[Mr. Vega]

Since the Charleston Massacre and the calls to take down the Confederate Flag, there have been seven burnings of black churches in the South in a week. At least 3 have been designated as suspected arsons. Has received almost no attention whatsoever in the media. Anybody notice?

[Bobboau]

I have no way of knowing if that's a lot. how often do churches typically burn down?

/*googles it*/
Looks like it's in the low thousands per year with 1/4th typically due to arson (http://nfa.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v2i7-508.pdf). 1300 (church fires) / 52 (weeks in a year) = 25 (expected church fires in a week) with a little over 6 expected to be due to arson
There are about 70,000 'black' churches in the country (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=96516), about 300,000 churches total (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html), so about 23% of churches are black (I would expect that to be higher in the south because of the demographics there) so you would expect in any given week a little less that 6 black churches to burn with 1.4 of them to be arsons. So ok I guess it's a little high, 1.6 more arsons than I would expect, but I don't see it as being too far outside the norm, it's hard to tell without doing a more thorough analysis to get the standard deviation which I'm too sleepy to do right now.

But hasn't there been enough racial hysteria and violence whipped up this year? Race relations are the worse I think I've ever seen them. We must have undone 30 years of progress since 2010.

[Grizzly]

I think it's more the 7 in a week that stands out there. How often has that happened?

As it happened, I did notice it, it was covered on dutch media at the least. I think this these are the spasms of people who subscribe to a view of the world that is becoming more and more marginal.

[Dragon]

I think it's more the 7 in a week that stands out there. How often has that happened?

As it happened, I did notice it, it was covered on dutch media at the least. I think this these are the spasms of people who subscribe to a view of the world that is becoming more and more marginal.

Per the statistics above, 6 of them "should" have a fire in any given week. Note that this is a purely mathematical, country-wide analysis. So it doesn't look like a huge spike (probably within deviation parameters). There's a spike in suspected arsons, however. Still, I don't think there's a reason to be alarmed. The US is huge, if those cases weren't somewhere near each other, this is simply statistics at work.

Racial relations are bad lately, but those are dying spasms of those unable to come to terms with progress. They're growing old and dying, one generation from now people will all be laughing at them.

[Luis Dias]

I'm just amazed how many church burnings there are, but you're right, it's just how numbers play out when there are so many things out there. It just blows out of any sensible proportion that a human head can wrap around with.

[karajorma]

Perhaps it's time to stop building them out of potassium then.

[Bobboau]

you're right! cesium would be much better.

[General Battuta]

I think it's more the 7 in a week that stands out there. How often has that happened?

As it happened, I did notice it, it was covered on dutch media at the least. I think this these are the spasms of people who subscribe to a view of the world that is becoming more and more marginal.

Per the statistics above, 6 of them "should" have a fire in any given week. Note that this is a purely mathematical, country-wide analysis. So it doesn't look like a huge spike (probably within deviation parameters). There's a spike in suspected arsons, however. Still, I don't think there's a reason to be alarmed. The US is huge, if those cases weren't somewhere near each other, this is simply statistics at work.

Racial relations are bad lately, but those are dying spasms of those unable to come to terms with progress. They're growing old and dying, one generation from now people will all be laughing at them.

There's reason to fear this isn't true. The underlying problems that create racist violence are still present, and they seem to be extremely persistent.

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in
the American South in part trace their origins to slavery’s prevalence more than
150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high
shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative
action, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks.
These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of
contemporary racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new
theory involving the historical persistence of racial attitudes. We argue that, following
the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to
reinforce existing racist norms and institutions to maintain control over the newly
free African-American population. This amplified local differences in racially
conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across
generations. Our results challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial
attitudes in the American South.