Diggy, diggy, diggy…
(Mistake #1 [or 1A])
The first problem, the Levitt paper you cited is about victims of crime, not perpetrators of crime, not criminals. You can’t just take the data from Levitt and invert it to figure out who’s committing the crimes. Most crime is intra-racial (within the same race), as you’ve acknowledged before, so Black 10 victims means 10 Black robbers, right? No. No. Um… no. If that’s what you’re doing, it’s not even logical. It could be one guy, two guys, or even three who are responsible for every 10 victims. So Levitt’s data is out. Or any other data where you used victimization rates to work out perpetrator rates or instead of perpetrator rates.
(If there's a figure or table I missed somewhere, let me know the page number, if you don't mind. Or if there's another paper?)
“The Changing Relationship between Income and Crime Victimization.”
http://www.ny.frb.org/research/epr/99v05n3/9909levi.pdf (Mistake #2)
Another problem, which Levitt tries to address, is that socioeconomic factors like income, location, and tell you much more about criminals and victims than race. Black people are represented disproportionately as both victims and perpetrators because we are represented disproportionately amongst the poor. That doesn’t mean there are more poor Black people than poor White people, it means our percentage within the impoverished is greater than our 13-14% of the general population. Say, 20% of the poor in America are Black when we’re only 13-14% of the general population.
The way you state things implies that race is the main determining factor in criminality when the real determining factors are things like class, income, and location. Things that most robbers of ALL races have in common. Race is (or is practically?) an incidental. If a lady really wanted to screen for robbers, she’d screen for that stuff. Good luck with that.
http://what-when-how.com/interpersonal-violence/socioeconomic-status-offending-and-victimization-by-class/ Why we’re higher amongst the numbers of the poor is a discussion best left for the political board (but it involves inherited wealth, wage discrimination, red-lining, Jim Crow, de jura and de facto segregation, etc.)
But this is the “hobby” board, so let me bring it back to “the hobby.”
(Mistake #3 – cue Boy George)
Robbery of a provider is not a street crime, which is what Levitt, the FBI, and everybody else is measuring. It’s not like ladies are walking to their cars with an Escort uniform on and Black guys are jumping out on them. These are very specific, targeted crimes. Someone has to scan a website, pick out targets, call them (and probably probe for weaknesses), and then go rob them. The guy doing that is not the average robber that’s going to show up in crime statistics. He probably won’t show up in crime statistics at all because it will probably go unreported.
So, we can’t take these numbers for street crime and apply them to this ultra-specific, targeted crime.
(Mistake #4)
We’re also making the mistake of acting like the provider who is afraid of being robbed is the only one who says “No Black men” or “No Black men under nn.” “No Black men under nn” is sometimes an assumption about how they’re going to act. As a godfather, uncle, cousin, co-worker, etc. of many Black men under nn, I can tell you the majority of them do not act like they’re in a hippity hop video. Even if they listen to the rapping, hippity hip hop music. I’ll go you one further and say the majority of men who can afford to participate in this “hobby” do not carry themselves like “thugs,” rappers, gangsters, or any other young Black man stereotype people want to apply.
The ones that say “No Black men” period, there are no FBI stats to justify that. As Mocha or Jaye astutely pointed out, sometimes a Black provider might say “No Black men” or “No Black men under nn,” but that might be for personal reasons, to keep from running into somebody they know, or seeing a client who reminds them of their son, to not run into their son’s friends, etc. The rest? Well, there might be some KKK stats that justify that exclusion, but not FBI.
Speaking of the FBI, let’s look at some FBI stats, diggy, some of the stats you claim prove your case.
(Mistake #5, or 1B, or even 3B)
Let’s take the robbery figure in FBI Table 43 for 2013, the one where Blacks “outshine” Whites. And let’s ascribe all the robbery arrests to young Black men, aged 18 to 34. Of the population of young Black men, a whopping .44% were arrested for robbery. Let’s pretend that’s a.45 and round it up to a full .5 Half a percent.
Double that if you want and say for every guy who got caught, another wasn’t caught. You’re only at 1%. That means 99% of the young Black men in America did not rob anybody. For you to claim it’s justified, you’d have to be saying it’s logical to judge the 99 by the actions of the 1. Or, again, as somebody said before, “minorities aren’t individuals.”
(Young Black men aged 18-34, total number roughly 11.9 million in 2013, but I rounded down to 10 to make it harder for my case.) (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Ages) .
(Arrests for robbery for Black people, man, woman, and child: 44,271.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43) (44,000 / 10,000,000 = .44% If I used 11.9 million, it would be even lower.)
(I’m setting the same trap I set for you before, diggy. Do you know what it is?)
As I said in another thread, I don’t want any lady to see anybody they’re uncomfortable with, repulsed by, or whatever. Her body, her person, her rules of consent. It’s sacrosanct. I don’t even want people to stop seeing them (as I also said in that thread, bigots have to eat, too). What I do want is for people to stop calling bigotry “preference.” If an escort was to run her business by “preference,” she’d starve to death. So throw the “preference” defense out the window.
When we look right at bigotry and call it something else, we allow bigotry to flourish. Could we at least stop doing that? You’re tired of talking about race? Then acknowledge that there is racism in the world and we’re on the way to not talking about it. It’s like we’re at the foot of a mountain, trying to figure out how to get around it and you keep saying “What mountain?”.
What you’re doing, diggy, is worst of all. You’re making the case that it’s justified. And even worse than that, you’re using misapplied or misunderstood figures to do it, which gives it the illusion of "fact" or "science."
-- Modified on 3/14/2015 2:42:14 PM