Lynching Deaths 1882-1968 (87 Years)
Whites: 1297 – 14.9/year
Blacks: 3445 – 39.6/year
Black on Black: 2245
Black on White: 409
White on Black: 189
White on White: 2509
Homicide Rates 1964 (per 100,000)
Nonwhite: 22.9
Whites: 2.7
Homicide Rates 2015 (per 100,000)
Black: 31.4
White: 4.5
Imprisonment Rate 1926 (per 100,000)
Black: 106
White: 36
Imprisonment Rate 2012 (per 100,000)
Black: 463 (198251/42,750,000)
White: 88 (172,843/195,148,000)
Black: 55.1
White: 18.1
Black: 27%
White: 10%
Black: ~25%
White: ~5%
Black: 72%
White: 36%
Children in Broken Homes Rate 1965
Black: 25%
White: ~8%
Children in Broken Homes Rate (Unmarried minus Cohabiting) 2013
Black: 44%
White: 13%
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During Jim Crow, blacks were generally safer, had stronger families, and were less likely to commit a crime or be jailed, but had double the poverty rate they do now. If so, how can the social dysfunction be blamed on poverty? Also, are they necessarily better off?
Poverty does not account for cultural and/or social degradation. Pigs make sties – not the other way around.
Black popular music culture, until the late 1960s, sought to emulate white and behave better – look at old films of James Brown, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald etc and see how well dressed they are, how impeccable was their public persona.
In 1969, Diana Ross recorded R.Dean Taylor’s “I’m Livin’ In Shame” – when the word and the feeling carried much greater import than today.
Now we have hoes, niggaz, dawgs, fuk da poleece and Riskay demanding to “Smell Yo’ Dick” for proof of infidelity. Verily, how low black popular culture has fallen.
There’s poverty, and then there’s poverty. Most of the world’s population lives in poverty; for the vast majority of history, all but a miniscule % of humans lived in poverty. Poverty is not an aberration to be looked at and ask, my goodness, what are the bad effects this could have? Poverty is the condition humanity evolved in and that we’re used to. Wealth is an aberration.
There is a big difference between living in a shack with no running water in a society where everyone lives in a shack with no running water, and starving to death. The former can be quite pleasant, as anyone who has ever visited such a village can attest. Millions of people have grown up happily and healthy in houses without electricity or running water.
But starvation sucks; losing the farm sucks; being homeless sucks; being sick or beaten sucks; being in prison sucks; being around people who will always be richer than you sucks.
I am fond of all my nifty gadgets and conveniences and modern life, but I’m not convinced I’m actually any happier than a guy in the rainforest who can proudly say he built his own hut and killed his own dinner.
I suppose this is a tiny bit tangential to your post, but you can see the connection.