Analysis of Racism: Misattribution of Income-Level Aggression

Nikita, I think I get the essence of what you're trying to illustrate here, but -- and perhaps it's just my quick reading of your analysis -- I think you have some more work to do for your hypothesis to be accurate.
Just a couple of notes/questions:

I chose the black population as there is no immigration that would complicate analysis.

I think here you make a classic overstatement. "Blacks" are not a monolithic group. There are blacks who have immigrated to this country from not only Africa, but South America, the Carribean, Europe and elsewhere, and arrived in this country during the timeframe you selected.

this post may be considered as a bit of an apology. When we immigrated in 91, I was picked on by some black kids and, consequently, developed an instinctual fear and discomfort of black people

This might explain some of the "kinks" in the hypothesis. Would have developed the same fear if the kids that picked on you had the same skin color, or were from your ethnic group? Is it being a new kid or was it an ethnic difference that played the major role in your fear and discomfort?

1) Violent crime by blacks went noticeably down
2) The black population income distribution clearly improved

Perhaps you explain this better elsewhere, but I don't think you've established clearly how these statistics are related to your hypothesis.

1) When there is a wave of immigration, the immigrants tend to start by populating primarily the lower class thus leading to racism.

Here again, I think you have reached a conclusion without logical basis, especially since you wanted to eliminate immigration from your analysis. Not all immigrants are lower class, or even "primarily" lower class. How do low class immigrants "lead to" racism?

Education on the misattribution of violence within income levels could accelerate assimilation of these immigrants into our society by eliminating unnecessary animosity. This has been and is presently an issue with Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese and will likely become an issue with North Korea after it collapses.

I don't think immigrants would be "assimilated" any faster (in or out of their "income levels") because children were taught about "misattribution of violence." (I'm not getting the reference to the other ethnic groups you list here. Again, maybe it's stated better elsewhere.) Opinions about ethnicities other than your own are not developed from a single source. That is, if your parents tell you black people stink, violence has nothing to do with it. You would be conditioned to consider any aroma emanting from a black person to be unpleasant (stink) and far less likely to consider it pleasant (perfume). If your same ethnicity friends say black people are not as smart as you, you become conditioned to consider all blacks stupid. I think you may have overlooked these other factors which affect one ethnicity's perception of another.

2) This perception lends additional credibility...

I think this paragraph is really what you want to say, and everything else is dancing around it. I think you're trying find a way to justify Affirmative Action and other civil/social rights programs, but don't want to come right out and say it. I think here you're saying racism -- bigotry, prejudice, social injustice -- are wrong because they negatively impact a group based on groundless or false beliefs about an ethnic group. That affects them across the board and although it is not the best solution, some form of redress (affirmative action) is necessary until a different solution can be found.

I think I'd say you get to the right answer eventually, but there is a lot of faulty math along the way.

"1) Violent crime by blacks went noticeably down"

That's not what your graph states. It shows that violent crime against blacks noticeably decreased.

If the question is in regard to "social class" and violence and low income, you could have used low income, low social class whites -- even an immigrant class to prove your theory that is "misattribution of social characteristics." Hence, you could have studied Russian immigrants to New York City from the same time period. You have immigrants of the same ethnicity. You have immigrants of varying social statuses. You have a violence component. You have acquisition of wealth and financial security. And you have perceptions about that class made by your control group: middle class western european origin whites. (that is white americans of western european ancestry aka WASP).

Here is the problem... it's finally hit me... A few years ago there was a book that hit the bestseller list called "The Bell Curve." It tried to present as mathematical fact, the inferiority of blacks. The thesis of that book has been soundly debunked. Your research reminds me of that.

As I said, the ultimate result of your argument achieved a reasonable answer, i just disagree with your research. But I have to commend you for trying. Thanks Nikita...

I have heard something like this argument before, I'm interested in looking further at your data.

And thus, if left alone, I propose that given enough time, the term race will seize to have any negative connotation due to even distribution of peoples throughout the society and race will be used to signify nothing more than physical characteristics.

(Quoted from the link)

I don't agree with that at all. If you look at the amount of time which has passed between now and the civil war, it's rather impressive that things have not "settled out further." There are still massive differences between the black and white races, socioeconomically speaking.

My perception (which I'm not able to back up with numbers right now, but I wanted to hear your response to it) is that although there were major changes in the sixties and seventies, there really hasn't been that much to improve things lately.

I just did a simple search of ""black on white" violence homicide" at ask.com and then checked out a couple of the links, No Censorship
Richard Boyden

Just click on a few of these links and read a few paragraphs of the statistical interpretations. Now, I'm no statistician, and certainly not gifted with statistical reasoning, but time after time one encounters such disproportion. I'm not going to address Nikita's argument regarding income level and violent crime. However it seems to me that the simple graphs showing contrasted percentages of interracial violence over time cannot do justice to the reality of the racial disparities. I know blacks have good reason to decry policy decisions and social norms that have put them at a disadvantage, but I am willing to conclude that such disparities of interpersonal violent crime underlie much of the prejudice, here meaning "pre-judgement", that blacks encounter. Regardless of the social and historical causes, it would seem rational, as in ratio, for whites to have more fear, when it comes to personal violence, of blacks than blacks of whites on the streets of America. Please believe me when I say I am open to correction.

One of the dates that struck me in your statistics was 1970, a high point of violence due to the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war. I was in high school, crime was in general very high, much of it was unreported. I think black crime was much more likely to be prosecuted. There was also a tipping point aspect that people were angry because they were fed up. In the late 60's I remember walking down the street and watch a man physically kick a black child out of his way, the child was about 5. 15-20 year later my sister was at a stop light when the store next to her was fire bombed, that entire section of the city erupted in violence. It's hard to tie race to a violent mass rebellion that has sometimes been statistically compared to the American revolution.

What we often argue when we discuss race is whether we create an oppressed people or poverty is an inevitable part of every social structure. However I think the more fair comparison is Black people were a highly skilled part of society that were deprived of the right to compete and had no empowered structure to go to battle with. In comparison Native Americans were systematically exterminated and almost no longer exist. Racism is very real and a problem. When you create a class of people who do not experience or expect social fairness, that is classism. Racism may result in a kind of classism but it's a double failure. A victim of racism must overcome every other social stigma in addition to the requirement that their race succeed above all other world races.

In the global perspective of racism I think Whites can expect to experience racism because a lot of the world is not White. Already Europeans and Americans are considered technically poor which will surely affect their place in the future. Most immigrants from overseas are professionals and immigrants from the South are labor, which increases classism. Both have displaced black workers for different reasons.

There's a very good article in the NY Times today on the Kipp program and why it works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?pagewanted=6&ei=5087%0A&em&en=996a8a48d175d21e&ex=1164690000

As a student of sociology, I find this article very interesting. I would suggest that you take a look at this article: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime. I'm not sure if you are familiar with the research (or its controversy), but apparently, the economist Steven Levitt proposes that the legalization of abortion is a probable cause of the major drop in crime that occurred during the 90's. He argues that the children who would have been born would be more likely to grow up in conditions which are often precursors to criminal behavior.

Other than that, I agree with you. This is an aspect of racism that is entirely overlooked (as far as my curriculum is concerned). Well done.

Nikita, your addendum is moving you closer to a more accurate answer. However, I would like to see the observer's role in this "misattribution" problem. I think you do demonstrate crime went down, but based on your proof, we are still short of information that shows the observer (or the person making the false accusation) has altered his opinion in light of new facts.

That is, if Observer A sees a lot of poor black people, he assumes all black people must be similarly situated. If Observer A sees a black person commit a crime against another black person (or commits a crime against him), he assumes that black people are more likely to commit crime, and more likely to commit it against him (his past experience) because they are poor (because he believes all black people are poor.) Thus in his perception all black people are poor and criminal. From this all other judgements about blacks are made. (Can't hire them, they're criminals... etc.)

-- If the number of poor black people decreases and the rate of black on black crime drops (but does not end completely), does Observer A change his belief, or continue to believe the same thing, because there are still poor black people and there is still (albeit less) black on black crime?

-- What is the catalyst that changes Observer A's perception?
-- What if Observer A continues to see black people portrayed as criminals on TV (news or entertainment shows) or movies at the same rate, even though the actual rate of black crime (misnomer) has decreased?

Who owns the problem of "misattribution"? Not the black person whom you are measuring, but the white observer who has reached a flawed conclusion. Can you rework your calculations to measure the observer and not the one being observed?

You'll have to gather a large enough sample... Finding a diverse population may mean doing some preliminary work at a shopping mall or sporting event... not to do the study but to contact enough people to move them into a study group. Of course I wouldn't tell them up front what the test is about... Make it about the plot for a movie or something innocuous on the surface and thenget into the study. That might give you a variety of race, age, gender, socio-economic backgrounds, etc.

I skimmed through this, and I might be wrong, but here's what I would like to see that would make it more solid in my eyes.

Take two low income sub-groups: whites and blacks. determine the rate of violence among that population. Track as they move to a higher economic standing, and see if both groups reduce violence equally. Also conduct the opposite trial: observing people as they sink into lower economic brackets and see if one race becomes more prone to violence than the other. Of course there are a million variables here, such as community and friends, but if there is no difference that might show something.

Here's my other question: If violence is a direct consequence of race, have African, Latino, and Asian nations been more prone to violence than European nations? Based on race and history, couldn't the point be made that Europeans are actually more likely to commit cross-race violence and oppression. That being said, if race a predominant factor in determining likelihood of either same-race or cross-race violence, history shows that people of darker skin have much more to fear from people of whiter skin.