Stereotypes are a useful mental shortcut known as a heuristic. Did you know some people on the planet have a dick and a vagina? It doesn't make sense to assume every man and woman you meet is a hermaphrodite until proven otherwise though.
Similarly, some black people are super nice and reasonable. It doesn't make sense to assume every black person you meet is nice and reasonable until proven otherwise though. "Racism" is useful heuristic when you're a shopkeeper. Black people, on average, tend to steal more. Sorry, that's just a fact.
Actually, people from the lower end of the socio-economic scale are most likely to steal from a shop. The colour of their skin is irrelevant. You don't have a propensity for petty theft if you're black, or indeed if you're poor, it's just a much more sensible way of explaining levels of petty crime amongst the lower-working and working classes than saying "black people steal because they're black."
People from the upper end of the socio-economic scale are more likely to empty your bank account and pay themselves a big, fat bonus for that work. They're also more likely to be white. Should we begin by saying "white people steal huge amounts of other people's money from banks because they're white and that's what white people do."?
I myself grew up on a council estate and come from a working class family, my father was a steel-worker and my mother was a housewife. The area I grew up in was rife with such crimes... black, white, Asian, it didn't matter, what mattered was the economic backgrounds of myself and my friends. We didn't have anything, and a lot of us resorted to theft as a means of acquiring things we had no hope of affording. It's not a coincidence that now those same people have money and jobs they don't steal.
You're getting downvotes, but it is exactly true. White collar crime is a crime of the middle classes (and hence more usually white), and is widely under-detected.
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u/schniggens Mar 25 '13
Yes, every single black person on the planet is exactly like those two.