(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.
We’ve all been treated to the relentless mythology that “poverty causes crime” in the context of the well-documented wild disproportionality of black criminality relative to that of other races in the United States — thereby conveniently alleviating any responsibility on the part of the criminals by pinning it on external, systemic factors and also preempting any serious scrutiny of what might be wrong with American urban culture that’s driving that criminality.
Related: ‘Racial Terror’: AOC and Co. Demand Investigation Into Alleged Black Lynching Epidemic
The mythology is so oft-invoked to explain away black criminality, in fact, that it has become something of a truism established beyond any reasonable doubt (turning dubious statements into truisms being a function of propaganda).
Does it actually hold water, though?
That’s what we’re attempting to discover in this mini-series, the ‘Poverty As a Driver of Crime’ Narrative.
Related: White Children Now a Minority in American Public Schools
Study: Black economic uber-elite just as criminal as working-class whites
Here we have a chart demonstrating that, among men ages 27-32 taken from data published in a study titled Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective, the black sons of the economic elite (the top 1% of income earners) are actually just as likely as white men in the bottom 35% of income earners to end up incarcerated.
black men in the top 1% of income commit crimes at the same rate of whites in the bottom 35% this strongly indicates that black crime is not a matter of economics https://t.co/gmt5boaIO6
— Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕 (@jeremykauffman) December 16, 2025
Related: New Hollywood Hate Flick: White People ‘The Most Dangerous Animal on the Planet’
The 2018 study from which the data above was derived found that “differences in family characteristics such as… education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income” — in other words, a direct repudiation of the “poverty causes crime” narrative.
Comparing economic performance by race, the white and Hispanic sons of the poor have significantly higher upward economic mobility than their black counterparts.
Via Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective (emphasis added):
We study the sources of racial and ethnic disparities in income using de-identified longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three sets of results.
First, the intergenerational persistence of disparities varies substantially across racial groups. For example, Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations because they have relatively high rates of intergenerational income mobility. In contrast, black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to large income disparities that persist across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women.
Second, differences in family characteristics such as parental marital status, education, and wealth explain very little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Differences in ability also do not explain the patterns of intergenerational mobility we document.
Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. Both black and white boys have better outcomes in low-poverty areas, but black-white gaps are larger on average for boys who grow up in such neighborhoods.
Related: Denver Councilwoman Floats Whites-Only Business Tax
All of this begs the question of why the racial economic disparity exists if poverty can’t explain it.
The left, of course, as it does in so many other contexts, refuses to engage in any kind of fact-finding mission to answer the question, instead resorting to age-old tropes about slavery and colonialism and whatever.
Exhibit A: Jasmine Crockett, U.S. Congressional representative from Texas and one-time Senate candidate, explaining that literally the entire driver of American crime is something called “white supremacy,” citing “facts,” as these people always do, without any specifics:
It's always some white supremacy kind of thing that's going on. It's not black folk that are going out there. It's not immigrants that are going out there. But what cities are we going into? Black cities, because we are supposedly the ones that commit all the crime. Which people are we going after? Immigrants, because allegedly it's immigrants, but we don't want to have a talk about what the numbers say, what the facts say, which is that we have a white supremacy problem in this country.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett on Charlie Kirk: "Most violence, political or not, is linked to white supremacy.. truth is, we have white supremacy problem." https://t.co/NSUi3k2Urf
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 12, 2025
Related: Black Actress Worth Estimated $12 Million Cries About Low Pay, Cites Racism
People like Crockett are not only allowed but incentivized to blame literally all of society’s ills, including those plaguing the urban community, on the white man (literal Satan).
This practice of blaming whitey serves several functions at once for the power structure — not least of all to prop up the Democrat Party electorally, as an empowered, independent black community without a need for government handouts is anathema to the Democratic business model.
This is disgusting. Joe Biden: "If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't Black." https://t.co/UvYZTjcPqZ
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 22, 2020
