Are blacks more prone to criminal behaviour?

Before anything I want to answer the question in the subject line of this blog post.  And the answer is NO!!!  Skin pigmetation has no role in determining behaviour, be it criminal or otherwise,  ZERO.  

Why did I choose to make the subject line so inflamatory?  

I imagine some saw it and felt their blood pressure go up a notch.  Sadly I think others probably saw it and said "Good, here's someone who shares my point of view".  

It's this latter group that I'm hoping will read on.  I wrote what I wrote intentionally, because it's a view that is still out there.  And this part is hard to admit, but its a view that used to simmer deep down in my conciousness.  Not my subconcious....it was there, not at the top of my mind, but just below the surface. 

A big reason I think that problems persist is that it can be very difficult to ask the hard questions.  I know that in putting up as a title the question:  Are blacks more prone to criminal behaviour....that I'm stepping in it big time and this can go horribly wrong.  That's why people don't ask the hard questions, and that's why I believe difficult but essential questions never get asked, and people persist in their views.  Basically things never getter better in any meaningful and lasting way.

I said this was a view that simmered just below the surface in my own concious thoughts.  Why?  

Why did I think that it could be possible for something as random as skin pigmentation to predispose some people to certain behaviours?  I didn't come to this view all on my own, I had a lot of help, too much help.

I'm 53 years of age, born in 1966.  I have lived in many different places, both in Canada and the United States.  Most of my early childhood was spent in the U.S.  For about ten of my first twelve years our family lived in Staten Island New York, Northern New Jersey and Oregon.  Most of my growing up in Canada was in the suburbs of Toronto, places like Burlington, Pickering and Etobicoke.

Back it the 1970s, so up until I was 14 years of age, everywhere we lived had one common denominator, I always lived in areas that were white.  Not just predominatly white but overwhelmingly white, that was true both in the United States as well as Canada.  

I lived in Bergen County New Jersey from the time I was in kindergarten until I was in grade four.  At Clare E. Coleman Elementary we had one black student, not just in my class but in the entire school. Her name was, (and I pray still is) Cathy, she and I were in Mrs. Vandenberg's class.  In  October of 1975 we moved to Burlington Ontario, and I don't recall there being even one black student in the entire school.   From there it was onto Portland Oregon for my grade six year, and again I don't recall there being a single black student.  In fact the only minority I remember was Jason who was Hispanic.

It wasn't until our family moved back permanently to Canada in 1978 that I saw some racial diversity.  At Frenchman's Bay P.S. in Pickering there were some students of colour, Curtis, Troy, Spencer were my age, there was also Sterling whose background was Indian (from India), still predominantly white but not as much as in my earlier years.

I hope I'm not boring my readers, (all three of them) with my personal history.  

What I'm trying to do is to establish my context.  That of a white kid growing up in an overwhelmingly white world.  I was not friends with Cathy back in NJ, and I didn't have a black friend until grade 7 when Curtis and I hung out together at times.  Calling Curtis a friend is probably stretching things, but we did interact at school.  

It was actually Curtis who was the first (and I believe only) person to accuse me of being a racist.  Someone burned me with a joke in grade seven and I was anxious to repeat it.  I was asked:  "Hey Gordon, how tall our you"?  When I said 5'4" (or whatever height I was back then) the retort was:  "I didn't know shit piled that high".  I repeated it to Curtis, with no racist intent, and he went at me.  Thankfully I was able to hold him down and explain that I was just repeating a joke someone had burned me with, that it had nothing to do with him being black.  He forgave me.  

I'm lucky, I had amazing parents, and neither would tolerate racism.  I was in grade two or three when I first encountered the N word, but I didn't know what it meant.  I went home and asked my mother but she didn't answer.  She took me into the bathroom and had me stick out my tongue and then swabbed it with soap.  She said if I ever said that word again she'd make me eat the whole bar.

In 1977 when we moved to Oregon my Dad was opening a retail bank branch in dowtown Portland.  The new branch was on a street called Halsey if memory serves, and years later I was told that Halsey was Portland's own Mason Dixon line, one side white and the other black.  As you moved further into the white area the city was richer, further into the black area became poorer.  My Dad's bank was on the black side of the street.  Because of this my Dad made a point of hiring a number of black tellers, not because of affirmative action or anything like that, but because he wanted his staff to be reflective of the community where he was operating.

I'd never heard my father swear, he was not a man given to profanity.  But one day some big wigs from head office in Toronto came to our house just ahead of the grand opening.  I was ushered into my bedroom while Dad and these execs sat around the bar in our family room.  My father was stressed out with the opening and had developped strep throat, his voice was a rasp.  

One of the Toronto guys asked my Dad what the plans were for the opening.  "Nothing special", was my Dad's reply, "just gonna do the usual coffee and donuts thing".  All I remember at that time was my Father finding his voice and hearing raspy but loud and strong F bombs being dropped.  

Years later my Mother filled me in.  When my Dad said he was gonna do coffee and donuts one of the T.O. crew said:  "Don't do that, you'll have every coon in the area coming in".  Years later my Mother filled me in:  "Your Father threatened to kick their effiin asses all the way back to Toronto if they told him how to run his branch".  About six months later he handed in his resignation, I think he would have done it sooner, but with a wife and three children he had to make sure he had his ducks lined up before leaving.

I think I've painted the picture well enough, a white kid with a priveleged upbringing, raised with decent values.  Not perfect maybe, but pretty darned good.  

I'm going to add one more snippet, from when I was about sixteen.  Ah sixteen, on the cusp of adulthood, when one looks to assert their independence and identity.  The Dukes of Hazzard was must see TV on Friday's, and besides Catherine Bach in her mouth watering Daisy Dukes there was the General Lee, a car that had the confederate flag on its hood.  

I bought a confederate flag at a flea market and hung it over my bed, I was a rebel.  My Mother didn't explode, but she told me in no uncertain terms that she wasn't allowing a racist symbol in her house.  When I protested that it wasn't a racist symbol, that it was about rebellion she gave me a history lesson.  The flag came down and was replaced with a red Maple Leaf.

So how did I come to have this notion, just below the surface, that skin colour could play a role in criminality?  I recall a debate that raged sometime in the 1980s, about whether Toronto Police should collect criminal statistics based on race.  And I recall thinking it was perfectly rationale, that data is good....that planted the seed.  

Media had already been working on me as well.  Look at Dirty Harry, there's a scene that I've seen shared on social media where Clint Eastwood's character foils a robbery at a coffee shop.  In this snippet all the gun weilding criminals are black, all the victims are white.  Then in the late 80's the TV show COPS hit the airwaves.  Laws divided drugs between rich and poor, hard and soft, black and white....crack was a black hard street drug, cocaine was a softer rich white drug.  

That seed took root, thankfully those roots didn't run deep, but they were there.  

I differentiated between prejudice and racism.  For me prejudice was unavoidable, and in many ways I think it still is.  It's part of human nature to compartmentalize things, even fellow human beings and I don't think it's exclusive to people who are white, everyone does it.  Racism however is acting on that prejudice, and that's something that was drilled into my tiny brain from an early age.

That's why I believe the United States was able to elect Barack Obama twice to the Presidency of the United States, and then turn around and elect such a disgusting waste of skin like Trump.  Obama was the exception, while Trump plays to the prejudiced and racist rule.  

So how do we get past it?  How did I get past it?  

Unfortunately I don't think it's easy, the answer is education.  Starting in my late twenties and onward I've educated myself, and much of what I've learned is distrubing, in fact disturbing isn't a strong enough word.  I apologize for the profanity, but fucking disgusting is what it is.  

After the Civil War in the United States the economy of the southern states was utterly in ruin.  Yes the slaves had been emancipated, but if they could be tossed in jail they could be forced to work as slaves again, to rebuild the infrastructure the war had destroyed.  Black men were arrested for things like vagrancy, or anything else that could be thought up.  

When prison gangs were seen working the roads, bridges and railways they were either predominantly or entirely black.  Get the picture?  See all those criminals in their prison outfits?  Black equals crime.

I've read that the greatest human migration in history that wasn't the result of war, famine or natural disaster happened after the Civil War when a great exodus of blacks left the south for places like Oakland, Detroit, Chicago and NYC.  It wasn't for economic opportunity that blacks fled the south, it was to escape being tossed in jail and enslaved again.  

Nova Scotia is said to be a hotbed of racism in Canada.  Before the Civil War it was the final destination for many on the Underground Railroad.  Former slaves with no formal education entrenched the racist opinion here in Canada, black equals ignorance and stupidity.    

I could go on and on but I'll end it here with a suggestion.  Anyone who still has even an inkling that somehow a person's race plays a role in behaviour, criminal or otherwise, please watch the Netflix documentary 13th.  I saw it a few years back and it added to what I already knew and helped water the roots of better understanding in my own mind.  

Before watching this amazing documentary I wasn't even aware of the 1912 film "Birth of a Nation" that glorified the KKK and was praised by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.  

Here is a clip, please watch: