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0 pointsJoeAltmaier10y ago0 comments

That's another troublesome point. Our distinctions are related to old Jim Crow notions that 1/64th Black made you Not White. Why not the other way around? If 1/64th White made you Not Black, then the USA would be about 99% white.

So I'm not sure what these stats even mean. At bottom, its a broken idea that a killer is White or Black; it largely depends upon who's doing the reporting.

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dragonwriter10y ago· 1 in thread

I think you've misunderstood.

"Not black" and "White" are different not because of things like the one-drop rule and its legacy, but because there are races other than "White" and "Black" present in the US.

"Not black" includes Native Americans/Alaskan Natives, Asians/Pacific Islanders, etc., not just Whites.

> Our distinctions are related to old Jim Crow notions that 1/64th Black made you Not White. Why not the other way around? If 1/64th White made you Not Black, then the USA would be about 99% white.

Er, no. Because even if modern Black vs. White racial identification were entirely driven by the one-drop rule (its not), there's only about 87% of the population that identifies as either White or Black, so shifting some portion of the Black to White isn't going to make 99% of the population White. Again, there are other races in the US besides White and Black.

JoeAltmaierOP10y ago

Thanks for the statistics lesson!

On that subject, we seem to be missing a killing by an Other - at 13% of the population, we should have another minority in the demographic. Well, small sample set I guess.

Anyway I have to stop making tangential remarks in responses - folks always interpret them too closely.

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