askchapo

which could be twisted to say that Afros do 2-3 times the crime rate, as the Reason article once noted... could you explain that...

I would explain it by first going over the failure of the drug war and how it was created specifically to target racial minorities as well as youth movements in general. It comes back down to anti-communism, they needed a way to grab these activist groups that were mostly minorities and youth when they weren't protesting. Drugs were a great excuse to do that. Now you can enter their homes, arrest them, jail them, put leverage on them to flip because you smell weed. Of course then there is the importing of drugs to also disrupt these communities but that's a rabbit hole for this discussion. This is why you see so many drug arrests for all ethnic groups and for younger people and for poorer people. In fact, that's most of the crime, given by the very stats they use. A small portion of crime both generally and specifically is violent. But even then violent crimes such as gun violence can also be explained in a way that doesn't rely on skull measurements and eugenics. Poor people start illegal businesses and violence is used to enforce illegal property ownership, just like it is in legitimate, legal business. Gang violence and drug dealer shootouts make sense in that light. They're not animal-minded thugs, they're people trying to protect their own sources of income and material security. Drugs have been turned into an exploitative black market precisely so people destroy themselves without state intervention.

We could also talk about the history of criminal enforcement, the origins of police, the institutionalization of crime, the self defenses capitalism creates when faced with a group of people who don't want to participate in capitalism. Because it's all relevant.

It's a bit like asking to explain why sunlight is white but only using equations. I can give you an equation for fusing hydrogen and the energy it gives off, and another equation for taking that energy and turning into a wavelength. But it doesn't really do any good without the conceptual stuff. You need to know how stars form and some chemistry and other physics to really understand. Knowing the numbers alone isn't enough. The social science equivalent of that is history. If we just focus purely on stats, there's enough room for everyone to write their own narrative. So you gotta bring some narrative to the argument.