While comprising just 12% of the population at large, African Americans have or will have held the highest or second highest posts in the country for what will be 12 of the last 16 years by 2024. Presently our military is headed by an African American. Does it seriously make sense to you that a systemically racist country would put African Americans in charge of it?
Furthermore, what is true is that while there is a distinct inner city African American culture, if our history were the problem, we would expect to find these “toxic cultures” in the South more than in the Northern cities where slavery was never practiced and Jim Crow laws were not in place. But we see no evidence of that.
Three common characteristics of toxic culture are high rates of violence, high rates of single parent families, and generational failing public school systems.
We should expect that if systemic racism were to blame for toxic culture, that we would see the same thing in early Jewish communities where anti Semitic feelings should have produced the same results… but instead violence, single parent families, and generational failing public school systems were not present… instead the opposite was true…
Violence rates were relatively low especially between Jews, single parent families more rare than even white families, and inner city Jewish schools excelled rather than failed.
Interestingly, African, South American, and Latin American cultures worldwide are in general more violent than most. Check the map below. America’s “neighborhood” experience mimics the violence levels of those countries from which people are descended more so than “their American experience”.
VIOLENCE DEATH RATE BY COUNTRY (worldlifeexpectancy.com)
This suggest toxicity of culture goes all the way back to one’s “mother” country. I refuse to believe skin color or biology is the underlying reason. Something else is causing it… and as long as we let things like “systemic racism” point us in the wrong direction… we will never be able to solve the problem. We know the symptoms of toxic culture, the question is how do we address it?
