xssve
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Like I said, it's a hoodie thing, as in hood rats - lots of tension between Blacks and Hispanics, mostly rivalry over the drug trade.
Socially, and this has been true since the Eighties, when the murder rate broke the previous record, set during the Great depression, the common culture here is the drug trade and the prison system. The prison system is is a pathological microcosm of hood dynamics, divided into gangs, Black, White, and Hispanic, which mirrors the dynamics of the drug trade on the streets.
Charles Murray has a new book out, focusing on White decline, which, although I haven't read it yet, I presume follows his usual formula of focusing on the individual, a problem common in the right wing paradigm, and often used to excuse social abuses that lead to the sort of behaviors they habitually decry, while ignoring the real causes.
That social dynamics affect aggregate behavior was never more clearly demonstrated than it was in the Early to mid Nineties, when the crime rate, after peaking in spectacular, record setting fashion, dropped like a rock, even more spectacularly, when the employment market tightened up, and wages started going up.
i.e., there is price for loose labor monetary policy, attempts to control inflation to optimize the business climate for Banks and business exact a toll on social dynamics, which tend to simmer until a recession/depression catalyzes them.
In short, the enmity between Treyvon and Zimmerman, is acting out on a larger competition in the labor market, where who you know make a big difference.
Conservatives tend to exacerbate this by coming up with even more lines of division - social divisions between "good Christians" who get married tend to reflect racial categories as well, albeit hypocritically: i.e., the fact that the rate of single motherhood is high among African Americans is a constant litany, it defines African Americans for the race baiting periphery of the core theocracy (and witness Arizona's attempt to make anyone using birth control unemployable).
i.e., African Americans are deemed unemployable because they don't come from stable, married households (by definition), while at the same time Hispanics are "unemployable" because they're poor (poor people are lazy and steal), in spite of the fact that Hispanic poverty levels are almost entirely due to extremely high levels of marriage and adherence to very strict family values: i.e., the women don't go to college, don't work at outside jobs, they stay home, raise the kids and take care of the house, which means the average Hispanic household is a single wage earner household, which given declining wages (for Thirty years now), is practically definitive of an impoverished household.
Ultimately, throw in the rants, like the one from LnN up there, and the focus becomes clear: Brown people are taking jobs and opportunities away from White people, period, and any reason to keep them down is therefore justifiable.
We discussed this in the other thread of course, economics is not a zero sum game, more people working means more economic activity, and full or close to full employment is really "the tide that lifts all the boats", any contraction in the microcosm will be reflected by a contraction in the macrocosm.
Problem is human psychology, which under stress, goes into zero sum mode, and at precisely the time we should be co-operating and looking for ways to increase employment, everybody is circling the wagons and loading the guns.
This can only be countered with education and appeals to co-operation, but the right is just feeding the fire - in business, they call it "the pucker factor", socially, it leads to growing perceptions of inequality which is a leading indicator of crime rates: Treyvon and Zimmerman are the Canaries in the coal mine, and if this is handled in the usual conservative way, they are the shape of things to come, ala the Eighties redux - prison/drug culture will again become the dominant culture below a certain income level, while White people, predictably, get rich off it by controlling the corridors, the prisons, and the real estate values.
And yeah, there are always poor people who manage to rise above it if they don't get killed in the crossfire first, but as a statistical phenomena, this is predictable, it worked just like that when everybody was a Christian, it's not "culture" per se, it's how economics shapes and distorts culture - people adapt, and they'll adapt to anything, they'll adapt to cannibalism if they have to.
Insofar as it's culture, it a culture who's paradigm is based on the dangerously mistaken notion that you can walk all over people, and they're supposed to be grateful to you for doing it - and it is a distinctly moralistic Christian cultural conceit.
On a purely statistical basis, it's never led to stable economic or social conditions, ever, and when present, it indicates a crippling absence of leadership ability - even the Caesars understood that, and when they didn't, they were reminded.
< Message edited by xssve -- 3/31/2012 7:38:23 AM >
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