(This is part of an ongoing series. To find previous editions, copy and paste “Is American Urban Culture Beyond Repair?” into the search function at the top of your screen.)
Examining the deleterious impacts of modern urban culture on the American social fabric and its future prognosis.
In the previous installment of Is American Urban Culture Beyond Repair?, ChatGPT, when prompted to explain the wildly disproportionate rates of black violent crime in the United States, offered as the top explanation “concentrated poverty and economic inequality,” among other obfuscations.
Poverty is perhaps the most common excuse that social justice activists offer to explain away the very inconvenient crime statistics that undercut their “evil violent white man” dogma.
You know the thing.
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The narrative that urban Americans disproportionately commit violence because they are forced by circumstances beyond their control to be that way is so often authoritatively repeated that it is essentially tantamount to conventional wisdom at this point. I learned it all throughout public school, most especially in sociology undergraduate courses. If you have kids you send to government school for whatever reason, they’re learning it too.
As seen during COVID with the “safe and effective” line to describe a “vaccine” that turned out to be neither, social engineers will often use the tactic of repeating whatever bumper-sticker-length slogan ad nauseam so that most people can be socially conditioned to take it for granted, and anyone who questions it will be derided as a loon. Once it becomes so entrenched that the peasants who have internalized it enforce the dogma themselves against heretics, it sort of takes on a life of its own and becomes very difficult to dislodge.
So, given that ChatGPT is fed on the musings of overpaid, ideologically driven academics, it’s no wonder that it spits back the same narrative.
In fact, DEI Doctor Allison Wiltz, a “[capital B] Black womanist scholar" with a PhD from New Orleans, takes it one step further: poverty isn’t just a driver of violence in blameless, victimized urban culture; it is the violence.
Via Dr. Allison Wiltz (emphasis added):
Throughout American history, Black people have learned that violence takes on many shapes and forms. Sometimes, those with ill intent will brandish a weapon, like a knife, gun, or pitchfork, and other times, their disdain will be expressed in systems designed to perpetuate harm. This essay is about the latter. You see, far too often, discussions about racism center on explicit examples while ignoring more subtle cues, in essence, missing the forest for the trees. Maybe you have never considered this before, but poverty is a form of violence in the black community, a way of causing harm without ever brandishing a weapon or saying an unkind word…
Racial redlining and discrimination in banking forced black families into these communities. The intentional lack of investment in these communities, paired with widespread poverty, creates a toxic cycle. In some cases, Black people are pushed to the edges, literally marginalized out of their communities, or confined in others. Depriving black communities of these resources contributes to all the ill effects associated with poverty, such as increased crime, and poorer health outcomes, less access to educational or economic opportunities for advancement. There's a reason why Black people often refer to the hood as a trap — it's designed to keep you ensnared, trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.
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Give them more money, so the story goes, sometimes explicitly but usually implicitly, and urban Americans will stop killing each other (and other ethnic groups) at wildly disproportionate clips relative to the general population.
Right?
Poverty, I would posit, is probably not completely uncorrelated to criminality — material conditions do matter — but it’s clearly not a 1:1 causal relationship, based on the overwhelming statistical evidence and observable reality available to anyone willing to open their eyes.
In upcoming installments, we’ll explore what actual empirical evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, not mythology, has to say about the “poverty causes violence” theory.
