That's quite a laundry list of statistics. Would you mind quoting a source for them?hippiewannabe wrote: Anecdotes.
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"Social pathology" -- delinquency, crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, child neglect, permanent welfare dependency -- is disproportionately concentrated (for whites and blacks alike) in the segment of the population with IQs below 75; at least one-fourth of the black population (compared to one-twentieth of the white population) falls below that critical IQ point in the bell curve
http://library.flawlesslogic.com/iq.htm
As for the one reference you cited, I suppose you didn't get the word that the statistical basis of Jensen's "Bell Curve" work was called into question almost twenty years ago. Stephen Jay Gould re-analyzed the data under more rigid statistical criteria and found that Jensen's conclusions were not supported by the data.
I can't argue that black populations are over-represented in prison and on welfare rolls. That's because the burdens of poverty are disproportionately placed on them. It has nothing to do with IQ (which is, basically, a measure of a person's ability to pass an IQ test, but doesn't correlate very well with real-life intelligence). It is, instead, the result of centuries of discrimination and apartheid. African-American and Native American groups know full well that they have problems that need addressing, and that the responsibility for addressing the problems lies with them. But part of the problem is, and has been for years, a disconnect between what they expect in the way of protection of their rights, and what they've been given instead. One of these disconnects is the way they're treated by police, and that's the issue being addressed here.
I kind of know where you're coming from. I grew up white and middle-class and therefore privileged. And cops were always friendly to me. But when I grew my hair down past my shoulders and started living in Baltimore's inner city, I suddenly became the kind of person that cops would harass for no reason, and passing truckers would spit on. I cannot conceive what it must have been like for people to have been treated that way from the time they could walk. So I kind of know where they're coming from, too.