Hi there everyone, I'm white...

[calimary]

105. Welcome to DU, davidsilver!

Glad you're here! The only complication I could see with what's argued here...

"Is the poster saying that because a disproportionate percentage of POC live in poverty that poverty causes people to commit crime? This could be but there are tens of million of white people on public assistance and living at the poverty threshold."

...is a very basic difference that yet again attempts to compare a brick with a grain of aquarium gravel and claiming they're both the same because they're both hard.

They're NOT the same. YES there are millions and millions of whites living in poverty and needing public assistance. But we whites, in general, have not had the long and shitty history of slavery, wrenched from our homes, families, and communities on a whole other continent, and plunked down into an artificially-created community of slavery and severe indentured servitude. WE haven't had that. WE haven't come from that. WE haven't had a background and a community history of that. WE haven't been preyed upon and persecuted and demeaned and belittled as the black community has. WE don't have the history of "shoot first, ask questions later" for OUR young men. When OUR young men are pulled over for some random bullshit situation like a broken tail light, I would submit that OUR young men are not treated AND presumed as being guilty-until-proven-innocent. The white kid is apt to get a warning, a slap on the wrist, or a ticket. For the black kid, the hard, cold statistics show that presumption is TOTALLY guilty-until-proven-innocent. The black kid automatically starts from WAY back on the speedway.

We whites for the most part can't even begin to comprehend what that is like to live with - through the generations. Through the decades. Through several centuries in this country by now. Not surprising that it doesn't make sense to many of our white brothers and sisters. Because it's just not in their reality. It's just not their universe. How CAN they know? How CAN they understand? They've never experienced anything like the black community faces every day.

I'd venture that there's one single exception to that. The ONLY whites who possibly could even begin to understand that as acutely as blacks do, as a collective that's STILL being regarded as second-class, know-your-place, shut-up-and-obey, are women. The ONLY segment of the white population that has been held down and held back anywhere near as much as the black population in this country has, and had to face similar hurdles, similar discrimination, similar diminishment, similar obstacles, similar inequality, similar lack of opportunity - is the FEMALE population. As a woman, I DO get it. John Lennon once sang about how "woman is the n-word of the world." He used the actual word in that song. And his point was a completely valid one.