The Black Lives Matter movement targets a very specific problem. That problem is that police officers seem to be rather trigger happy when it comes to interaction with black people. The metrics seem to be very fuzzy, largely due to a lack of any level of reporting or accountability when it comes to police killing people, but the one thing that does seem to stand out is the number of black victims shot by police while completely unarmed. This BLM movement, and the police shootings of innocent black victims, has lead to another problem. Now, people are trying to fight back against the police. Recently we have seen a number of BLM related shootings of police officers. The response to the shooting of a few police officers has been very different from the response of police shooting unarmed and innocent black people though. The media immediately reported it when the police were shot. When the black victims were shot, it was only reported when public outcry reached a threshold where it was starting to go viral. It is as if the media actually cared about the police who got shot but only cared about missing out on a viral story when the black people were shot by police. It is clear that police lives matter, but black lives only seem to matter when it makes a good story. This is a problem, for many reasons, but what it really comes down to is that all lives matter.
I would love to discuss why all of these lives matter, but I am not in the mood for a religious discussion, and the point of this article is to discuss why we seem to treat police lives as mattering more and whether they actually do. Before I start though, I want to stress that regardless of whose life matters more, all human lives are equally valuable.
Why do police lives seem to matter more? Police deaths have always been treated as tragic, especially when those deaths were caused by others. Killing a police officer is considered a greater crime than killing a civilian or even a private security guard. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons. The first is that we tend to revere authority. Police officers have been granted authority by the government beyond what regular civilians are granted. If the government is a legitimate source of authority (and most law abiding citizens will agree that it is, to at least some degree), then police officers have legitimate authority over civilians. Killing a police officer is seen as worse than killing another civilian, because a police officer is part of a higher social class than regular civilians. Aside from a question of the Constitutionality of government mandated social classes (explicit or implicit), we should be questioning this. The reason is that police officers are not appointed leaders. They are law enforcement. Their primary job is our protection. So, without the authority argument, are police lives still worth more than civilian lives? This is a harder question. If they are our protectors, and they get killed, who protects us? On the other hand, if they survive but we get killed, are they really protecting us?
The answer should be obvious. Police officers swear to protect the people they serve. They do this with the understanding that they are putting their own lives at risk by doing it. In short, when a police officer fails to protect an innocent civilian, that police officer has failed. When a police officer is killed while protecting civilians, that police officer has done his or her duty. A police officer that kills an innocent civilian has become part of the problem that he or she has sworn to protect everyone else from. The fact is, police officers are people who have sworn to protect the people with the knowledge that they are risking their lives in doing so. Civilians have made no such commitment. Police officers are like soldiers in this respect. In pure value all lives are equal. When it comes to who's lives matter the most though, those who have committed to protect the lives of others have sworn that the lives of others matter more than their own lives.
All lives matter, but the lives of innocent civilians matter more than the lives of police officers, because those officers have declared it so with their own mouths. When a police officer expressed relief that the murder victim was only a security guard and not a government mandated police officer, that officer violated his or her oath of service. When police arrive a crime scene, and the only death is a police officer, that is when they should be relieved. When police arrive at a scene where innocent civilians have died, they should feel like they have failed their sworn duty, because they have! We should mourn police deaths like we mourn the deaths of soldiers. When soldiers die, we revere them (if we have any sense or gratitude) for the sacrifice they have made for our freedom; we don't get outraged that anyone would dare to kill a soldier. When we express outrage that a police officer was killed in the line of duty, we deny their oath and their sworn purpose, and we raise them above ourselves. Police officers are no better than anyone else, except perhaps in their willingness to risk their lives for our safety. The fact is, black lives matter, and so do white lives, Asian lives, native American lives, and the lives of police officers. The fact also is, police officers have sworn their lives to our protection, and when a civilian dies instead of a police office, we should not feel relief, we should feel ashamed for the officers who did not fulfill their duties. In short, all lives matter, but civilian lives matter more than police officer lives, because police officers have sworn to protect them, with their own lives if necessary.
26 July 2016
16 July 2016
Shooting Cops
This topic is not one that I expect to be very popular, especially among certain groups, but it is a topic that needs serious discussion before things get worse.
An important question needs to be answered, and that question is, "Is shooting a police officer worse than shooting someone else?" The gut reaction for most people is probably, "Yes!" I want you to think seriously about this though, and specifically ask yourself why. I won't accept an answers like, "It's obvious," or "They deserve more respect." I want to know exactly why shooting a police officer is worse than shooting someone else. If you are struggling with this, you might want to read this article written by a friend who has worked as a security guard and has interacted closely with police in that capacity: http://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/2016/07/divide-and-conquer.html.
The fact is, we have a major problem in the U.S. The U.S. Constitution forbids the creation of government mandated social classes. Our current law enforcement system treats the lives of police officers as more valuable than the lives of regular citizens. It gives police officers rights beyond what regular citizens are allowed. It even provides police with access to weapons that are not legal for regular citizens to own. In short, in the U.S. police officers are a de facto aristocracy, given rights and privileges, by the government, beyond what are given to the "peasant" class. Police are not the only aristocracy in the U.S., but they are the only one that is allowed to pass judgement and execute the death penalty without giving the victim a fair trial, which has started to become a serious problem in recent years.
The 2nd amendment is often seen by liberals as purely related to the (possibly outdated) idea that states need armed militias for national protection. Many conservatives see it as a right explicitly given to allow the people to protect themselves against a corrupt government. I have already written on this subject, so I am not going to elaborate, but my conclusion based on the biases and situation of the people who actually drafted and passed the amendment, it is extremely likely that protection against a corrupt government was a very real and serious element (among several others) in the decision to grant the right to bear arms. Now, it should be obvious that the government will never justify the use of this right for the citizens of the U.S. to enforce their Constitutional rights. Any acts against the government, no matter how corrupt it is, will be framed by the government and anyone that benefits from the government (the media, for example) as serious crime. The use of the 2nd amendment by the people to protect themselves from a corrupt government will never be sanctioned by that government, or by the media that has a very close relationship with it. In other words, any violent act by the people to secure their freedom, no matter how necessary, will always get those people branded as villains and criminals.
The only way we can secure our freedom is by thinking for ourselves, instead of letting the government and the media tell us what to think. Now I don't want to glorify violence. No act of violence is ever glorious. Sometimes it is necessary though. I am not going to judge whether the recent violence against police was necessary or not. From one perspective, the police killed were not those guilty of the recent murders committed by police. On the other hand though, they are all part of the same de facto aristocracy, and the American people have a Constitutional right to defend themselves from this kind of government mandated social division. It is time for the people of the U.S. to think for themselves when it comes to this. Instead of taking the word of the media and the government, use your own brains to work out the ethics of a man killing illegally mandated aristocrats who have been given power over him to judge and kill him on the spot, without a fair trial.
I also want to point out something very important. The number of innocent black people murdered by police in the last few years is far greater than the number of police officers killed. Note also that the murders committed by police don't even include the white victims or victims of any other race. The media treats murders of innocent victims by police as controversial, while it treats killings of police as heinous crimes against our great country. This is a country where the citizens are supposed to be the most important thing, but the media and the government treat our police as more important than the citizens. If this does not prompt you to reconsider how you think about the relationship between the government, law enforcement, and the people, then perhaps you live in the wrong country.
I submit that the lives of police officers are worth no more than the lives of any other citizen of this country. I further submit that murders committed by police are a much more serious problem than the occasional police officer killed in the line of duty. Lastly, I submit that the guy who recently killed several police officers had completely reasonable and logical justifications for doing so, though perhaps he could have chosen better targets.
The fact is, we have a major problem here. People with strong morals and good ethics tend to believe that problems like this should be handled through the proper legal channels. It is generally better to campaign and vote for change than to get violent about it. The problem is, the "proper legal channels" are controlled by police through their magical union that has the powers to negotiate laws without the consent of the people. While I will hold out for the proper legal channels for now, this may be a problem that cannot be resolved without violence. It is possible that the shooter was just a hot head with a short fuse. It is also possible that he had better foresight than I do, realizing that the time for the "proper legal channels" has passed. Like I said, I won't pass judgement. I think that it is still possible to fix this without killing a bunch of people. That said, this police aristocracy is so deeply entrenched in our culture and our society that the time may already be here, where the sacrifice of lives is necessary to reestablish our lost freedom and to maintain it once we have gotten it back.
If you have thought seriously about this problem and can clearly see that it is a serious problem, please campaign and vote to fix it. Police should have no more power or value than any regular U.S. citizen. Police should be at least as accountable as regular citizens for any damage, injury, or death that they cause. If we can take police from their elevated position to the same legal and social status as every other U.S. citizen, we can avoid unnecessary blood shed. If we cannot do this though, we are going to have more police shootings and more murders committed by police, and eventually it will end in either open rebellion against the police or a police state so oppressive that we have lost most of the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Either way will involve significant blood shed, possibly for a very long time. The fact is, the U.S. has been a police state for quite a long time. We have let it sneak up on us, and if we don't do something about it now, it will get a lot closer to the movies and books than anyone ever expected.
An important question needs to be answered, and that question is, "Is shooting a police officer worse than shooting someone else?" The gut reaction for most people is probably, "Yes!" I want you to think seriously about this though, and specifically ask yourself why. I won't accept an answers like, "It's obvious," or "They deserve more respect." I want to know exactly why shooting a police officer is worse than shooting someone else. If you are struggling with this, you might want to read this article written by a friend who has worked as a security guard and has interacted closely with police in that capacity: http://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/2016/07/divide-and-conquer.html.
The fact is, we have a major problem in the U.S. The U.S. Constitution forbids the creation of government mandated social classes. Our current law enforcement system treats the lives of police officers as more valuable than the lives of regular citizens. It gives police officers rights beyond what regular citizens are allowed. It even provides police with access to weapons that are not legal for regular citizens to own. In short, in the U.S. police officers are a de facto aristocracy, given rights and privileges, by the government, beyond what are given to the "peasant" class. Police are not the only aristocracy in the U.S., but they are the only one that is allowed to pass judgement and execute the death penalty without giving the victim a fair trial, which has started to become a serious problem in recent years.
The 2nd amendment is often seen by liberals as purely related to the (possibly outdated) idea that states need armed militias for national protection. Many conservatives see it as a right explicitly given to allow the people to protect themselves against a corrupt government. I have already written on this subject, so I am not going to elaborate, but my conclusion based on the biases and situation of the people who actually drafted and passed the amendment, it is extremely likely that protection against a corrupt government was a very real and serious element (among several others) in the decision to grant the right to bear arms. Now, it should be obvious that the government will never justify the use of this right for the citizens of the U.S. to enforce their Constitutional rights. Any acts against the government, no matter how corrupt it is, will be framed by the government and anyone that benefits from the government (the media, for example) as serious crime. The use of the 2nd amendment by the people to protect themselves from a corrupt government will never be sanctioned by that government, or by the media that has a very close relationship with it. In other words, any violent act by the people to secure their freedom, no matter how necessary, will always get those people branded as villains and criminals.
The only way we can secure our freedom is by thinking for ourselves, instead of letting the government and the media tell us what to think. Now I don't want to glorify violence. No act of violence is ever glorious. Sometimes it is necessary though. I am not going to judge whether the recent violence against police was necessary or not. From one perspective, the police killed were not those guilty of the recent murders committed by police. On the other hand though, they are all part of the same de facto aristocracy, and the American people have a Constitutional right to defend themselves from this kind of government mandated social division. It is time for the people of the U.S. to think for themselves when it comes to this. Instead of taking the word of the media and the government, use your own brains to work out the ethics of a man killing illegally mandated aristocrats who have been given power over him to judge and kill him on the spot, without a fair trial.
I also want to point out something very important. The number of innocent black people murdered by police in the last few years is far greater than the number of police officers killed. Note also that the murders committed by police don't even include the white victims or victims of any other race. The media treats murders of innocent victims by police as controversial, while it treats killings of police as heinous crimes against our great country. This is a country where the citizens are supposed to be the most important thing, but the media and the government treat our police as more important than the citizens. If this does not prompt you to reconsider how you think about the relationship between the government, law enforcement, and the people, then perhaps you live in the wrong country.
I submit that the lives of police officers are worth no more than the lives of any other citizen of this country. I further submit that murders committed by police are a much more serious problem than the occasional police officer killed in the line of duty. Lastly, I submit that the guy who recently killed several police officers had completely reasonable and logical justifications for doing so, though perhaps he could have chosen better targets.
The fact is, we have a major problem here. People with strong morals and good ethics tend to believe that problems like this should be handled through the proper legal channels. It is generally better to campaign and vote for change than to get violent about it. The problem is, the "proper legal channels" are controlled by police through their magical union that has the powers to negotiate laws without the consent of the people. While I will hold out for the proper legal channels for now, this may be a problem that cannot be resolved without violence. It is possible that the shooter was just a hot head with a short fuse. It is also possible that he had better foresight than I do, realizing that the time for the "proper legal channels" has passed. Like I said, I won't pass judgement. I think that it is still possible to fix this without killing a bunch of people. That said, this police aristocracy is so deeply entrenched in our culture and our society that the time may already be here, where the sacrifice of lives is necessary to reestablish our lost freedom and to maintain it once we have gotten it back.
If you have thought seriously about this problem and can clearly see that it is a serious problem, please campaign and vote to fix it. Police should have no more power or value than any regular U.S. citizen. Police should be at least as accountable as regular citizens for any damage, injury, or death that they cause. If we can take police from their elevated position to the same legal and social status as every other U.S. citizen, we can avoid unnecessary blood shed. If we cannot do this though, we are going to have more police shootings and more murders committed by police, and eventually it will end in either open rebellion against the police or a police state so oppressive that we have lost most of the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Either way will involve significant blood shed, possibly for a very long time. The fact is, the U.S. has been a police state for quite a long time. We have let it sneak up on us, and if we don't do something about it now, it will get a lot closer to the movies and books than anyone ever expected.
02 July 2016
Race and Wealth Distribution
Today, a friend asked me how a more even distribution of wealth could make any difference to people of any specific race. This made me realize that many people legitimately don't understand this, and maybe part of the problem with racial inequity in the U.S. is that a vast majority of people do not even realize that there is a problem. I want to break down the statistics and math so that they are easier to understand, and maybe this will help people to see the issue better.
Pretty much all of this data is in percentages, but this may be a poor way of representing valuable human lives, as it is easy to see percentages as meaningless data that is not associated with actual people. So, I am going to present this as a representative sample of 100 Americans.
If we have a perfectly representative sample of Americans with 100 people in the group, here is what you might expect. In this group, there is one filthy rich person, making at least $450,000 a year. There are 6 regular rich people making over $200,000 a year. There are around 20 upper middle class people, making more than $100,000 a year. There are maybe 36 middle class people making more than $50,000 a year. There are 16 lower middle class and upper lower class people making $30,000 or more a year. There are 21 people in various degrees of poverty. Grouping these a little more broadly, there is one filthy rich person, 6 upper class people, around 72 middle and lower class people, and around 21 people living in poverty.
Now, another way to look at these 100 people is by race. 61 of these 100 people are white. 13 of these people are black. 1 is Native American. 5 are Asian. 17 are Hispanic. The other 3 people are mixed race. White people dramatically outnumber any other specific race, but only a bit over half of the people are white.
This next bit of information, linking the two above data sets, is much harder to find, but we will do our best with what we have. On average, the black people are making $35,000 a year. This puts a vast majority of them into the poverty category, with maybe only one or two in a higher category. White people are averaging $60,000 a year, putting them squarely in the middle of the middle class category, but it is important to understand that the 1 filthy rich guy and the 6 rich people are all white. Yes, there are non-white people in the $200,000+ a year category, but the number is not statistically significant, especially when talking in percentages. The thing to keep in mind here is, there are only 13 black people in our sample. Well under 1% of Americans are both rich and black, or for that matter, rich and any race but white, despite the fact that 39% of Americans are not white. Our 5 Asians are actually the only group to beat white people, at $74,000 a year, but with such a small percentage, we would have to see a lot of Asians making more than $200,000 a year to have a footprint above the middle class, and if that were the case, they would be averaging significantly more than $74,000 a year. Hispanics are making around $41,000 a year, putting them mostly in the high end of the lower class, but again, a lot of them are spread through the poverty section as well as the middle class section. The point here is, if you look at these numbers, you will find that probably 6 or 7 of the black people are in poverty and probably the same number of Hispanic people are there as well. Asians don't make up much of the population, but their mean income is high enough that it would be reasonable to assume most of them are not in poverty, and white people are making up most of the middle and upper class, so most of them are also not in poverty. Broken down, you will probably find that of the 21 people in poverty, around 14 are black or Hispanic, 1 is Native American, and the other 6 are white.
So, here is what this means: About 1/3 of Americans in poverty are black, 1/3 are Hispanic, and 1/3 are white. If the racial distribution of the U.S. was 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 like that, this is what we would expect. This is not the case though. Over 60% of Americans are white, which means that half as many whites are in poverty as the country's racial distribution suggests. In the above breakdown, we have maybe 7 white people in poverty, when we should be seeing more like 13. Only 13% of Americans are black, while around 30% of people in poverty are black. What we are seeing is about twice as many black people in poverty as the numbers suggest. In our breakdown, we have 7 black people in poverty, when we should have only 3. Hispanics are in about the same boat. We are seeing 30% when we should be seeing about half that. In the breakdown, we would be expecting to see about 4 Hispanic people in poverty, while we are actually seeing 7.
So, the numbers have gotten complicated at this point, and honestly there is no way to avoid that entirely. We can still manage though. Here is what we have so far:
Here is what we can see from the above numbers. White Americans are massively over represented in the upper class. They are over represented by 4% in the middle and lower classes. They are massively under represented, by around 28% in the poverty class. Black and Hispanic Americans are massively under represented in the upper class (statistically, there there should be at least one of each). They are under represented by 2% for black people and 3% for Hispanics in the middle and lower class. In the poverty class though, the are massively over represented, by 20% for black people and 16% for Hispanics. In short, we are not seeing enough black and Hispanic people in the upper, middle, and lower classes, and we are seeing way too many in the poverty class. The spots that are left are taken up by white people.
What about redistribution of wealth then? Does this really show that it would help specific races of people? It does, and I will show you how. Consider if we take a significant amount of income from the 7 people at the top. This affects only white people, because that is all there is up there. The middle class won't really be affected much, so a vast majority of white people will actually not be affected at all. The poverty class, on the other hand, has a dramatically different racial distribution, and this is where it makes a difference. If we give the money from the upper class to the 21 people in poverty, we are helping equal numbers of black, Hispanic, and white people, while the national racial distribution is not equal. In fact, breaking down the numbers specifically per race shows the big picture very well.
The number of black people in poverty is close to the same as the number who are not in poverty. So, we are giving more than half of the black population significant amounts of money. The Hispanic population is not quite as evenly divided, but we are still giving 41% of them money. The white people in poverty, however, only make up 10% of the white population. In other words, not only would redistribution of wealth benefit more black and Hispanic people by relative measure (54% of black people and 41% of Hispanics, compared to only 10% of white people), it also benefits black and Hispanic people in larger absolute quantity, because far more of our black and Hispanic populations are in poverty than our white population.
Let's put this into absolute numbers. In 2015 (where most of my data is from), the U.S. population was about 320 million people. According to the racial distribution above, that means we had about 195.2 million white people, 41.6 million black people, and 54.4 million Hispanic people. Out of these numbers, a redistribution of wealth primarily funded by our 7% (or 22.4 million) upper class white people (making more than $200,000 a year, including the 1%, or 3.2 million making more than $450,000 a year) would cost only 22.4 million white people (I say "cost" instead of "hurt" because these people could sacrifice half of the incomes without any real suffering). At the same time, it would help 19.2 million white people, 22.4 million black people, and 22.4 million Hispanic people. The total number of people helped is 67.2 million. The fact is, while only 19.2 million while people would be helped, 44.8 million black and Hispanic people would be helped. In other words, a redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities far more than it would help white people, and it would help almost 3 times as many people as it mildly inconvenienced.
Now, there is another question that goes with this: Would a redistribution of wealth only help the poverty class and maybe the lower class? The evidence seems to indicate that it would not. Research consistently shows that racially diverse schools produce better results for everyone, not just those of minority races. When schools that are exclusively white get some poor black and Hispanic students mixed in (and by "some" I mean, a significant number, not just a token black guy here or there), not only do the poor black and Hispanic students grades improve, the grades of the upper and middle class white students also improve. An effective redistribution of wealth would give black and Hispanic families some of the same mobility as middle and upper class white families, which would give them more choice in what schools to send their children to. We would quickly start to see more black and Hispanic kids in traditionally all middle and upper class white schools, not only helping these minorities to get out of poverty, and also helping the isolated white kids to learn more effectively as well.
It goes further though. While this may not have quite the same level of evidence (the period of time directly after desegregation in the U.S. provided tons of data on school environments and student scores), there is still significant speculation backed by math and some evidence that redistribution of wealth would stimulate the U.S. economy, possibly on a level never before seen in the history of the planet. This could result in the 7% of white upper class Americans ultimately coming away with more than they contributed, and it would certainly help pretty much all of the rest of the people in the U.S.
In short, redistribution of wealth would, at the least, help around 3 times as many people as it costs. It would help the black and Hispanic American populations far more than the white population. It would almost eliminate poverty. It would significantly improve U.S. education, as black and Hispanic Americans take advantage of their new mobility. It would most likely also dramatically improve the U.S. economy, and it might even improve the economy enough to ultimately pay back those who funded it, with interest. (And honestly, even if it didn't, it would not actually hurt anyone, and it would help right some wrongs which have plagued our country for centuries.)
Anyhow, this is how redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities in the U.S. I hope this helps you to see that there is indeed a problem. I hope this helps you to see how redistribution of wealth would help solve this problem. I also hope this helps you see that redistribution of wealth is not just "stealing from the rich to give to the poor," and how it is far more and far better than that. The fact is, the money that would be redistributed should be regarded as compensating people for hundreds of years of theft from them and their ancestors. Overt racism might be illegal, but racism is still causing not only the victims but also the perpetrators a great deal of harm. If we would fix this and right this wrong, our nation could be so much better. As our Pledge of Allegiance says, "United we stand, divided we fall." We might be united as states, but if we are not united as people, our nation will ultimately be crushed under its own weight.
References:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/
https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/674703885357867009
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/RHI125215/00
Pretty much all of this data is in percentages, but this may be a poor way of representing valuable human lives, as it is easy to see percentages as meaningless data that is not associated with actual people. So, I am going to present this as a representative sample of 100 Americans.
If we have a perfectly representative sample of Americans with 100 people in the group, here is what you might expect. In this group, there is one filthy rich person, making at least $450,000 a year. There are 6 regular rich people making over $200,000 a year. There are around 20 upper middle class people, making more than $100,000 a year. There are maybe 36 middle class people making more than $50,000 a year. There are 16 lower middle class and upper lower class people making $30,000 or more a year. There are 21 people in various degrees of poverty. Grouping these a little more broadly, there is one filthy rich person, 6 upper class people, around 72 middle and lower class people, and around 21 people living in poverty.
Now, another way to look at these 100 people is by race. 61 of these 100 people are white. 13 of these people are black. 1 is Native American. 5 are Asian. 17 are Hispanic. The other 3 people are mixed race. White people dramatically outnumber any other specific race, but only a bit over half of the people are white.
This next bit of information, linking the two above data sets, is much harder to find, but we will do our best with what we have. On average, the black people are making $35,000 a year. This puts a vast majority of them into the poverty category, with maybe only one or two in a higher category. White people are averaging $60,000 a year, putting them squarely in the middle of the middle class category, but it is important to understand that the 1 filthy rich guy and the 6 rich people are all white. Yes, there are non-white people in the $200,000+ a year category, but the number is not statistically significant, especially when talking in percentages. The thing to keep in mind here is, there are only 13 black people in our sample. Well under 1% of Americans are both rich and black, or for that matter, rich and any race but white, despite the fact that 39% of Americans are not white. Our 5 Asians are actually the only group to beat white people, at $74,000 a year, but with such a small percentage, we would have to see a lot of Asians making more than $200,000 a year to have a footprint above the middle class, and if that were the case, they would be averaging significantly more than $74,000 a year. Hispanics are making around $41,000 a year, putting them mostly in the high end of the lower class, but again, a lot of them are spread through the poverty section as well as the middle class section. The point here is, if you look at these numbers, you will find that probably 6 or 7 of the black people are in poverty and probably the same number of Hispanic people are there as well. Asians don't make up much of the population, but their mean income is high enough that it would be reasonable to assume most of them are not in poverty, and white people are making up most of the middle and upper class, so most of them are also not in poverty. Broken down, you will probably find that of the 21 people in poverty, around 14 are black or Hispanic, 1 is Native American, and the other 6 are white.
So, here is what this means: About 1/3 of Americans in poverty are black, 1/3 are Hispanic, and 1/3 are white. If the racial distribution of the U.S. was 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 like that, this is what we would expect. This is not the case though. Over 60% of Americans are white, which means that half as many whites are in poverty as the country's racial distribution suggests. In the above breakdown, we have maybe 7 white people in poverty, when we should be seeing more like 13. Only 13% of Americans are black, while around 30% of people in poverty are black. What we are seeing is about twice as many black people in poverty as the numbers suggest. In our breakdown, we have 7 black people in poverty, when we should have only 3. Hispanics are in about the same boat. We are seeing 30% when we should be seeing about half that. In the breakdown, we would be expecting to see about 4 Hispanic people in poverty, while we are actually seeing 7.
So, the numbers have gotten complicated at this point, and honestly there is no way to avoid that entirely. We can still manage though. Here is what we have so far:
- 7 rich or extremely rich people
- 7 White (yes, that is all of them)
- 72 middle and lower class people
- 48 White
- 6 Black
- 10 Hispanic
- 5 Asian
- 21 people in poverty
- 6 White
- 7 Black
- 7 Hispanic
Here is what we can see from the above numbers. White Americans are massively over represented in the upper class. They are over represented by 4% in the middle and lower classes. They are massively under represented, by around 28% in the poverty class. Black and Hispanic Americans are massively under represented in the upper class (statistically, there there should be at least one of each). They are under represented by 2% for black people and 3% for Hispanics in the middle and lower class. In the poverty class though, the are massively over represented, by 20% for black people and 16% for Hispanics. In short, we are not seeing enough black and Hispanic people in the upper, middle, and lower classes, and we are seeing way too many in the poverty class. The spots that are left are taken up by white people.
What about redistribution of wealth then? Does this really show that it would help specific races of people? It does, and I will show you how. Consider if we take a significant amount of income from the 7 people at the top. This affects only white people, because that is all there is up there. The middle class won't really be affected much, so a vast majority of white people will actually not be affected at all. The poverty class, on the other hand, has a dramatically different racial distribution, and this is where it makes a difference. If we give the money from the upper class to the 21 people in poverty, we are helping equal numbers of black, Hispanic, and white people, while the national racial distribution is not equal. In fact, breaking down the numbers specifically per race shows the big picture very well.
The number of black people in poverty is close to the same as the number who are not in poverty. So, we are giving more than half of the black population significant amounts of money. The Hispanic population is not quite as evenly divided, but we are still giving 41% of them money. The white people in poverty, however, only make up 10% of the white population. In other words, not only would redistribution of wealth benefit more black and Hispanic people by relative measure (54% of black people and 41% of Hispanics, compared to only 10% of white people), it also benefits black and Hispanic people in larger absolute quantity, because far more of our black and Hispanic populations are in poverty than our white population.
Let's put this into absolute numbers. In 2015 (where most of my data is from), the U.S. population was about 320 million people. According to the racial distribution above, that means we had about 195.2 million white people, 41.6 million black people, and 54.4 million Hispanic people. Out of these numbers, a redistribution of wealth primarily funded by our 7% (or 22.4 million) upper class white people (making more than $200,000 a year, including the 1%, or 3.2 million making more than $450,000 a year) would cost only 22.4 million white people (I say "cost" instead of "hurt" because these people could sacrifice half of the incomes without any real suffering). At the same time, it would help 19.2 million white people, 22.4 million black people, and 22.4 million Hispanic people. The total number of people helped is 67.2 million. The fact is, while only 19.2 million while people would be helped, 44.8 million black and Hispanic people would be helped. In other words, a redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities far more than it would help white people, and it would help almost 3 times as many people as it mildly inconvenienced.
Now, there is another question that goes with this: Would a redistribution of wealth only help the poverty class and maybe the lower class? The evidence seems to indicate that it would not. Research consistently shows that racially diverse schools produce better results for everyone, not just those of minority races. When schools that are exclusively white get some poor black and Hispanic students mixed in (and by "some" I mean, a significant number, not just a token black guy here or there), not only do the poor black and Hispanic students grades improve, the grades of the upper and middle class white students also improve. An effective redistribution of wealth would give black and Hispanic families some of the same mobility as middle and upper class white families, which would give them more choice in what schools to send their children to. We would quickly start to see more black and Hispanic kids in traditionally all middle and upper class white schools, not only helping these minorities to get out of poverty, and also helping the isolated white kids to learn more effectively as well.
It goes further though. While this may not have quite the same level of evidence (the period of time directly after desegregation in the U.S. provided tons of data on school environments and student scores), there is still significant speculation backed by math and some evidence that redistribution of wealth would stimulate the U.S. economy, possibly on a level never before seen in the history of the planet. This could result in the 7% of white upper class Americans ultimately coming away with more than they contributed, and it would certainly help pretty much all of the rest of the people in the U.S.
In short, redistribution of wealth would, at the least, help around 3 times as many people as it costs. It would help the black and Hispanic American populations far more than the white population. It would almost eliminate poverty. It would significantly improve U.S. education, as black and Hispanic Americans take advantage of their new mobility. It would most likely also dramatically improve the U.S. economy, and it might even improve the economy enough to ultimately pay back those who funded it, with interest. (And honestly, even if it didn't, it would not actually hurt anyone, and it would help right some wrongs which have plagued our country for centuries.)
Anyhow, this is how redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities in the U.S. I hope this helps you to see that there is indeed a problem. I hope this helps you to see how redistribution of wealth would help solve this problem. I also hope this helps you see that redistribution of wealth is not just "stealing from the rich to give to the poor," and how it is far more and far better than that. The fact is, the money that would be redistributed should be regarded as compensating people for hundreds of years of theft from them and their ancestors. Overt racism might be illegal, but racism is still causing not only the victims but also the perpetrators a great deal of harm. If we would fix this and right this wrong, our nation could be so much better. As our Pledge of Allegiance says, "United we stand, divided we fall." We might be united as states, but if we are not united as people, our nation will ultimately be crushed under its own weight.
References:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/
https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/674703885357867009
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/RHI125215/00
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