A Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison. They Could Only Find 1 Answer: Systemic Racism

[Superbadbrutha]

TRANSLATION:
More black people are in jail. Therefore, we must destroy America's constitution and replace it with communism.

Fuck off, Harvard.

How about Justice is supposed to be blind and we need to make Justice EQUAL for all Americans no matter what their skin color.

 

[Superbadbrutha]

they had money. But some of them, not much of a father. Ivanka about 11, Eric was about 8, and Tiffany about 6, when broke up the families. We'll see how long he stays with Melanie & Barron.

Who woudda thunk it?

Libertine libs were for divorce before they were against it

Yep and you used to claim to be the party of family values, moral and blah, blah, blah. Well all the bullshit went out the window.

 

[Mac-7]

Yep and you used to claim to be the party of family values, moral and blah, blah, blah.


Well all the bullshit went out the window.

I dont think so

Trump was an imperfect man, but we elected him to be president, not our spiritual leader

Trump voters still believe in God

Still believe in marriage between one man and one woman only

They still frown on adultry and abortion

They still salute the flag and teach their children to do the same

None of that changed by electing trump who puts America first, unlike democrats

 

[Burgermeister]

You know, instead of searching for excuses and justification, there is another school of thought that might have more practical application -

 

[frigidweirdo]

Or is it that white people want to keep black people down and as such the system turns them into criminals?

Correct and this is how they did it

A History of Tolerance for Violence Has Laid the Groundwork for Injustice Today
We are living in America’s era of mass incarceration. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, this nation holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners—and many more people impacted by its crime policies. More than 2.1 million Americans are incarcerated in jails and prisons, up from less than 200,000 in 1972, while over 4.6 million more are on probation or parole. These numbers are not faceless. African Americans make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, but constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of the incarcerated, and 42 percent of those on death row. African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are all more likely to be arrested, jailed awaiting trial, and sentenced to jail or prison when compared to white Americans. Perhaps the starkest statistic, recent data predicted one of every three black boys, and one of six Latino boys, born in 2001 would go to jail or prison within their lifetimes if current trends continue.

In some ways, these statistics outline a contemporary problem—but the challenges they describe are legacies of systems much older and deeper. The same judgments about criminality, race, and control that led one Mississippi official in 1865 to remark, “Emancipation will require a system of prisons,” still color our political discourse and policy outcomes. And the widespread yet largely unknown story of racial terror lynching continues to shape our lives.

View attachment 490368

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to the thousands of people killed in racist lynchings

The experiences of African Americans murdered and terrorized by mob violence for generations between Emancipation and the struggle for civil rights, alongside the virtual inaction of local and federal law enforcement and lawmakers, lay the groundwork for the inequality and injustice we face today. Understanding the current system’s roots in racism and dehumanization is critical to extracting the problem and growing something better.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 12 million African people were kidnapped, chained, and brought to the Americas after a torturous journey across the Atlantic Ocean. In the United States, the labor of enslaved black people fueled economic growth, while an ideology of white supremacy and racial difference was created to justify slavery as morally acceptable. In the nineteenth century, a thriving plantation economy and forcible taking of land from Native people increased demand for enslaved labor and, through the domestic slave trade, the South’s enslaved population rose dramatically.

After the South’s defeat in a bloody Civil War, the nation adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery “except as punishment for crime,” while leaving intact a bitter resistance to racial equality. Continued support for white supremacy and racial hierarchy meant that slavery in America did not end—it evolved. The identities of many white Americans, especially in the South, were grounded in the belief that they were inherently superior to African Americans. Many white people reacted violently to the requirement to treat their former “human property” as equals and pay for their labor. In the first two years after the war, thousands of black people were murdered for asserting freedom or basic rights; cities like Memphis and New Orleans were sites of violent mob attacks on black communities.

Between 1868 and 1871, a wave of terror swept across the South, resulting in the deaths of thousands of African Americans—some killed merely for failing to obey a white person. Congressional efforts to provide federal protection and civil rights to formerly enslaved black people were undermined by the United States Supreme Court’s rulings in cases like The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872); United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1875); and United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). Soon, Northern politicians retreated from a commitment to protect black people and Reconstruction collapsed. In 1877, federal troops were removed from the region and white Southerners used their regained power to bar black people from voting; legalize racial segregation; and create an exploitative economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming that would keep African Americans indentured and poor for generations.

Convict leasing—a horrific system in which black people were convicted of crimes under discriminatory “Black Code” laws and then leased to private businesses to labor under inhuman conditions for state profit—created a new kind of bondage some scholars have described as “worse than slavery.” At the same time, Jim Crow and racial integrity laws prohibited social interactions between people of different races, especially black men and white women. Lynching soon emerged as a primary tool to enforce racial hierarchy and oppression while terrorizing black people into accepting abusive mistreatment and subordination. Federal, state, and local governments largely tolerated these terrorist acts.

Often committed in broad daylight and sometimes “on the courthouse lawn,” racial terror lynchings were directly tied to the history of enslavement and the re-establishment of white supremacy after the Civil War. These lynchings were also distinct from hangings and mob violence committed against white people because they were intended to terrorize entire black communities and enforce racial hierarchy. Unlike frontier justice in the West, racial terror lynchings generally took place in communities with functioning criminal courts—viewed as too good for African Americans. Despite its lawlessness and terrifying unpredictability, lynching was sanctioned by law enforcement and elected officials, and the perpetrators acted boldly and with impunity. Victims were sometimes publicly tortured for hours before their brutalized bodies were left out on display to traumatize other black people. Members of the mob frequently documented their atrocities by posing for photographs with a dangling, bloodied, or burnt corpse.

Most of the more than 4,400 documented victims of racial terror lynching killed between 1877 and 1950 were killed in the 12 Southern states; Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana were among the deadliest. Several hundred additional victims were lynched in other regions, with the highest numbers in Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. Many more victims were undocumented and remain unknown. This brutality continued into the twentieth century, and national leaders and mainstream media outlets quickly learned to use white supremacist views and pro-lynching rhetoric for political gain. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt declared, “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” An editorial in the Memphis Avalanche Appeal advised, “Let [the black man] keep his hands off white women and lynching will soon die out.”

“[If] it requires lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts,” white women’s rights activist Rebecca Felton wrote in the Atlanta Journal in 1898, “then I say lynch a thousand a week if necessary.”

Sexual violence became the most common justification for deadly vigilante violence targeting black men and terrorizing black communities. In fact, fewer than 25 percent of documented African American lynching victims were accused of sexual assault and less than 30 percent were accused of murder. Because African Americans were presumed guilty and dangerous, accusations lodged against them were rarely scrutinized; nearly all were lynched without an investigation, much less a trial. Shortly after Reuben Sims was lynched for assaulting a white woman in Baldwin County, Alabama, in 1904, the local sheriff admitted he was innocent but nonetheless refused to arrest any members of the lynch mob.

When 17-year-old Henry Smith was accused of killing a white girl in Paris, Texas, in 1893, he was quickly captured and condemned without trial or investigation. On February 1, a mob of 10,000 people gathered from across the state to watch as Henry was paraded through town on a carnival float, forced onto a 10-foot-high platform at the county fairgrounds, brutally tortured for nearly an hour, and then burned alive. “Caucasian Vengeance for African Barbarity,” declared a Fort Worth Daily Gazette headline above an article describing the fate of the “Animal Form of Rapist-Murderer-Savage-Fiendish Negro, Henry Smith.”

In common but much-less-publicized incidents, lynching victims were targeted not for allegations of crime but for pursuing political and economic equality. Dozens of black sugar cane workers were lynched in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887 for striking to protest low wages. In 1884, after Calvin Mike cast a vote in Calhoun County, Georgia, a white mob attacked and burned his home, killing his elderly mother and his two young daughters, Emma and Lillie.

Reverend T. A. Allen was lynched in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1935 for organizing local sharecroppers. According to press coverage, Rev. Allen—known to wear a button that read “Every Man a King”—was shot through the heart; his body was found chained and floating in the Coldwater River.

Others were lynched for refusing to address a white man as “sir” or demanding to be served at the counter in a segregated soda shop. William Brooks was lynched in Palestine, Arkansas, in 1894 for asking to marry his white employer’s daughter. In Labelle, Florida, in 1926, Henry Patterson was lynched for “attempting to assault” a white woman; soon after his death, news spread that his “offense” had actually been asking for a drink of water.

Hundreds more black people were lynched on allegations of arson, robbery, non-sexual assault, and vagrancy. Reporting on the lynching of a black man in Millersburg, Ohio, in 1892, an Indiana newspaper explained:

He had lingered about people’s doorsteps and annoyed them in various ways. There are supposed to be no Negroes in Holmes County. Nothing is known of the victim’s history, not even his name. He was said to be the only Negro in the county.
In 1930, a 65-year-old black woman named Laura Wood was hanged with a plow chain in Barber, North Carolina, for allegedly stealing a ham. After an overcoat went missing from a hotel in Tifton, Georgia, in 1900, police whipped two black men to death while “interrogating” them in the woods; newspapers did not report their names. In a strictly maintained racial caste system, white lives and white property held heightened value, while the lives of black people held little or none.
Efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation repeatedly failed, largely due to concerted opposition by Southern elected officials. Due to this federal inaction and local indifference, only 1 percent of lynchings committed after 1900 led to a criminal conviction.

Facing the constant threat of attack, nearly 6 million black Americans fled the South between 1910 and 1970 as traumatized refugees, abandoning homes, families, and work in hopes of escaping racial terror. When parts of Georgia experienced a mass black exodus after gruesome lynchings in 1915 and 1916, the local planters “attributed the movement from their places to the fact that the lynching parties had terrorized their Negroes.” Lynching profoundly reshaped the American landscape and burdened already vulnerable communities with pain and disadvantage still with them today.

Importantly, these lynchings were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes; they were targeted racial violence perpetrated to uphold an unjust social order. Lynchings were terrorism. This violence left thousands dead; significantly marginalized black people politically, financially, and socially; and inflicted deep trauma on the entire African American community. White people who witnessed, participated in, and socialized their children in a culture that tolerated gruesome lynchings also were psychologically damaged. State officials’ tolerance of lynching created enduring national and institutional wounds that survived to oppose the goals of the civil rights movement and modern calls for equality.

Jars containing soil from the sites of confirmed lynchings in the state of Alabama are displayed at the Equal Justice Initiative offices.

Many lynchings occurred in communities where African Americans remain marginalized, disproportionately poor, over represented in prisons and jails, and underrepresented as decision-makers in the criminal justice system. The racial terror epilogue to slavery grafted onto the racial hierarchy narrative a presumption of guilt and dangerousness, and entrenched white power structures soon adopted rhetoric defending racialized vigilante violence as necessary to protect white property, families, and the Southern way of life from black “criminals.”

The persistent presumption of guilt and dangerousness assigned to African Americans has made minority communities particularly susceptible to the unfair administration of criminal justice. Research demonstrates that implicit bias impacts policing—marking young men of color for disparately frequent stops, searches, and violence—and all aspects of the criminal justice system, leading to higher rates of childhood suspension, expulsion, and arrest at school; disproportionate contact with the juvenile justice system; harsher charging decisions and disadvantaged plea negotiations; a greater likelihood of being denied bail and diversion; an increased risk of wrongful convictions and unfair sentences; and higher rates of probation and parole revocation.

Research has also shown that racial prejudice is directly related to public support for “tough on crime” laws that lead to long sentences and mass incarceration. So deeply entrenched is the presumption that people of color are dangerous and guilty that, according to a 2014 study, informing white Americans’ about racial disparities in incarceration rates led to more fear of crime and more support for punitive criminal justice policies.

Lynchings were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes; they were targeted racial violence perpetrated to uphold an unjust social order.​

Perhaps the clearest intersection between the history of racial terror lynching and modern criminal law is seen in the death penalty. As lynching attracted national and international condemnation after the 1920s, capital punishment became a more acceptable means of achieving the same ends. Many defendants of the era learned that replacing a lynching with a death sentence did little to achieve a fair trial, a reliable conviction, or a just sentence.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, after a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder after a trial lasting just two hours and 40 minutes, the judge promised the mob of armed white men filling the courtroom that the ordered death sentence would be carried out by public hanging—though that violated state law. When the execution was set for a later date, the mob threatened vigilante action. In response, Florida officials quickly moved up the date, authorized Wilson to be hanged before a jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on the “avoided” lynching.

By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Between 1910 and 1950, African Americans fell to just 22 percent of the South’s population but constituted 75 percent of those executed in the region. More than 80 percent of documented lynchings in America between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than 80 percent of the nearly 1,400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have also been in the South.

Modern death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against racial bias in the administration of the death penalty remain thwarted by familiar appeals to the rhetoric of states’ rights; and regional data demonstrates that the modern death penalty in America mirrors racial violence of the past.

The bold and unpunished deaths of black men, women, and children deemed dangerous—like Trayvon Martin in Florida; Philando Castile in Minnesota; Tamir Rice and Samuel DuBose in Ohio; Alton Sterling in Louisiana; Sandra Bland in Texas; Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland; and many, many more—continue to demonstrate the fatal consequences of a racialized presumption of guilt permitted to fester for more than a century. The trauma borne by Anthony Ray Hinton and countless more men and women condemned to death only to be exonerated many years later reveals the arrogance of a judicial system built on a history of injustice but still confident in its ability to fairly and justly judge who should live and who should die.

Chattel slavery in the United States required manufacturing a myth of racial difference to justify the brutal practice of buying and selling African men, women, and children as property. The inhumanity of slavery was largely intolerable unless there was a narrative that enslaved people were not really people. The military battles and legal developments that led to the abolition of slavery did nothing to undo that project of dehumanization, and those same ideas survived to justify racial terror lynching through the criminalization of black identity. Today, dehumanization and the fear of the “black criminal” remain at the core of our national acceptance of a prison system that cages and warehouses millions of people of all backgrounds. The impact of American mass incarceration is felt far beyond the black community, but the black community and its history illustrate the roots of this crisis—and potentially a path out.

After nearly 30 years advocating on behalf of the condemned and incarcerated in the Deep South, we at the Equal Justice Initiative believe that telling the truth of the slave trade, racial terror lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration can free us from the division and conflict that have grown out of centuries of euphemism and avoidance. We believe that bravely committing to this effort can set our community on the path to the honest reflection that will uproot and expose these poisons, and that this work cannot be relegated to the courtroom.

To that end, in April 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened two new sites in Montgomery, Alabama: The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which presents an interactive and digital narrative exhibit linking the trauma of slavery to modern-day challenges in criminal justice; and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the nation’s first memorial to the victims of racial terror lynching. Together, these spaces challenge each one of us to confront a difficult history and commit to creating a more just and peaceful future. We encourage and welcome all to visit.

Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells once wrote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” The museum and memorial strive to further the work of so many activists and advocates, past and present, striving to eradicate the roots of racism and inequality—and working to make that achievement lynching’s final legacy.

Jennifer Rae Taylor is a senior attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative.

I get the feeling you're just trying to make things fit your agenda.

Anyone who sees such a situation so simply, isn't usually interested in the truth.

And I get the feeling that you're surprised at the answer to your question, as in it wasn't what you were expecting.

There is nothing simple about the answer I provided other than the way it is consistently ignored as a contributing remnant of the systemic racism that endures to this day, including it's impact on current day crime statistics.

As far as the truth, the information provided in the article I cited is documented American history, the veracity of which can be verified by anyone who is interested in the real history of how and why African Americans arrived to where we are today.

I can't remember if you're American or not and if not considering there are plenty of Americans who are unaware of this aspect of our history, then it certainly is more understandable why you might not have known any better, but now you do.

Surprised? Not at all. I've been on forums like this long enough to expect people to follow a different line of reasoning.

I said what I said to provoke thought. You responded by clipping it half and then saying "correct" to only one part. That means I didn't provoke thought in your mind.

Essentially there are ways of answering a question which simplifies an issue. "It's this, and only this". I've learned such simplified responses are generally wrong, and when I've presented both sides, it's because I'm saying one or the other alone is WRONG.

First of all, your evaluation of my response is incorrect although I get the feeling that you wanted me to give credence or at least consideration to your first option instead of rejecting it out of hand as it should have been considering that it is patently false

These were the two options you gave

Is it that black people are more likely to be aggressive, criminal and all black people then people go with the stereotype?
Or
is it that white people want to keep black people down and as such the system turns them into criminals?

Had you bothered to read the article I cited, you would have found in the text exactly why your first premise is false, in addition to why the second statement is true, convict leasing and black codes being only a part of it. Hell, it's right there in the title of the article "A History of Tolerance for Violence Has Laid the Groundwork for Injustice Today". This is the fucking gaslighting that black people have had to endure for centuries, white racists running around killing, maiming and terrorizing black people all while claiming that the blacks "are more likely to be aggressive, criminal " and themselves to be the victims.

left out on display to traumatize other black people. Members of the mob frequently documented their atrocities by posing for photographs with a dangling, bloodied, or burnt corpse.

Most of the more than 4,400 documented victims of racial terror lynching killed between 1877 and 1950 were killed in the 12 Southern states; Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana were among the deadliest. Several hundred additional victims were lynched in other regions, with the highest numbers in Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia. Many more victims were undocumented and remain unknown. This brutality continued into the twentieth century, and national leaders and mainstream media outlets quickly learned to use white supremacist views and pro-lynching rhetoric for political gain. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt declared, “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.” An editorial in the Memphis Avalanche Appeal advised, “Let [the black man] keep his hands off white women and lynching will soon die out.”

“[If] it requires lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts,” white women’s rights activist Rebecca Felton wrote in the Atlanta Journal in 1898, “then I say lynch a thousand a week if necessary.”

Sexual violence became the most common justification for deadly vigilante violence targeting black men and terrorizing black communities. In fact, fewer than 25 percent of documented African American lynching victims were accused of sexual assault and less than 30 percent were accused of murder. Because African Americans were presumed guilty and dangerous, accusations lodged against them were rarely scrutinized; nearly all were lynched without an investigation, much less a trial. Shortly after Reuben Sims was lynched for assaulting a white woman in Baldwin County, Alabama, in 1904, the local sheriff admitted he was innocent but nonetheless refused to arrest any members of the lynch mob.

When 17-year-old Henry Smith was accused of killing a white girl in Paris, Texas, in 1893, he was quickly captured and condemned without trial or investigation. On February 1, a mob of 10,000 people gathered from across the state to watch as Henry was paraded through town on a carnival float, forced onto a 10-foot-high platform at the county fairgrounds, brutally tortured for nearly an hour, and then burned alive. “Caucasian Vengeance for African Barbarity,” declared a Fort Worth Daily Gazette headline above an article describing the fate of the “Animal Form of Rapist-Murderer-Savage-Fiendish Negro, Henry Smith.”

In common but much-less-publicized incidents, lynching victims were targeted not for allegations of crime but for pursuing political and economic equality. Dozens of black sugar cane workers were lynched in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887 for striking to protest low wages. In 1884, after Calvin Mike cast a vote in Calhoun County, Georgia, a white mob attacked and burned his home, killing his elderly mother and his two young daughters, Emma and Lillie.

My stating that I couldn't remember whether or not you're American was not a slight, I was merely attempting to point out that there are plenty of Americans who would deny this history even if you laid it out right before them therefore for you to not have known this is understandable, at least to me. However now that you know the truth I am curious why you're acting as though the 1st option is still the correct one.

It's the people who did all that they could to diminish people of African descent and our abilities in the eyes of the courts, the military, society, etc. who had/have an agenda, not me or any of the other black people and all of our allies who can see through all of this bs.

Yes, you get the feeling. So what? That's your feeling, not reality.

The problem is, had I read the article I might have DISAGREED with the article.

Just because some dude from Harvard writes something, doesn't make it right.

I'm acting like BOTH could be true. The simple fact is that humans are not simple. There's plenty of stuff going on that could literally lead to both cases being true at the same time.

Usually people want thing easy to understand. Even people intelligent enough to understand both sides, might simply state one is true in order to push their agenda.

The reality is if we look at things going on, we'll see patterns.

In the UK black people also commit the most crimes.

Race and crime in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Black people make up 3.3% of the population, 10% of arrests, 13% of the prison population and 22% of stop and searches.

Why? Why is it the same in the UK and the US? The UK is far less racist than the US is.

Education is similar.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/439867/RR439B-Ethnic_minorities_and_attainment_the_effects_of_poverty_annex.pdf.pdf

Page 24, figure 3.

In 2006 black kids had a 50% achievement of getting 5 GCSEs at 16 (you need this to progress to the next level before university). This is the lowest on this list.

Indians are up there at 72%, white kids 58%.

Table 5 shows that Gypsies and travellers are, in fact, the lowest. But there are obvious reasons for this. Black Caribbean is the lowest, by far. And if we look at figure four we know it's black Caribbean BOYS that do the worst.

Black African students were higher than white British students in 2013.

The area with the most African Caribbeans is London. Also the area with the highest rate of murder.

UK homicides by region 2023 | Statista

In 2022/23 there were 112 homicide offences recorded in London, the most of any region of the United Kingdom during that time period.

www.statista.com

So why the UK and the US?

What is it that connects the two? Racism? Or is it cultural?

One thing that stands out is that Jamaicans used to get into the UK visa free. Anyone executed in Jamaica gets the nod in London. It's weird, a colonial relic. But the Yardies turned up in the 1980s and things just kept getting worse, especially with the black Caribbean boys.

Well, we could change how we look at things. Let's check out homicide by country.

List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The pattern here is one of CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES.

Top 33 countries are all Christian. In fact they're mostly in the Americas, with Lesotho and South Africa the only non- American in the top 20.

First non-Christian country is the Ivory Coast at 34. Not majority Christian or Muslim, I'd bet most of the murders are in the Christian part.

Then again some of the safest places are also Christian, like Luxembourg, Monaco, Norway, richer Christian places and also majority white places.

So, is it a combination of Christianity, culture and race that's an issue? Or is it Christianity, culture, race and HISTORY that's an issue too?

Many of those in the top 30 something for murder are places that had blacks brought over for slavery. Lesotho at number 4 did not have slavery, wasn't part of the Apartheid regime. But it is surrounded by South Africa and maybe this is a big part of their high murder rate.

Race probably does play a part in it. Why are Indians and Chinese at the top of educational chart in the US and the UK and blacks are much lower down?

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019038.pdf

Attitudes to education?

Of course. We KNOW the Chinese and Indians put a lot of emphasis on education.

We also know people in poverty are less likely to put emphasis on education. Probably because they were failed by education so they simply don't care about it.

But then why are black people more likely to be in poverty? Why is AFRICA itself more likely to be in poverty?

List of countries by GDP (nominal) per capita - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A simple look at the map shows Africa the worst off, then central Asia then Latin America.

Bottom 9 for GDP per capita are African countries. Then Afghanistan, invaded constantly, then Africa down to 14 and then Yemen, another war torn country.

Why?

Some of it is probably due to the soil in Africa. It's not great. When I was in Lusaka I went to the city fair with an Aussie dairy farmer who was trying to help improve yields of milk from cows. They couldn't take Frisian cows and plonk them in Africa because the cows would produce less milk because of the grass. If you have bad soil, you can't get away from an agrarian lifestyle.

List of countries by employment in agriculture - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Top 11 countries for percentage of people in agriculture are in Africa, then Nepal and the Soloman Islands, and then 8 more Africa countries.

If you have a harsh landscape, you'll produce animals which adapt to the harsh environment. Is that what Africans did? Especially those in sub-saharan Africa? They're certainly the best athletes.

But that aggression, that physicalness that made them great in Africa, perhaps that then becomes a problem in a white society which isn't aimed at such things.

It leads to more poverty, it leads to the break up of families, black kids have a one in three chance of having both parents at home. (figure 3.1)

It's 73% for white kids, 57% for Hispanics, 84% for Asians, only Native Americans get anywhere close to black families at 45%, and they also struggle at school and this leads to problems.

So, is race and ethnicity an issue? Yes it is. Is this an issue because of how society functions? Yes, it is. It's a mixture of both.

The problem is, people don't want there to be any differences between the races. So they pretend it's not an issue of race and culture, when there is a part of that.

But there's also a problem in society. Because the UK has a significant black population but it doesn't end up like the US. It's not a murderous place. The UK has solved its gun problem (introduced by the Jamaican Yardies) with education, policing and all of that. Many places in the US simply don't care to bother.