There is a big case in the Netherlands right now.

A 15-year-old black boy stole an electric bike outside of a McDonalds. He threatened a younger kid with a gun and when police was called, resisted arrest. Despite repeated warnings, he tried to escape, still carrying his gun… police the shot and killed the kid. His name was Jerryson.

The boy was kind of a wild one. Despite being only 15, his arms were covered in tattoos, he wore expensive gold chains and was involved in street crime, theft and generally seen as a bad seed. His mother had given up custody and he was raised in foster care. Jerryson’s older brother was already in jail for robbery at the time of his younger brother’s death.

Now the thing is, the Netherlands and Europe in general does NOT have a problem with police brutality. At all. It does not have a habit of placing black people in ghettos and ethnically profiling them, and it does not have a history of Jim Crow laws or segregation…

What it does have, however, is gangsta rap coming in from America, and copied by local groups and rappers. They idolize the thug life, gangster lifestyle. Police are pigs, women bitches and greed is good, the usual fare. I do not believe crime is a genetic thing, but there is a culural problem in certain ethnic groups where a life on the wrong side of the law is seen as cool. It’s the Wild West out there on the streets, in the minds of these kids. And they’re some mix of Billy the Kid and Tupac in their own eyes.

Part of a wider cultural issue. Although the US no longer has legal discrimination (although under Trump that may change), until about 40 years ago it was perfectly legal to refuse to sell a house to a black person.

Let’s take a little detour. Why am I poor, with all the skills I have? I’m poor because my parents were poor, so I had nothing to inherit and nobody who could buy me a car, and therefore all my wages had to go on rent and fares. When my mother became crippled by arthritis I gave up work to care for her, because there was no family house which could be sold to pay for sheltered accommodation.

Why were my parents poor, although *their* parents had excellent jobs? Some time in the early 1930s my mother’s father, who was Regimental Sergeant Major of the Royal Corps of Signals, allowed a young officer for whom he felt sorry to run up a large mess bill.

The officer absconded, my grandfather was made to pay his bill, he had to sell his house and downsize, and the family who had sent their two elder boys to Harrow (ultra-posh fee-paying school, for those who don’t know) ended up barely scraping by.

My father’s (adoptive) father was one of the most senior police commanders in British Myanmar and was at one point tipped to become head of CID there, but in 1947 he was involved in quelling a riot at a prison which ended up with several prisoners being shot.

He was accused of having given the order to open fire without authorisation; the two more senior officers who had deliberately provoked the riot and had almost certainly ordered his men to fire had left the country and refused to come back; so pending an inquiry (which never actually happened due to the assassination of General Aung San) he was suspended on half and later quarter pay from a police force which meanwhile had ceased to exist; and he ended up losing his pension and having to work as a salesman for a builder’s merchant in Austria.

So my father spent *his* salary putting his five younger brothers through school because his father couldn’t.

Why is this relevant? Things that happened as long ago as the 1930s still affect people who are alive nearly 100 years later. From the end of slavery to the 1970s, another hundred years and a bit extra, black people in much of the US were not allowed to buy good houses in good areas, even if they could afford to.

They were only allowed to own cheap houses in poor areas, so they didn’t benefit from the rise in the value of decent housing and didn’t have an inheritance to leave to their children – especially as poor housing in the US tends to be shoddily built and to require constant, expensive maintenance to keep it going for more than one lifespan.

Those areas of poor housing also had poor schools, and black people weren’t allowed to move to the areas with the good schools or, before about 1970, to attend any good schools which might be nearby, so they were intentionally handicapped in the race for success. That some succeeded *anyway* is a tribute to their innate ability and to the dedication of black teachers who did the best they could with minimal resources.

But the average students, the ones who weren’t brilliant enough to transcend the disadvantages to which they had been shackled, were still stuck in poor areas which, in addition, tended to be concrete jungles without parks or trees, leading to a very *hot* environment which encourages dehydration, which affects people’s mental and emotional health.

To cap that, for those hundred+ years up to the 1970s black people living in southern states were often beaten or even murdered if they got a good education or a good job, as they were thought to be getting ideas above their station, so black people in those areas mostly kept their heads down and didn’t even try to succeed because they knew that tall poppies got lopped. You only have to look at the Tulsa race riot in the 1920s, when a successful black commercial district was actually bombed from the air to destroy any chance of black people succeeding.

So now you’ve got black families who in many states are still likely to be poor, not because of anything they or their parents did wrong but because of money their great grandparents weren’t allow to earn and houses they weren’t allowed to buy 80 years ago, combined with a culture which in many areas didn’t place much stress on success because well within living memory success would get you killed.

Here in the UK the criminals are usually working class white kids who have similar issues – poor housing, baking-hot concrete jungles, a culture which doesn’t stress education – although they got there for different historical reasons.