x YouTube Video

“For people like Bill O’Reilly,” Hayes said, “there is a zero sum of concern, here. For him, this really isn’t about his interest in helping the actual human beings being killed on Chicago’s South Side. No. It’s about making a point. A point about the propensity of black people to commit violence, and then tossing them aside as violent people with ‘little discipline’ who are ‘unsupervised’ and ‘prone to imitate bad behavior.’” Hayes said, “There are about 200 million white people in America, making up about 63% of the population. In 2010, 1,179 white people were killed by black people.



Compare that number to the roughly 20,000 white people who died from accidental poisoning, 16,000 who died from accidental falls that year, or the 2,000 or so white people estimated who died from accidental drowning. In other words, Bill O’Reilly, you have more reason to be afraid of your own swimming pool than any young black man you see in a hoodie.” Rep. Barbra Lee states that "many studies have shown that low socio-economic status is the largest indicator of violence rather than race".

Just as many argue there is a correlation between a high rate of black crime, even though the fact is those statistics are repeatedly misused, skewed and distorted, they often ignore that there is also a fairly high rate of poverty among non-whites. Via Wapo.

A census report on poverty rates for various racial and ethnic groups found poverty widespread among American Indians, blacks and Hispanics. Nationwide, during 2007 and 2011, which encompasses the recession and the immediate aftermath, 43 million Americans — or slightly more than 14 percent — lived in poverty. But not every group was impacted equally. The poverty rate was 27 percent for American Indians, 26 percent for African Americans and 23 percent for Hispanics. Among whites and Asians, less than 12 percent were poor. The federal threshold for poverty is about $11,500 in annual income for an individual and about $23,000 for a family of four.

So you see the poverty rate for non-whites and non-asians is over two times higher, and also the unemployed rate is far higher as well and has been for quite some time.

There are of course a great many factors that influence this, the crumbling of the urban educational infrastructure, the automation, outsourcing and offshoring blue color jobs, our slow stumbling recovery from the second greatest financial collapse in our history which affects both black and white alike, but with the additional tendency of business to discriminate in hiring, for banks to discriminate in lending, and landlords to discriminate in housing, biased policing that drains economic resources, the drug war and mass incarceration that disenfranchises millions from the job market and most importantly the creeping deficit of hope that slowly drowns the promise of an eventual better future, the end result affects blacks somewhat more. When it came to finding one of the studies mentioned by Rep. Lee, it took all of 0.0026 seconds on google. Here is what the Bureau of Justice Statistics states.

For the period 2008–12— Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000). Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8–2.5 per 1,000). The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels. Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000). Poor persons living in urban areas (43.9 per 1,000) had violent victimization rates similar to poor persons living in rural areas (38.8 per 1,000). Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).

So, generally speaking, rates of violence for people in poverty are largely the same across racial lines it's just that there is a far higher rate of black people living in poverty in higher concentrated density, and hence, more likely in those specific areas to resort to violence, or become the victim of violence. The violence isn't tied to who or what they are, it's tied to the circumstances they're living in.

Blacks are not inherently prone to violent crime, poor people sometimes are.

Even with that fact documented, it's it interesting that when you control for poverty for poor urban blacks, that the actual rate of violence is slightly higher for poor urban whites at 56.4 incidents per 1000 white persons vs. 51.3 per 1000 black persons. It may not be more than a statistical anomaly, but it does go directly against the prevailing narrative.

It's also interesting that poor Hispanics rate of violence is not much affected by poverty and is nearly half the rate of both poor blacks and whites -perhaps because for many of them U.S. poverty is a massive upgrade from poverty in Latin America - which certainly stands in stark contrast to the claims made by the likes of Donald Trump about "immigrant rapists and killers" and the like. It is said that a man with few means and great wants may resort to desperate measures. I think we can see that this is true whether that person is white or black. So when exactly are we going to start working on our poor-on-poor crime problem? Or just on ending the problem of the poverty gap itself?