Diverse Criteria
Thoreau said:
Well, I do a lot of regional traveling for my job. On the occasions that I have to go to a low-income, majorly black area (always a high crime area around here), I usually go armed. I'm not afraid of black people. But I do recognize that increased threat of crime in majorly black neighborhoods, and thus I protect myself accordingly.
You
do realize, of course, that you changed your own criteria?
Or, rather, you went from
criterion to
criteria:
• "
Blacks statistically commit higher rates of homicide. Therefore, regardless of one's own race, it can be beneficial to stereotype based on race, for the purpose of self-protection."
(Topic post)
• "
... a low-income, majorly black area (always a high crime area around here) ...."
(#14)
Low income? What's that? Poverty?
There's your key.
It's like that
Top Gear bit where they drove across Alabama and painted weird slogans on their cars about Hillary Clinton, NASCAR, and homosexuality. That ranting gas station manager is a
perfect stereotype of the South. But more than just being in the South, there is the question of the general affluence of the community; up here in Seattle, that stunt wouldn't have worked at all because we'd have thought the cars were hilarious. Yet there are places in the Evergreen State where that sort of stunt wouldn't go over well. And it's not just because a town is in the east half of the state, or something like that. These are less affluent, less educated communities, and skin color doesn't make much of a difference.
There are neighborhoods in the Seattle area with high nonwhite populations—including concentrations of blacks—and elevated crime rates, in which I would feel safer than some of our white-bred backwaters around the state.
Two comparative stories: I was once headed out of Tula's, a jazz club, in the Belltown neighborhood. Belltown is actually a pretty cool neighborhood, so I was surprised when a prostitute emerged from an alley and offered her services. I politely declined. As I did so, her mountain of a black man pimp came out of the alley and offered me a pot deal. In all honesty I told him no thanks, my box at home was full. I thanked him; he told me to take it easy and have a good night. Really. I had the money to make a buy, but I was set, and my rules about random street deals generally worry about cops and product quality. There was another time when I happened to be walking up the street to ... um ... somewhere. Maybe just the grocery store. A white guy approached me and offered me 'shrooms for a price I couldn't resist, so I made the buy. It wasn't that he was white, but the fact that I was in
Fremont, the legendary hippie neighborhood of Seattle. Technically, yes, it was a stupid buy, but it all worked out fine. A quarter of 'shrooms at half-price? And they were
good. Not the best I've ever had, but certainly more than merely respectable.
Had I been running low that night in Belltown, I would have made the buy. Acknowledging the fact that, well, the dude's a pimp, I've found that many who others consider "dangerous"—and, well, yeah, a pimp qualifies, especially when he's got eight inches and over a hundred pounds on you—aren't problematic. It's easy to not start shit with someone when you're not afraid of them. The guy's a
businessman in his own mind, and thrashing me for the sixty bucks in my wallet would have qualified as an unnecessary risk.
At the time, I had good connections. I had at least an eighth left in my kif box at home, didn't know the quality of the stuff he was hawking, and had, a couple years before, reassessed my security measures after wandering through a random police dragnet that, it turned out, might well have been looking for me considering I had been walking around that part of Ballard on my lunch break every day smoking dope. They were, apparently—at least, as it was explained to me by the two cops I talked to—following up on reports of someone walking around smoking some kind of drugs. Unless there was a crackhead a block over, that was probably me. And, you know, when those sorts of things happen, you reassess your behavior.
I knew where my next bag was coming from, that night in Belltown. The fact that he was black had nothing to do with it. Indeed, if I wanted to presume based on race, I would have dismissed my concerns about quality; the pimps are somewhere up the chain from my usual dealers, and the farther you are down the line, the lesser the quality you get. (Of course, it was Seattle, so there's only so low the quality gets; whenever people brought up Mexican dirtweed or that dry, crumbly shit from the American southwest ... well, that's the stuff you sell to the homeless or to high school kids, I guess. I know it comes in, but I haven't seen it in years, though. Even now, with exceptionally limited contacts, and living amid a mix of backwaters with gun racks for their gun rack and bourgeois snobs who fund enforcement of gardening standards and how long your damn garage door is open, the product quality is more than simply good enough.)
Does all this seem like a digression? My point is that there are more criteria to consider than just skin color.
By a market standard, my big risk in Fremont was that I was buying off a guy who was clearly an addict trying to fund his next score, and who might well not have been astute enough to know what he was actually selling. But, as I said, it was Fremont, so one might invoke the phrase, so the odds were in my favor.
But, yeah. Maybe it's the strangest thing to you, but the pimp, aside from being a pimp, was a perfectly cool dude for a hulking criminal emerging suddenly from a shadowed alley.
In my world, it's the white meth users who are the higher risk, largely because they're unpredictable and stupid.
Not because they're white. They're stupid enough to use meth, and meth makes people
very unpredictable.
Hell, when I was dating the hispanic daughter of a meth dealer, years ago in Oregon—where the meth dealers were largely backwater sharks—I never once felt threatened by her business associates. Her customers, however, were a different story, regardless of their skin color.
So go back and look at your criteria. In the topic post, it's skin color. In #14, you add a really important factor—poverty.
