That makes sense to me. If you keep black people in poverty, you keep them in crime, which entrenches racism (black people are criminals!). That's simple cause and effect.
If you raise them out of poverty, the message will stick around because of racism, but it will stop self-propagating just like we stopped being racist to the Irish.
No, you have it backwards... And this is exactly the mistaken perspective that perpetuates the "black people are criminals" mentality and the "all this rampant black crime explains/justifies racial prejudice" mentality. Black people are not "in crime" and "black crime" does not "cause" or "entrench" racism.
Racism causes the negative, prejudicial attitudes that lead to disproportionate negative treatment by the justice system, which in turn leads to the skewed crime statistics, which are then used as justification for more disproportionately negative treatment. The myth is that higher arrest rates and conviction rates = higher amounts of
actual commission of crime... it doesn't. Higher arrest and conviction rates means higher arrest and conviction rates, period. Simply put, the flawed thought process goes "
We have to focus all of our law enforcement efforts on blacks, because look at all the blacks we are arresting and convicting!" But if you focus on hunting deer rather than fish, you catch way more deer than fish... that doesn't mean that the deer are "worse" at survival. It just means you are getting the expected result of the focus of your efforts.
Just one example... during the 2008 election you had around a quarter of
Kentucky and
West Virginia Democrats essentially saying that they wouldn't vote for a black guy
because he was black.
In fact, both West Virginia and Kentucky have gone against the national tide of the last 8 years and have been trending Republican. Also – and this needs to be said – a significant percentage of the voters in both those states have now indicated that they may not vote for a fellow Democrat simply because he’s black. Pollsters know that people lie about race; voters rarely come out and say they will not vote for someone because he’s black. Instead, they say things like we’re hearing from West Virginia and Kentucky – that “race is a factor.” In Kentucky, over 25 percent of Clinton supporters said race was a factor in their vote – about five times the national average for such a question.
And this isn't some crack dealer or carjacker were talking about
...we're talking about a sitting US Senator, attorney, Harvard law professor, on-and-on... So the whole "blacks are criminals" canard is no excuse for their refusal to vote for him... it was just flat out racism with no "justification" whatsoever. Again "black crime" doesn't "cause racism". The institutional and cultural perpetuation of the racist and prejudicial treatment and portrayal of blacks is what causes racism. In other words, people are prejudiced against blacks
because they are taught to be prejudiced against blacks from childhood, not because of "black crime."
And this same racism leads to this negative perception bleeding over into other areas... news media, business, pop culture, etc... Again, r
acism causes the negative, prejudicial, media portrayal, stereotypical portrayal in pop-culture, etc., which in turn leads to prejudicial hiring practices, which leads to poverty, low income neighborhoods and the poor education that goes along with that, which in turn creates a vicious cycle with the stereotypes. So in summation... you don't need to "raise blacks out of poverty" or stop so-called "black crime" to end racism.. You need to end racism to end racism.
And to bring this full circle with the topic of the thread... If Democrats/liberals think that they will motivate black voters with a purely economics message like "lift blacks out of the inner cities and poverty and that will end racism"... they are going to be sorely disappointed. Racism/Prejudice is a thing, separate from economics... Democrats ignore that at their political peril.
