(This is part of an ongoing series. To find previous editions, copy and paste “Is American Urban Culture Beyond Repair?” into the search function at the top of your screen.)
Examining the deleterious impacts of modern urban culture on the American social fabric and its future prognosis.
As an undergraduate at Valdosta State University, we were treated, in a sociology course taught by a pit bull with a peace medallion around her chest called Tracy Woodard-Meyers, to an entire module called the “Asian Model Minority Myth,” the thesis being, as the name suggests, that white supremacists point to Asians as an underhanded way to debunk progressive orthodoxy on why urban Americans are so much more violent and criminal than every other ethnic group in the country.
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Reality, though — lived experience, in Social Justice™ jargon — has a way of debunking that orthodoxy all on its own.
Post-higher “education” in the VSU sociology department, I’ve lived in relatively extremely impoverished areas of the world — and passed through many more where I would not have wanted to set up shop on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.
As relayed in more detail in my groundbreaking expat memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, in 2017 I visited the most poorest region of Bangkok, the Khlong Toei slum, armed with absolutely nothing.
Even in the most neglected wrong side of the tracks, you’ve never seen poverty like this stateside.
Feral children without shoes stared at me.
The houses are all on stilts to compensate for flooding, and the stilts are all rotten at the waterline.
I took some pictures that are lost to time — they were up on my personal Facebook until it got permanently nuked after repeated suspensions for saying uncouth things about trans people and true things about COVID — but there are lots of documentaries on the web.
The point here, aside from plugging my groundbreaking memoir, is that none of these places, including Khlong Toei, although they were palpably poorer than anywhere in urban Detroit or Chicago, had anything approaching the level of violence commonly seen in urban America.
Because it’s not a violent culture.
It also had nowhere approaching the same level of palpable, simmering grievance, even though Khlong Toei is situated right next to one of the richest areas of Bangkok and these people get absolutely shafted regularly by real estate developers and other interests trying to run them off so they can build more shopping malls and condos, as if Bangkok doesn’t have enough of those already.
But it’s not just poor Asians living in Asia who have a markedly lower crime rate and propensity for violence than urban Americans; it’s Asians living in poverty in America, presumably who have been assimilated to one extent or another into American culture.
Emeritus professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Barry Latzer, analyzed a study from Columbia University examining disparate crime rates between racial groups in New York City, their respective poverty rates, and relationships, if any, between those two metrics.
Via City Journal (emphasis added):
Many analysts, along with the general public, believe that poverty is a major, if not the major, cause of crime. But a new study from a Columbia University research group should remind us of something that history has consistently shown: that the relationship between poverty and crime is far from predictable or consistent. The Columbia study revealed the startling news that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of New York City’s Asian population was impoverished, a proportion exceeding that of the city’s black population (19 percent). This was surprising, given the widespread perception that Asians are among the nation’s more affluent social groups. But the study contains an even more startling aspect: in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates…
Asians had consistently low arrest rates for violent crime—usually lower than their proportion of the population, lower than those of blacks and Hispanics, and in one category (assault), even lower than that of whites, who, as a group, are far less often impoverished.
Per the data, 1.2 Asians in New York per 100,000 were picked up for murder in the time period studied, compared to 10.5 blacks per 100,000.
All of which directly contradicts the “poverty causes crime” narrative used to explain away urban crime. (And we’ve only just scratched the surface of what the data actually says.)
Of course, acknowledging reality would force difficult questions, such as: if it’s not the poverty, what is it exactly that makes urban Americans so disproportionately criminal?
