This thread is drifting from the original topic. As I pointed out earlier, a lot of the disparity comes from black men committing crimes at higher rates, graduating from high school at lower rates, and lower rates of college attendance, much less college graduation. If you don’t meet the minimum requirements for the job or have a criminal record, you’re unlikely to get hired, no matter what name you put on the resume.
In this study, incarceration rates, graduation rates and college attendance are outcomes. They are things that need to be explained. If black boys from the top quintile have a lower high school graduation rate (I haven’t checked, but they probably do), why is that? Are these factors something about the environment they are growing up in? Are teachers treating black boys and white boys the same?
Do black boys who live in lower-bias areas have a higher graduation rate, everything else held constant? That is not under their control. If a black boy does better with black fathers (not his own) in his neighborhood, that’s very little under control of that black boy.
When we see a white young man who killed someone and terrorized an entire city with bombs called “a very challenging young man,” when we see a white teenage boy who murdered his girlfriend and shot another boy called “lovesick,” while black teenagers whose only offense is a smart mouth get called “thugs,” it’s easy to see that black teenage boys and white teenage boys are not treated equally for equal behavior-- and that is not under the control of the black boys and their families.
Wishing that the crime rate is just the same across all groups is a disservice, because until you recognize the problem properly, you cannot have useful discussions, which is the first step to solving the problem.
As to whether or not we can know the underlying crime rate, it depends upon the crime. For example, incarceration rates of drug dealers by race would be a poor way to estimate underlying crime rate, because it is highly dependent upon possible racism by the arresting officers and the criminal justice system.
On the other hand, something like murder can provide a much better estimate because 1) It is hard to fake a dead body that doesn’t exist, and 2) It is hard to ignore a dead body that does exist, and 3) The vast majority of murder victims are killed by people of their own race. In the case black victims, it is estimated that about 90% of the assailants were also black.
The FBI link at the bottom of this post shows that in 2016, that out of 9374 murder/manslaughter arrests, 4935 were black or about 53% of the total. Given that blacks are about 12.3% of the population, this suggests a crime rate of about 4.2x that of the overall population. In reality it is likely worse than this, because, as the Brennan Center link below shows, the clearance rate for black victims is unfortunately lower than the clearance rate for white victims.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21
I think that we need to talk about peer influences.
Well I wish that it were, but I don’t think it is.
Cognitive ability and conscientiousness are highly correlated with crime rate and school completion besides job performance. We have known this for a long time.
Social science is infamous for statistical sleight of hand, besides p-hacking, it is easy to manipulate data to find significance, or torturing the data until it confesses. Then there is publication bias-the selective reporting of positive results. Why the lack of replication studies? because we all know many if not most are done to confirm the investigators’ biases. This is an open secret.
There is one and only one area that can stand up to scrutiny decade after decade- psychometric. It has a high degree of reliability and predictive validity that no other area of social science can come remotely close to matching. Yet we are doing our best to ignore it. I just don’t understand.
@roethlisburger You’re simplifying this a lot. I don’t think the studies with the resumes were comparing high school drop outs to college graduates…
Criminality has been mentioned quite a bit in this thread, but white men with criminal records even fare better than black men without records.
This study is focused on low pay, low skill jobs(ex. fast food worker). I wouldn’t extrapolate those results to the broader job market.
Let’s see. White men with criminal records fare better than black men without, when applying for entry level jobs. Black people get turned away from rentals when white potential renters are shown the rental.
Black boys fare better when they grow up in areas with less racial bias. How, how can we explain this? Oh, yeah, it’s because there’s something wrong with black boys.
@roethlisburger Im trying to figure out where I extrapolated those results to the broader market???
I specifically said , “** since it has been mentioned in this thread**”…
I honestly don’t need any of these studies to know that bias exists , as I am married to a Black man, and have raised a Black son. The original study and some of the other studies mentioned ring true for many POC.
@partyof5 I don’t understand why there is assumed incompetence based on color. I agree with you. I’m glad you posted justice center link. I was going to post same thing.
What many on this thread seem to not be acknowledging is that black men do not need to fix the problem, society needs to fix their problem with black men. Someone said black men should try to emulate black women, how does that prevent the treatment of black men in society? It seems to me, if we go back to OP’s original post, that if we are talking about educated families the responsibility is not on black men to do the right thing. It’s already been done.
@IfYouOnlyKnew I wish there was a love button on here!!
This is a link from an article in the Chicago Tribune from a couple of years ago. I think it provides food for thought. By the way Naperville is a relatively wealthy suburb of Chicago. If you have trouble reading the article, try the “reader view”. If you want the original FB post the article is based on, click the link in the first paragraph.
Instead of writing this:
, it would have been more accurate to say that white men with criminal records do slightly better than black men without records, when competing for entry-level jobs which don’t require any education past high school. Not including the last qualifier overstates the scope of the study. For example, HS black men had a 6.5% response rate without a criminal record and a 6.2% response rate with one for online applications. Does that mean having a felony conviction has almost no impact on your employment options? That would be ridiculous. Instead, it shows what a limited range of jobs were included in the study.
We get it. You don’t believe there’s racism, systemic or not, in the U.S. And no amount of studies will change your mind.
@katliamom thank you
@88jm19 thanks for the article. I am very familiar with Naperville and the fact that the cop claimed there was gang activity was absurd! I’ve lost count of how many of my friends sons and my family members have been pulled over in similar scenarios.
Or perhaps that result could have come from employers in question assuming that “black man = criminal” regardless of whether such an applicant actually had a record?
I recently went for my interview for TSA precheck/global entry interview and the TSA agent seemed shocked I didn’t have a record. He even repeated the question as if I didn’t hear him the first time. I wanted to read him so bad, but since I needed my app processed I figured that wouldn’t be a good idea.