but it will take time. Moving large groups from poverty can take a couple of generations.)
In the South (I'm now in Georgia), I find that race is mostly an issue for those about 15 years older than me—those that lived during times where discrimination was more overt. As we were house hunting, more than one well-meaning (but misguided) elderly person suggested the neighborhood had gone downhill since [$race] moved in.
The social conditions where we grow up matter. The presence or absence of successful people of different races matters. Geography (and local history) matters. The extent to which people have traveled or moved from where they grew up matters.
As the poor, chubby, too-smart girl, I got smeared with all kinds of shit in elementary & middle school. Then one day I realized: it's not about me, it's about them.
It's like "sexism" too: If a bunch of sad, pathetic men hate & resent somebody and she's a woman, their insults will be sexual. But if a bunch of sad, pathetic men hate & resent another man, their comments will be equally vicious, they just aren't always sexual.
But whereas the hated men do not think "oh no, it's because I am…" or "It's because I have a penis," they realize that the reason they're being picked on is petty jealousy and that WHAT the jerks say is actually immaterial. On the other hand, a woman will assume it's actually because she's a woman.
I've watched this play out over & over & over.
The bottom line is that people are assholes, and they will pick on ANYTHING different if they want to be mean to you. That doesn't mean you should assume the reason they are mean is because you have something different. They're just assholes with an opportunistic bent.
(And by the way, I understood Grammaton above to be speaking of racist attitudes, not institutional racism. Two different things. People overfocus on attitudes and slurs; but I don't wish to sidetrack from the more important issue of institutional racism.)