You know somebody is white when they use their black friends as reference material for discussions on race. Or at least not black.
The root of these issues is systematic. One thing is all related to another. Poverty, schools, jobs, the economy, parenting, race, community, individual decision making influenced by cultural trends, all these things are interconnected and related to produce outcomes.
What's your point? What does my ethnicity have to do with this? You just repeated the exact same thing I said, except with a snarky and pointless comment.
Note that I mentioned it is not race, it is linked to poverty, and also familial upbringing, and other factors, so you're just regurgitating what I said. My comment on my black friends was meant to address the fact that it is not race that influences your actions, but environment and family values.
My point is that using "my black friends..." as supporting evidence for your arguments is crappy supporting evidence, regardless of your race, national origin, economic background, etc. I admit to not reading your whole post because whenever I see the phrase "my black friends" I have a knee jerk reaction to believe that the speaker has no clue what it is like to grow up and live in poverty with crap family life in a crap urban American neighborhood with crap schools and crap jobs and not enough resources to access places with better jobs and education opportunities to climb out of poverty and then the additional influence of racial messages and being a member of a race that has been systemically repressed for most of your country's history, and a large chunk of the population still holds veiled racist views against you and doesn't really want to take the effort and energy to understand you as a person. All the speaker has is their limited interactions in the bubble of their daily and lifetime experiences (we all live in our little bubbles, fyi), and should make an effort to visualize themselves in these less-than-ideal environments to understand why people act the way they do, rather default to their own limited experiences as evidence.
Then you write things like " Is it an innate, racial thing? I don't know. We can't say without cold, hard evidence. Anecdotal observations don't count."
And I'm like wut. What the hell is that? Of course it's not an innate racial thing, you don't need a grand scientific study to figure that out and will serve to justify currently held racist views and discourage people from understanding each person as a person. Anecdotal evidence will work just fine to answer that question. The more people you meet, the more places you go, the more interactions and experiences you develop, the more you understand that WE ARE ALL ONE, and way more alike than we are different. And this is a beautiful thing, because it allows us to connect with and understand almost anyone.
Okay, then stuff like this: "*WHY* is this the case?...How can we fix it? Or is it so difficult and entrenched in American society/history that it is unresolvable? This is what really interests me. If only we could scientifically test this. But people are too sensitive and politically correct to entertain the notion. Science and effective problem resolution is so often held back by these bleeding heart sentimentalities..."
You don't seem to understand human nature very well. We are human, we are inherently flawed, we always will be, and our institutions and cultures always will be flawed because they reflect who we are as people. We always will create problem to be solved, because each of us are problems to be solved. Things can be improved, but most likely never completely solved. Psychology is a heck of a field for understanding human behavior. You can attempt to apply scientific research and engineer a solution, but we are humans, not robots. We are emotional, irrational, self-absorbed, and basically incapable of making the best decisions based on all the best information because the limitations of our tiny human minds to grasp the information overload that is modern life. Accept it, don't cause problems yourself, and the world is a better place just because of that.
Like you mentioned, a variety of factors are at play that influence why individuals act the way that they do. The main problem that I see in discussions of race is people do not consider how an individual's decision making is influenced by many factors to produce outcomes, and we lack empathy and compassion with how we attempt to understand people.
A lot of the other things you have written throughout this thread could use some further analysis, but I'm not gonna bother right now.
