Just pointing out a sophistry sighting. Before, it was black injection with a progressive face, now the reverse. I guess they finished whatever they were trying to do?

Thank you. I’m going to have another drink now.

Before I get into the numbers (which are, alas, scant – we just weren’t as good at data collecting before the 20th century, which we didn’t do obsessively until teh post-war era), I think it’s obvious the answer has to be ‘both’.

That violent crime has a genetic component is as easily visible by observing the drastic difference in the offense rate between men and women within any race or culture. This is pretty clear when one considers the influence of testosterone levels on rage, anger, muscularity, machismo, impulsiveness, combativeness, sexual drive (rape rate?), etc. – all contributors to a propensity to commit violent crime. We know from Rushton that testosterone levels vary by race in the expected order, which is the same order as intelligence and criminality.

But culture and context also obviously have an impact on criminality. The Wild West was Wild because the same people were much more murderous with each other than they were in the East. You can see this by comparing members of the same ethnic group in different contemporary contexts. Until about a century ago, New York’s homicide rate was over 10 times London’s stunningly low Victorian rate. Stuntz gets this from Monkonen’s database and Ted Gurr’s, “Trends in Violent Crime: Europe and the United States” and also his, “Violence in America”. (Gurr is quite the prolific author actually).

For example, from 1840-45, the murder rate per 100,000 in New York was 4.4 but in London only 0.3. London’s population was about 2 million at the time – so that means only one murder in the whole city every two months. And remember – this was at a time of essentially zero life-saving emergency medicine. Bring our ambulances and technology to Victorian London and in a city of millions there might be a single homicide in a year. Isn’t that, after all, the Vision of Reactionary Utopia? The only American city comparable to London was … Boston (which has always been the safest big city in America)… but even there it was three times as high even before the Irish arrived in large numbers.

Anyway, Charles Murray also plots the path of low-class Whites over time in his “Coming Apart”. We see new immigrants like Italians and Irish because fairly violent when they get into the country (Moynihan ascribed it to the lack of fathers, too many single young men in female-led households), but then improve dramatically in a generation or two – reverting to the overall White mean. And then, since 1960 – getting worse and worse alongside the Blacks.

Consider variations in imprisonment rates (not a perfect proxy, I know, but it’s what I have to work with) across various States with small black population percentages in 1880:

New York: 124
Michigan: 72
Massachusetts: 60
Illinois: 60
Pennsylvania: 43
Ohio: 40

That’s a huge difference for similar ethnic compositions. But there’s also always been a huge gap between Black and White imprisonment rates. See: Margaret Werner Cahalan “Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States 1850-1984). In 1950 – the rate was 86 for Whites and 402 for Blacks (about 5 times more). In 2000, it was 244 for Whites (180% increase) and a stunning 1,830 for blacks (355% increase, and almost 8 times more than Whites!).

Then again, the Homicide rate in New York was more or less stable between 3 and 5 from 1875 until something goes seriously wrong at the inflection point in 1958. Within 15 years it would explode exponentially, increasing 350%. New York was over 90% White until … the 1950’s. Here is black percentage by decade.

1930: 4.7
1940: 6.1
1950: 9.5
1960: 14.0
1970: 21.1
1980: 25.2
1990: 28.7

A 6-fold increase. Keep in mind that the peak of NYC crime was in 1990 during the ‘crack epidemic’ at 30 homicides per 100,000 – 6 times the pre-war stable rate, and prior to Giuliani’s stop-and-frisk program implementation that reduced the rate 75% in just 10 years. The most successful policing reform achievement in US History based on Racial Profiling, but not permitted to be copied in any other jurisdiction. But the black percentage is still 25.6, so to the extent ‘culture’ includes ‘policing’, a major shift in a particular category crime rate occurred without ethnic proportional change. Then again, they threw most of the most impulsive violent criminals in jail and threw away the keys – so that helps.

There are some other anomalies. I’d guess Memphis and Atlanta were similarly black in 1937, but Memphis’ murder rate was 13 whereas Atlanta’s was 39. (Boston’s was 2).

So, it’s both nature and nurture. With the nurture part going bad for Blacks in the aftermath of the Great Migration and just getting worse and worse since then. But though it’s hard to get old numbers, I see no evidence that there has even been a period in American History when there wasn’t a massive order of magnitude difference in violent criminality between Blacks and Whites. If you do a statistical factor analysis (like Unz did) you find that the explanation reduces to a single variable of one dimension which tracks race almost perfectly.

I should also add that ‘poverty’ and ‘wealth / income gaps’ have always been true as well, however, the degree of those gaps has oscillated wildly without much of an apparent effect on the crime-gap. In the early 1970’s, the median household incomes for Whites and Blacks had come as close as they had ever come before. But that was the ‘low water mark’, and they began to diverge again which has continued until the present day without sign of stopping.

As far as ‘cold despair’ goes, the fact that nurture and culture and social pathology have any significant impact at all is grounds for at least some hope. On the other hand, what are you going to do to fix these things? It seems like it would take some pretty brutal / draconian / fascist policies to correct things like culture, ethics, and illegitimacy. Sailer talks about the coming ‘stolen generation’ when Progressives take all the Blacks’ kids away so they can do extreme ‘early intervention’ and try to raise their test scores.

But people were talking about that 30 years ago.

Consider Unz’s letter to the Economist from 32 years ago. He hoped. “… to help elect [Los Angeles Mayor and Black Democrat] Tom Bradley America’s first black governor”.

From page 145 of American Millstone we get both strategies,

One idea, suggested in August by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, is for underclass children to be taken out of their homes and placed in boarding schools to break ‘this whole cycle of failure.’ The willingness of Bradley, one of the nation’s most prominent black officials, to suggest such a radical proposal indicates the growing seriousness of the problem of underclass education. Yet, he was quick to note that his city would be unable to administer such a costly and, most likely, controversial program.

Another suggestion, proposed on Sept. 23 by a task force appointed by U.S. Sen. Paul Simon [D. Ill.] to suggest improvements in Chicago’s public schools, is to have preschool classes, possibly mandatory, for all 3- and 4-year-olds in the city by 1988.

And with that – I’ve been able to connect every subject in this comment threat in a weird Ouroborus chain. Nothing ever changes. And nobody remembers. Cold Despair Indeed.

But briefly, the incentives of European elites are similar to our own but amplified to a greater degree of severity.

1. Nationalism is a dirty, low-class word and the European Project is hugely important. There is this constant, palpable fear that the local populations will reject the enlightened leadership of their betters and revolt and the whole grand scheme will fall apart. And so it must be held together by any means necessary. Immigrants and multiculturalism means a huge non-nationalist constituency. In America, the question between our parties is “How much Socialism with our Nationalism?” In Europe, it’s, “How much Nationalism, with our Socialism?”

2. Because the Nationalism question is so central over there – the cynical democratic political calculus is much more overt and explicit – because the nationalist party is naturally the anti-immigrant party, and the anti-nationalists are guaranteed America-Black levels of immigrant support. This is ‘elect a new population to achieve permanent one-party rule to complete the Socialist Revolution’ plan. See Peter Hitchens on this subject

3. The Europeans have a huge welfare state with generous early pensions and lots of old baby boomers who forgot to procreate. The Ponzi Scheme collapses without new young workers. Europeans don’t have Japanese trade, currency, and debt policies and the ability to rely on 100% internal finance at 0% interest. (Well, the Germans, Swiss and the North could, but that’s a different story). I specifically remember my relatives parroting this popular and frequently-repeated line of state propaganda on the subject. And there may even be some truth to it – if you don’t mind losing the character of your country in the process of having a nice nursing home experience.

4. Power and Global Influence to Rival the US – Europe wants it badly. They thought a few dozen million immigrants and their offspring would boost their populations and stagnating economies (think of all that new Aggregate Demand Pump Priming!) to get their social engines going again. Not so much.

5. Overconfidence in their own attractiveness and in the automaticity of assimilation despite the prevalence of no-questions-asked, nothing-demanded multiculturalism and the theological vacuum. Basically, a Secular Socialist Frenchman found it utterly inconceivable that someone would come from some crap country and arrive in France and do anything other than immediately drop all those backward old ways and beliefs and rush as quickly as he could to become as much of a Secular Socialist Frenchmen as he could. To be fair, the French – being more naturally Nationalistic and possessed of a healthy amount of No-Apologies French-Ego-Pride, have done a better job than the guilt-ridden Germans and Nordics on insisting on this. But the point is that it came as an absolute surprise that anyone would retain alternative culture and Orthodox Islamism, or that the French-born offspring of immigrants would be particularly likely to adopt radical, violent forms of it.

India and Pakistan suck in extremely similar ways. And Islam is as strong a cultural input you can get.

Biological determinism takes you pretty far I’m afraid.

Re. city maps of racial distribution having a “bulls-eye / archery target” appearance –
During the 2011 English riots, city centres were indeed targets. Surrounded by suburbs seething with yob estate resentment, they were invaded by feral gangs from all directions.
For inner city re-colonizers therefore, such benefits as no longer needing to commute will be offset to some extent by being strategically more vulnerable during outbreaks of civil unrest.

Do you have something that would resolve the controversy between John Derbyshire vs. Mark Steyn? Derbyshire seems to be saying that America’s race problem is basically genetic, and Steyn says it’s cultural.

“Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados? Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.”

IIRC, the differential racial statistics on out-of-wedlock childbirths seem to support Steyn; the numbers changed over time (post 1960) in a way that culture can explain, but genetics can’t. But am I cherry-picking? Do pre-1960 crime statistics reveal a golden age of lawfulness or is it “a kind of cold despair” as far back as the statisticians can see?

Yes, I have a few sources on that, to include Stuntz’s “Collapse of American Criminal Justice”. Anything in particular you’d like to see?