I understand your phobia of being beaten to a pulp by a mob of angry black guys might be clouding your judgment a bit.
I'm actually not scared of that. The city I live in doesn't have a high concentration of urban poor black youth. But then again, the city I grew up in did, and I wasn't too scared of it then either. I knew then, as I know now, abuse is far more likely to happen at the hands of someone you know. That being said, I find videos like these ones disturbing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE_ZFVUuL-ohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SxHOLWiUnAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB91BBPt8g4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS79au2w7LoOF COURSE there were Irish ghettos and gangs in America, just like there were Italian gangs and Jewish ghettos. The ghetto is typically where you started off when you were a poor immigrant to a big city in a far away land, and organized crime was often a source of income for marginalized communities who were not immediately integrated into society. I have to hope your knowledge of American history is at least sufficient enough for me not to have to cite examples here.
Yes, I know about the fact that they existed, that's precisely why I brought them up. And those ghettos are gone now. Why are they gone?
The difference – and this is a huge difference – is that in a racist society, the groups I mentioned above would, after a generation or two, be integrated into the overall society as “White,” or at least be able to pass as “White” when it mattered, whereas African Americans bear the mark of their history in the very hue of their faces. This leads to all sorts of discrimination and behavior confirmation that has been engrained in our society and that we are struggling to break free from. This is quite a different scenario from other groups in other cultures that were not legally segregated along racial lines up until a generation ago.
This argument doesn't take into consideration the other examples I used such as Hispanics and Asians. The other ethnic groups were NOT able to integrate as white into American society and WERE subject to the same discriminatory laws. You don't see a huge problem with violent crime in Chinatown districts of various American cities. You don't see a huge problem with fatherlessness and recidivism in Hispanic communities.
And it also fails to address why we don't see the same kind of ghettos filled with former slaves in other countries that also had slavery like England or China. If it's inherent to one's ancestors having been enslaved, why don't the descendants of other slaves suffer the same fate?
As for people “glorifying” “thug-life,” then I’d love to ask you WHO exactly is doing this glorification? Are you talking about hip hop music? The media? Who? And who in turn is the biggest consumer of this “glorification.”
Sure, that's a good start to a list. Also good old-fashioned peer pressure, which youth with a lack of strong parental support are more susceptible to. If 1/4 of your class has dropped out of school, the richest guy you know is a drug pusher, and the most reliable source of income for you is crime, then yeah, you're going to look favorably on that lifestyle.
And, dear god, I’m not even going to waste my time picking through your posts about the enforcement of laws, particularly non-violent drug offences. All I will ask is that you reference statistics on the use of drugs – which make up a significant amount of the “crime” that Black people are convicted for, and compare that against drug usage in the rest of non-colored America.
Let's say you smoke weed twice a week but the police are only called to your apartment complex once in an entire month, and they went there to respond with a cat stuck in a tree, not a crime. Then let's say that John also smokes weed twice a week but he lives in an apartment complex that has had the police called to it 3 times a week, one of those being for a drug offense, one being for reports of a shooting, and one being for disorderly conduct. Which of you is more likely to run into the police while carrying around your weed? Which one of your neighborhoods are the police more likely to be nervous about when they're responding to the call? Yes, it's not fair, but racism isn't the only possible explanation.
Topic: Opinion: Black Lives Matter is a Terrorist Group