Thread by @docgotham

1/ Poverty Causes Violent Crime, Right? Not Necessarily

Have we read Kevin D. Williamson’s ‘Big White Ghetto’ yet?

quote/

“The overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two-thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average,

2/ according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.”

[...]

There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York.

3/ It’s a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that

4/ would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation intended, as peasants. Thinking about the future here, with its bleak prospects, is not much fun at all. So instead of too much black-minded

5/ introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, the healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency,

6/ tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, The Draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short; the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier

7/ than a man in Fairfax County, Va. And they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007.

If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.

/quote

nationalreview.com/2013/12/white-…