03/13/2020
In yet another case that appears to me to be pretty unremarkable black (and perhaps any race) behavior, a mother in Pennsylvania is charged with crimes after her kids were found wandering … gasp! with no shoes. [Facebook video of shoeless children outside gets Pa. mom charged: cops Updated, March 12, 2020 ]
I’ve been seeing this exact case for years now, and I have some thoughts.
One, I am unconvinced that simply because a kid is found wandering outside means that the parent on duty should be charged with a crime. Kids can slip away from even very careful parents.
You might be surprised to find out how many police and prosecutors think otherwise, not to mention judgmental busybodies who like to post things on Facebook and make ridiculous virtue-signaling comments of the “well, I never!” type. And who probably don’t have kids themselves, mind you.
It’s really a cultural determination of very recent vintage that kids should not be allowed outside without supervision, as the Free-Range Parenting Movement would note.
I personally attribute some of that to the heightened fears felt by white parents in a society that is increasingly multiracial, but that’s another discussion.
The other thought I have is how much the r/K scale might explain this in the case of black parents. It’s an evolutionary theory that says that some groups survive by producing a large number of offspring and mostly ignoring them, then surviving to the next generation on the few survivors.
Other groups, meanwhile, have fewer offspring but pay close attention to them and nurture them carefully.
For the "r" end of the equation, think of the baby turtles crawling up the beach. For "K" end of the equation, think of elephants.
It’s been observed (by Philippe Rushton, among others) that you can see this scale at work in human groups, where Asians and whites are more "K", and blacks and Hispanics are more "r". It’s very hard to deny that black people produce a large number of children, with the usual pattern for poorer blacks being a black male who impregnates many black women and is nowhere to be found when the children are born. Welfare and lax social attitudes worsen the problem, but there could be an evolutionary basis for it.
So why impose hyper-sniffy white values on black people?
Relatedly, jails across America are filled with black males who haven’t paid child support
Of course, we know why the Legal Aid attorney isn’t going to mention this as a way to mitigate her black client’s guilt. To suggest that there are inherent racial differences isn’t a place our society is prepared to go in 2020.
But it seems that if human suffering can spring from obsessing over differences, human suffering can also spring from dismissing them completely.
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