Us v. Them

Today in one of my classes we were discussing the relationship between race and crime. Well, actually we were talking about sentencing disparities among the races. Why are there so many black people in prison? Why are they there longer than white people? My answer is two-fold: poverty and racism. Although I suppose we could blame the poverty on racism...but that's a whole chicken-egg thing that I won't get into here.

Anyway, the discussion lead to a conversation about why society sees Black men as more dangerous or criminal, etc. There were some statistics indicating that if you show people a news story about a crime and don't show them any pictures 60% of the people will think they did see a picture & 70% of those people will think the picture they saw was of a black person.

One person in the class suggested that the perception of black people as violent comes from Rap music, which talks about violence and Rap artists, who participate in violence (because, ya know, 2 rappers were shot in the 90s). The theory being that the majority of successful & public Black people are rappers & so that is all we see of the Black community.

So, my question is this: In general, people are disproportionately afraid of serial killers & pedophiles. Both of these types of criminals are overwhelmingly likely to be white males. So why aren't people afraid of white men? People are afraid of black men because they rap about guns, but we aren't afraid of white men who cut people into little pieces and put them in their refrigerators?? Doesn't make sense, does it? Or, did anyone ever think about where the term "wifebeater" comes from? It comes from the fact that when fat, hairy, drunk, white rednecks are pulled out of their trailers & arrested on COPS for beating their wives, they are wearing their undershirts!! So why aren't we afraid of rednecks in undershirts??? (Well, I am, but I mean the world in general.)

Seriously folks, white men are WAY crazier than black men. Think about the most famous psychpaths & sociopaths, including terrorists, that you can remember....they are almost ALL white!! Not to mention that the most hideous & deadly crimes plaguing our society are committed by white-collar criminals (which I define as criminals with white-collar jobs, so a poor little old lady committing social security fraud from her apartment in the projects doesn't count). And white-collar criminals are also almost always white men! So this whole "we only hear about black criminals" theory is crap.

The truth is, people are afraid of anyone who is different from them. And aside from gender, skin color is most obvious difference 2 people can have. We can't necessarily determine a person's religion, interests, hobbies, income, family history, or even ethnicity at 1st glance. But we sure can tell race. We are constantly searching to define things as Us v. Them. And the easiest way to distinguish Us v. Them is by skin color. So, there's a robber on the loose? He's a criminal. Criminals are bad. We are good. He can't be one of us. He must be one of them - and they are black. See, it's not the media or the past or experiences. It's laziness. We are too lazy to discover the right things to fear or hate. So we simply make the easiest delineations. Fortunately, there is an easy answer to this, one that I have adopted long ago. That answer: Be more lazy. Hate everyone equally. It saves a lot of time.