Murder and Race

This Economist story touches on the research on left-handedness I mentioned earlier in the week, but what is most interesting about it to me is the following excerpt on murder rates in different societies.

Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year (compared with, for example, 0.068 in New York). And, according to Dr Faurie and Dr Raymond, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed.

Why is this important? Because it is as flagrant a violation of the assertions of the J. Philippe Rushton school of junk-scientists about the "innate" nature of "black" violence as it is possible to get; if the theory that black males were all testosterone-poisoned brutes were true, why would murder rates in New York City (at most 20% black) be more than 5 times higher than that amongst the Dioula?

Comments

[Jason Soon]

yup. technically aren't the Yanomamo law-adiding 'Mongoloids' whose ancestors evolved in Ice Age environments requiring long-term planning and the curbing of violent impulses?

[Abiola Lapite]

Indeed they are! I wonder what became of those law-abiding genes of theirs ...

[João da Costa]

Some "statistics" or "statements" connecting crime and race really don't make sense and tell us more about how much gullible some people are than the reality as such.
Citizens of Maputo - capital city of Mozambique - are often advised to be cautious when they travel to South Africa because there the crime rate is higher than at home despite the fact that South Africa has a higher amount of Whites (and non-Blacks in general) than Mozambique.
If crime was really related to "blackeness" - as those people seem to believe - then such things would be hard to understand.
Even if you don't cross the border (between these 2 countries, Mozambique and South Africa) and try to compare the rural and urban settlements in Mozambique alone, you will find out that the crime rate grows with the urbanization rate. And the majority of Whites or non-Blacks concentrate in the principal urban centres of the country so, again, the relation between the amount of "blackness" of one site and crime is not true (one should then expect to have a maximum in crime rate in "pure black" settlements!)
I think that crime is more related to the distribution of wealth in a society: with a more uneven distribution comes more crime from petit robbery to grand robbery and homicide including other categories.
I personally remember a time when crime was almost inexistent in Maputo: we had a socialist regime in the 80's and there was then an almost "equal" distribution of "poverty". Even stealing was rare and everybody - national or foreigner - could walk from one part to another of Maputo without the slightest preocupation to his/her safety at any hour of the day or night.
Today such paradisiac status does not exist anymore, but the amount of crime remains lower than in much of our neighboring countries.
The type of crime we are mostly preoccupied today in Mozambique is the so called white-collar crime or, to put it bluntly, corruption, and I don't think people who argue Blacks tend to be more criminal than other races were thinking about this last type of crime when they linked it to testosterone levels in the body.
Surely I'm aware of the fact that some of those people who believe Blacks to be inately more violent than others, would argue that the chain of causality between "blackeness" and crime is not direct, but occurs through the mediation of IQ. Something like: 1. Blacks have less native intelligence (and maybe, they would say, higher testosterone levels are partially to blame), 2. because they have less intelligence they tend to occupy less desirable societal niches, 3. and therefore they tend to be more angry at society or more susceptible to use violence to gain access to resources otherwise not within their reach.
Well, but all this is questionable as you know!

[lamin]

Obviously people like J.P.Rushton don't consider the massive violence meted out against those who resisted colonialism as violence. If not, then what kind of violence is it? Does this have to do with testosterone levels and IQ?