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Originally Posted by Ustwo
Me too, as our overly race sensitive culture would never allow such a list, even if true, so my guess is such a list would come from 'racist' web site. It doesn't make the information not true, we have chosen to ignore race in this country, at least when it says something bad about blacks and crime. This is just ignoring the problem and causes more issues and seems to me as racist as those who want to use such information to feel superior.
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For someone who can't seem to go a day without mentioning his exceedingly developed ability to understand the meaning of scientific data, your reaction seems to show a bit of a lapse. What exactly is the significance of this data in the context of seeing a black guy on the street? So a black male is 4 times more likely to commit assault than a white guy, does that mean that when you see four white guys together you start to get nervous?
If you think that it isn't generally acknowledged in our race sensitive culture that blacks are more likely to commit crime then you're clearly not paying attention. Anyone who takes the issue seriously acknowledges that fact. The bone of contention about such facts are how to interpret them.
I would argue that the reason lists like this don't get much play in the nonracist world is that they don't provide enough context to make the data meaningful. It's a classic example of using statistics to lie. Racist people (or those who aren't necessarily that interested in statistics) see data like this and say, "See, I was right to be afraid of that black guy I saw. He was four times as likely to assault me as a white guy." Which completely ignores the fact that there are a lot of other factors that determine whether someone is going to assault you than the color of their skin.
Lists like these, when presented as they are here, are nothing more than overly simplified attempts to use scientific data to back up racist attitudes. It's pretty transparent; attempting to extrapolate FBI crime stats down to that black guy behind you in the store isn't something one does when one wants to pretend to be a fanboy of scientific rigor.