Statistics, the perfect weapon to justify hate?

[Rev. Rye]

Statistics are good in and of themselves, but the thing is it's stupefyingly easy to divorce them from the context of why they're the way they are.

Case in point: are you familiar with the meme "13/50"? It's about a statistic that claims that black people make up 13% of the population of America, but commit 50% of the violent crime. This is actually accurate, if the Department of Justice's statistics on homicide are any indication


But the question remains: why is this the case? Well, there's a lot of factors to consider (including the fact that black people are disproportionately questioned by police, arrested, and convicted, and are likely to spend more time in prison than white people for the exact same fucking crimes), but the answer tends to boil down into two categories: either black people are naturally more inclined to commit violent crime than the rest of the population, or there's something in society that's causing a disproportionate number of black people to commit crimes.

And it turns out there's a wealth of studies exploring the latter possibility. And for those of you who want a story about how this comes about, here's Vaush giving a history lesson:




That said, if you've heard people bringing up the whole 13/50 meme before this, they're not going to give you that critical context, and, odds are, even if they don't outright state that black people are just naturally stupid and violent, odds are, they're going to dismiss any and all potential environmental causes out of hand. And so, they feel free to continue doing this to an entire aggregate of people: