Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles

A commenter notes that genes provide a range of behaviors, and culture may not be able to move group performance much outside of that range. The suggestion by that commenter was that genes will predispose some populations to relatively high crime, and culture can only make it lower or higher, but it’s never going to be all that low. Allow me to differ on that for a moment. Check out my post on the Moriori. In a nutshell, the Polynesians are widely regarded as extremely violent people. They were violent as Hell on contact, and their oral histories indicated a culture of extreme violence dating back as far as we can tell. They seem to have been some of the most violent folks on Earth. The Maori were some of the most violent of all of the Polynesians. To this day, they have very high rates of general instability, drug abuse, domestic violence, and all sorts of crime, including violent crime. They are are regarded as having hair trigger tempers and for being highly aggressive. They have all of the social pathologies of US Blacks, though their IQ’s seem to be higher. (IQ = 91). The Moriori were a Maori subgroup that colonized the Chatham Islands in the 1600’s. They started out being typically maniacal Maoris, but after a while of that, it become clear that they were going to massacre each other. A leader came unto them and saw God. He became a religious leader, and all of the people followed him. He ordered them to renounce all violence. For the next 300 years, they were possibly one of the least violent people on Earth. Homicide was basically unheard of, and so was rape. Conflict was settled by a twig as wide as your index finger. At the first blood it was over and done with, and the conflict was buried. Around the 1830’s, the Maori came to the Chatham Islands. They attacked the Moriori and the Moriori were so pacifist they would not even fight back. They were quickly massacred, enslaved and cannibalized. Few survived. Now, how does the most violent tribe on Earth become the most pacifist tribe on Earth? It’s clear to me that Polynesians are genetically primed for violence and aggression, but it’s also clear that a strong culture can completely overcome that. Genes provide the clay, culture is the sculptor. Now, the question is, how can these profound gene-warping cultures work? Sadly, I think they work best in small tribes and villages. In large cities and big societies, I don’t think these super-cultures can take hold. They just get washed out by the genes. So in large cities and with huge populations, genes will predominate, and maybe culture has limited effects. In very small populations, culture can be a super-warper. There is also the possibility that some races are more “plastic” than other races. Polynesians may be a “plastic race” that is highly susceptible to cultural effects. Amerindians may be another one. There are Amazonian tribes right near the “most violent people on Earth”, the Yanomamo, that, like the Moriori, are some of the pacifist people on Earth. A problem with Blacks is that they seem to commit lots of crime just about everywhere. I am willing to entertain the possibility that Blacks may not be as “plastic” or as effected by super-culture, as, say, Polynesians and Amerindians are. The Dyula are an exception, and they are Blacker than people Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Aborigines, Africa, Amerindians, Anthropology, Arabs, Blacks, Capitalism, Caribbean, Crime, Criminology, Cuba, Cultural, Dominica, Dyala, East Indians, Economics, Hispanics, Intelligence, Inuit, Islam, Left, Maori, Marxism, Melanesians, Moriori, Mozambique, New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Polynesians, Psychology, Race Realism, Race/Ethnicity, Roma, Russia, Socialism, Sociology, South Africa, Whites33 Comments on Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles

Blacks and Crime: An Examination

Repost from the old site. Note: This post has been accused, as usual, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism. Black crime rate in the US is approximately 8.1 times greater than the White crime rate. It is about 36.8 times higher than the US Asian rate, which itself is 4.6 times lower than the White rate. It is even 4 times higher than the US Amerindian and Polynesian (mostly Hawaiian) crime rates. It is also 2.4 times higher than the extremely high Hispanic crime rate. These rates are young Black males, and that Black males around 30-45+ have often got it figured out, no matter what they were like as kids. If they settle down, have some kids and own or rent a home, they often relax and are fairly peaceful and easy to deal with. I say this because my car has broken down a couple of times in the heart of the Los Angeles Black ghetto, and both times Black males around this age came out and worked on my engine to try to get it going again. Blacks have .3 standard deviation excess in aggressiveness across surveys (actually, that is not a tremendously elevated rate of aggression), including Interpol. Sailer points out that there is no discrimination involved in higher black suspension rates in schools. I would agree with that, and add, as a former teacher who taught in Black inner city schools for years, that the only discrimination is probably that far fewer Black students are suspended than ought to be. I would also add that Black 11th and 12th graders, even in the ghetto, are exceptionally well-behaved, all of the idiots being out of school, in jail, juvey or boot camp, or dead, by then. In death row sentencing, Sailer notes that the only bias is towards White inmates and this applies even to the South. What Sailer means by that is that Whites are actually more likely than Blacks to get the death penalty for the same crime, even in the South. Obviously, the days of White racist hanging juries are pretty much through in this country, even in the South. Gene Expression (not my favorite blog at all), quoting Le Griffe Du Lion (not my favorite White racist academic at all) on violent crime: Le Griffe messes around with some figures and comes up with a .84 correlation of I must point out that Le Griffe Du Lion is an academic lab coat racist, and a true White Supremacist, with a stated agenda of getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws in the US. Yet Black crime rates are not adequately explained on a global basis merely by presence of Blacks. For instance, the Miami Herald (dead link) quotes the World Health Organization saying that Latin America, with a mixed Caucasian-Amerindian population, has a higher homicide rate (27.5 per 100,000) than even Black Africa (22 per 100,000), lily-White but organized crime-overrun Eastern Europe (15 per 100,000) and Industrialized nations – generally speaking, the West (1 per 100,000). Furthermore, other studies show that the mixed Caucasian-Amerindians of Latin America, with only 8 percent of the global population, account for 75 percent of the world’s kidnappings. Clearly, there is something other than pure genetics at work in high Latin American crime rates. I know it’s heresy in these free market times to mention this, but perhaps, could an insane gap between rich and poor, among the worst on Earth, have a might bit to do with this? Gini coefficient map for Latin America. Oh no, of course not, capitalism doesn’t cause any problems, and all societal problems are caused by too much socialism. How do I know this? Wikipedia told me 10,000 times so far, and Wikipedia is God, you know. Shall we end this on a upbeat tone? Please do. Given the genetics that Blacks bring to the table, Black crime rates can either be relatively higher or relatively lower, depending on societal variables. A recognition that Blacks bring a different genetic set to the table, which may make them more susceptible to crime, is essential in devising societal actions to reduce Black crime. What works for other races with different genetic sets may not work for Blacks with their own mental toolbox. This is why race realism or racialism is so important. One suggestion I would like to make as a socialist is that socialism seems to dramatically reduce Black crime. Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, has a homicide rate 5 In Mozambique in the 1980’s there was a Communist regime under one of my heroes, Samora Machel. The crime rate was almost nonexistent. They were all poor together. According to a resident, anyone, male or female, native or foreigner, could walk across the all-Black capital city, Maputo, in the middle of the night, with scarcely a worry. Abiola Lapite, one of my least favorite human beings on Earth, does note that there is a tribe called the Dioula in Burkina Faso who have a homicide rate of 1.3/100,000, nearly as low as Japan’s rate of 1.1/100,000. Why don’t we get some Western criminologists over to Burkina Faso to study the very Black Dioula? Until there is a recognition of the existence of race as a salient variable in human diversity, and that races may differ genetically and biologically on behavioral outcomes, this will never occur. Genetics provides the clay. Culture or society is the sculptor. No Black population anywhere is doomed to an insane crime rate. If the Dioula can do it, so can any Blacks anywhere.

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