Quote:
Originally Posted by slapass
In the US we divide out the races for crime, poverty, etc. This is meaningless as we are unable to change the race of someone.
As an example. If you found that porn with red lingerie outsells porn with green lingerie, you would use more red. You can change that.
If we found out that people over 6 foot 2 were more likely to be criminals, again it is not really useful. So we don't do that. So why do we divide by race all the time?
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One thing you're forgetting here is the fact that different ethnic/cultural groups have a tendency to flock together, thus creating an "us vs them" mentality. This often results in under-privileged groups starting to hate the privileged ones, thus perpetuating hate, which ultimately may well lead to actual racism.
Statistics are nothing but a measuring stick. As such they're being used to pinpoint certain good or bad things occurring within certain segments of the general population. This doesn't necessarily lead to segregation of certain ethnic groups. In fact I'd argue that it's exactly the other way around. Statistics help discover issues within these groups, which mainly arose from them segregating themselves to begin with. These issues can then be dealt with, positively. This also helps discover positive things within these groups, so that they can be further improved upon.
Trust me, no one in the society REALLY wants under-privileged segments of the population being marginalized in ghettos. That simply keeps proliferating discontent with how they're being treated by "them" and ultimately leads to a lot more social issues within these groups.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that statistical data is far from being segmented only by race. The data gets segmented by lots of different criteria, many of which also happen to overlap. Segmentation is done by gender, age, profession, income, location and so on.