What would be some fact that, while true, could be told in a context or way that is misinfomating or make the other person draw incorrect conclusions?
What would be some fact that, while true, could be told in a context or way that is misinfomating or make the other person draw incorrect conclusions?
I don’t know if this counts, since it’s only a “true fact” if you are fine with carefully chosen words and the omission of crucial information…
But the 13-50 stat is dangerously misleading.
You know,
Note: these days, black people are 16% of the U.S. population. I’ll be referring to it as 16 from this point on.
Black people in America do, in fact, make up 50% of the murder arrests according to FBI crime statistics
That much is true.
But certain people tend to use this fact to assert that police officers – far more likely to be killed by black people than by white people – are actually holding back around black people to avoid appearing racist.
The users of this stat heavily imply black people are more violent and murder-prone, and hence a greater threat. The argument also carries with it an implied benefit to eugenics or a return to slavery (to anyone paying attention.)
But no one using this stat ever explores potential causes for the arrest rate disparity, instead letting their viewers assume it comes from “black culture” (if they are closeted racists) or “bad genes” (if they are open racists).
There’s no attention paid to the fact that black people make up over half of overturned wrongful convictions
There’s no attention paid to the stats further down in that same FBI crime stats table that make it clear that black people make up 25% of the nation’s drug arrests, despite making up close to 16% of the US’s total drug users. (Their population’s rate of drug use is within a margin of error of white people’s rate of drug use). So it should be strange they make up such an outsized portion of the total drug arrests in this country.
There’s no attention paid to the fact that more than half of US murders go unsolved, and in a country where 98% of the land is owned by white people and the public defender system is in shambles? Well, the murder arrest rate winds up just being a measure of which demographics can afford the best lawyers, rather than any proportional representation of each demographic’s tendencies.
There’s also no appreciation given for the fact that of the 511 felony murders committed against police from 2010 to 2019, 55 of them (or 10.8%) were committed by black people, meaning police are no more likely to get killed by a black person than a white person.
None of that. The people hawking this statistic intentionally lead their viewers to assume, “arrested for murder” is equivalent to “guilty of murder.” And that the entire demographic can be safely assumed to be more dangerous.
The thing about this is that the kind of people who quote statistics like that typically don’t have an interest in all of that. They start with a racist assertion, then search for anything that appears to corroborate. They have no interest in actually understanding the statistic, they only care about it insofar as they believe it justifies their racism.
That, or they know it doesn’t and they’re purposely arguing in bad faith.
Yeah… that’s a pretty reasonable conclusion. It’s hard to just state outright though, when I live with the exact sort of person described in your comment.
It’s interesting: the people who are fine with calling an entire race murderous seem to take great umbrage at being considered “racist.”
It’s the r-word to them – a slur used to invalidate their concerns and diminish the importance of their well-being.
That their concerns ought to be invalidated – since they are the racist result of racist fear-mongering – is never well-received.
You just became my first saved post on lemmy because this is such a succinct and well cited comment to counteract that bullshit. I just want to be able to pull up your links when I’m in a debate.
I’ve seen similar stuff multiple times, often with misquoted statistics. What many miss is that context is as important as stats.
This guy facts.
Omfg, thank you so much for this. I find it repulsive that pos 9gaggers post 50/13 as a mantra to every post that includes black people, but no one would really want to understand from where those numbers come up😡
The real bottom line is that when you create an underclass of people whose neighborhoods get firebombed or bulldozed when they get too affluent (see e.g. “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa and Auburn Avenue (formerly “the richest Negro street in the world”) in Atanta, respectively) and had generations of absent fathers due to persecution for things like “vagrancy”, of course they’re going to stop giving a shit about laws that bind but do not protect them! It’s entirely rational that people systematically excluded from being able to get ahead while acting within the law, and whose behaviors are deliberately criminalized in order to target them, would end up committing crimes at higher rates than the people benefiting from their oppression did. In other words, even if it’s true that they actually commit crimes at higher rates (as opposed to being accused at higher rates or being less likely to avoid conviction, as you pointed out, which just make the statistical bias even worse by compounding on top), even that is disingenous because it ignores that the disparity is caused by classism and institutional racism, not anything intrinsic to their race itself. The fiction that it’s somehow their own fault is like a society-wide version of “stop hitting yourself.”
Oh 100% this. The main accomplishment of Tulsa and Auburn was keeping black people impoverished, and…
For as long as society insists on high inequality with one race forcefully held at the bottom, no rational person can expect that race to be peaceful.
It’s just… I have a hard time bringing this concept to the table in a debate with people who believe “personal responsibility” can somehow magically indemnify society against its impact on people.
In fact, I am generally speechless when debating such people. It’s such an alien worldview to me. How can personal responsibility actually make society irrelevant? And since when?
The kinds of people who spout the 13-50 argument basically believe NOTHING society does can increase or decrease murder (except, when convenient, being “too soft on children” or “soft on crime.”)