Thread by @Aella_Girl

Below is a general summary of what I think is probably going on with black people in the US. This is based off memory of studies/data I've seen, but I'm open to updates if any of my facts seem wrong:

Black people are subject to greater police activity than white people, this seems supported by data.
This seems to be roughly proportional to crime black people commit; as in, low-crime black communities see roughly proportional police activity to white communities.

Racism seem to exist, but "unjustified" racism (e.g., disproportionate to crime) is relatively low and seems heavily city dependent.
So why do black communities tend to have higher crime? It seems to be fatherlessness, not poverty; poor, father-intact families have low crime.

So why do black communities tend to be more fatherless? It's partly a self-sustaining cycle; fathers are incarcerated, thus more likely to have boys who become incarcerated. But how did it start?
I'm less clear on this, it seems like this trend got going in the late 80s/early 90s

I have a poor grasp on the details around this shift, but likely due to society responding to increasing crime rates (which were in turn... due to lead or something?). Stuff like anti-drug laws, the Broken Windows policy and (ironically) the Biden Crime Law likely contributed.

A big part of this seems to be the crack cocaine epidemic (and subsequent laws around it), which primarily affected black communities. I don't know why black ppl tended to do crack more than white ppl; was it a cultural thing? Was it correlated strongly to poverty?

Regardless, this resulted in both black and white communities demonstrating strong support for harsh sentencing laws, and the result was a new, large discrepancy in which races went to prison - and the new gender ratio hit black family structures harder.

If perceived racism comes downstream of cultural effects from families fucked up by the justice system, then it makes sense we're seeing the results today - kids being raised in the broken families of the 1990s are now adults showing the effects themselves.

Not only has this resulted in the greater black crime rates we see today, but I suspect has had other effects on black culture; black men are more likely to report cheating on their partners (which makes sense as a sexual strategy if there's less sexual competition), but also

there's stronger sexual conservatism as a whole; black ppl report higher rates of religion and also lower acceptance of homosexuality and trans people. In general, the culture imo shows signs of high pressure from insecurity around childrearing.

Overall, I think that it's very had to distinguish the racism that exists today from cause vs. effect; as in, to what degree is racism a reaction to the problems black communities face, vs. the cause?

I don't know enough about the original problems - why crack cocaine hit black people, how much racism was a motivation for the laws passed to try to supposedly protect black communities. It seems like there's a good chance this was a significant incentive.

I don't think the perceived widespread racism in the US comes from white people being inherently racist; I think it's likely an amplified relationship to the difficulties caused by a specific set of (maybe racist?) policies a few decades ago.