By Wilfred C. Reilly
Saturday, February 08, 2020
A remarkable irony of the modern American conversation is
that while race relations have empirically never been better, many members of
different races are terrified of one another. Perceptions of crime are a
primary source of this tension. The center-left mainstream media run stories
almost daily about tough whites attacking blacks and other people of color for
trivial reasons, while a substantial cottage industry on the far right focuses
on sensational depictions of black crime. In reality, however, incidents like
these, which make for almost weekly viral news stories, are quite rare; so,
too, is serious interracial crime in general. According to the 2019 Bureau of
Justice Statistics (BJS) crime report, blacks made up only 15 percent of those
who criminally attacked whites in the United States in 2018. Whites attacked
blacks even less often, 11 percent of the time. For good or ill, the person
most likely to kill you remains your husband or wife, not an exotic stranger.
It is well worth unpacking the actual U.S. national crime data as a means of
tamping down tensions among countrymen.
The media’s sensational fixation on interracial crime has
grown steadily in recent years. A black friend has joked with me that 2018, in
particular, was “the year of whites with crazy nicknames.” Major media outlets
ran story after story about obnoxious Caucasians attacking blacks for the
flimsiest of reasons. On June 29, 2018, “Pool Patrol Paula”—actually named
Stephanie Sebby-Strempel—made headlines after allegedly shouting at and
striking a pleasant young black man attempting to use a South Carolina public
pool, telling him he didn’t belong in the water. When police officers attempted
to arrest her for misdemeanor assault, she bit one of them.
Sebby-Strempel did not police the waters alone. On July 5
of the same year, a man named Adam Bloom was dubbed “Pool Patrol PAUL” after
getting into a heated argument with a black woman who was using his condo
complex’s swimming facilities. When Bloom asked to see her resident ID, she
replied: “This is textbook racial profiling.” Multiple officers had to be
called in to resolve the situation. On Facebook, her video recording and
breakdown of the incident went massively viral.
On July 15, 2018—barely a week later—Chicago CVS manager
Morry Matson got famous as “Coupon Carl,” following his decision to contact the
police and accuse a black female customer of using a counterfeit coupon. The
fact that Matson, a gay man, is not only himself a member of an “oppressed”
minority group but also a leader of the moderate and all-LGBT Log Cabin
Republicans did not suffice to save him from the scarlet “R” of alleged racism.
He was fired days later, and the story became a cautionary tale for both blacks
and whites.
But the Queen of them all was BBQ Becky. On April 29,
2018, “Becky”—real name Jennifer Schulte—became internationally famous as a
symbol of “the everyday racism black people face,” as USA Today put it, after she confronted a black family that was
holding a cookout in a no-charcoal-grilling area of Oakland’s Lake Merritt.
Schulte asked the family to leave, and they refused. The ensuing confrontation
lasted several hours, during which family members accused Schulte of harassing
them and several hostile park attendees followed her out of the park. Oakland
Police eventually defused the situation, but a photograph of Schulte calling
them on her cellphone trended online not long afterward and eventually became
one of the most iconic memes of the past decade. Many laughed at the meme, but
the legacy of incidents like these extends well beyond Internet in-jokes.
According to Pew Social Trends’ analysis “Race in America 2019,” fully 71
percent of African Americans now see race relations as “generally bad,” and 56
percent think they have worsened under President Trump. It is impossible not to
see epidemic media coverage of situations such as those mentioned above as a
factor contributing to this malaise.
While the mainstream media lean left and tend to focus
their race-baiting on stories of white-on-black crime and harassment, a growing
right-wing alternative media take the opposite tack, sensationalizing virtually
every prominent story of black-on-white crime. The alt-right website American
Renaissance literally maintains a “Black on White Crime Archive,” chock-full of
stories such as “Anti-white Mob Cuts Off 18 Year Old’s Hand Following Road
Rage” (this happened in the UK) and “The Porch Pirate of Potrero Hill:
Inveterate Thief Blames Her Woes on Racism.” Similar content can be found at
VDARE, World Net Daily, Info Wars, the Unz Review, the Stuff Black People Don’t
Like blog, and a dozen similar outlets.
Gonzo journalist Colin Flaherty runs an entire website
devoted to stories about black-on-white crime. One tab on the site promises the
“top 200 Black mob violence videos,” while another invites readers to “Make a
Difference” by contacting Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones and recommending
Flaherty’s book on race-related crime. While content like this is generally at
least somewhat less widely distributed than mainstream media stories about
white rowdiness, this is not for want of trying. A quick Google search reveals
that one of the most popular pieces ever to appear on Flaherty’s website is
headlined: “Five Cases (of Black Crime) People Want on National TV.”
Looking at today’s dueling headlines, it is tempting to
ask: “So, do we have an epidemic of horrifically racist white-on-black crimes
or an epidemic of brutish black-on-white crimes?” The answer is “neither.”
Moreover, the statistics so thoroughly refute popular fear-mongering that
Americans of all colors should take the media to task for the divisive false
version of reality they so often present. In September of this year, the Trump
administration’s Department of Justice released the 2019 Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS) report, entitled “U.S. Criminal Victimization 2018,” a
comprehensive breakdown of U.S. crime data for the year in question. The
reality of interracial crime revealed within the pages of this thorough report
is far indeed from the “race war” fantasies of extremists on either side.
According to the report, only 15.3 percent of the
3,581,360 violent crimes against whites in 2018 were committed by blacks, who
make up 12 to 13 percent of the U.S. population. These percentages are,
needless to say, almost directly proportional. And whites were even less likely
to commit racist crimes: Only about 11 percent of the 563,940 violent crimes
against blacks were committed by whites. Significantly, no third group—say,
Latinos—made up for these positive findings. During the study year, persons of
Hispanic or Latino descent made up only 7.9 percent of all those who attacked
blacks and just 10.2 percent of all those who attacked whites. The massive
majority of crime in 2018 was intra-racial, with 62.1 percent of all attacks on
white people coming from other whites (non-Hispanic whites make up 61 percent
of the U.S. population) and 70.3 percent of all attacks on black people coming
from other blacks. For good measure, nearly 50 percent of all attackers of
Hispanics were themselves Hispanic. All told, only about 2,000,000 crimes, out
of 5,061,940 violent crimes and roughly 12,000,000 total crimes, involved any
interracial use of force whatsoever.
It is true that, as alt-righters are fond of pointing
out, there are more black attacks on whites than white attacks on blacks in a
typical year: Generally about 500,000 of the first and 100,000 or fewer of the
latter (59,777 in 2018). However, this fact taken alone is, in debater’s
parlance, “true but meaningless.” The honest math around the topic gets more
complicated than this, but it’s worth noting as a starting point that there are
five times as many white people as
black people in the United States. Even an utterly anti-racist black criminal
would thus find himself confronted with 500 to 600 percent more white targets
than black ones. It is also true that, on average, whites have more money than
blacks do, making the former more tempting targets for such crimes as robbery.
And the black violent-crime rate overall, as per the BJS, is roughly 2.4 times
the white rate, making blacks statistically more likely to be involved in crime
against members of all groups.
Once variables such as these are adjusted for, we see
that blacks attack whites less than
would be mathematically predicted, even in a default scenario where no racial
hostility whatsoever existed on either side. In that scenario, we would expect
blacks to make up around 30 percent of attackers of whites (12 percent
multiplied by 2.4 percent), but blacks in fact make up only 15.3 percent of
those who attack whites. At an even more basic level of analysis, whites make
up 61 percent of the population but only 46 percent of those attacked by black
criminals. Whites return the favor, attacking black citizens—again, 12 percent
or more of the population—roughly 3 percent of the time.
The absolute absence of an American race war is most
obvious in the context of that most warlike of crimes: murder. Figures from
every recent year indicate that roughly 85 percent of murders of whites and an
astonishing 91 to 95 percent of murders of blacks are intra-racial. In the
representative year of 2015, there were only 500 black-on-white murders and 229
white-on-black murders reported nationally, according to the International Business Times. To put
these figures in context, the Homicide Data Tables of the FBI’s Uniform Crime
Report for the same year indicate that 5,854 whites and 7,039 blacks were
murdered. For good or ill, social scientists almost universally note that the
person most likely to kill you is a current or former lover and not five strangers
from a different ethnic group.
There certainly are some interesting heterodox nuggets to
be mined from the BJS and other major data sets, which might advance the agenda
of one group or another. For example, it is hard not to notice that Asian
Americans apparently take it on the chin from everyone else in terms of
criminal victimization. While blacks committed 70 percent of all acts of
violence against blacks in 2018, and whites committed well over 60 percent of
violent acts against whites, Asian Americans committed only 24.1 percent of all
violent acts against Asians. Whites (24.1 percent), blacks (27.5 percent), and
Hispanics and “others” combined (21.4 percent) all attacked Asians roughly as
often as other Asians did. The report also showed an unusually high percentage
of attacks against Asians (2.9 percent) in which one Asian was assaulted by
“multiple offenders of various races.” This is well ahead of the corresponding
findings for blacks (1.9 percent) and whites (2.1 percent) and rivaled only by
that of Hispanics.
And, of course, American Jews are another small,
successful group who are subjected to inter-racial attacks with
disproportionate frequency. The New York City area, in particular, has
witnessed an astounding wave of anti-Semitic attacks, almost all committed by
people of color, during the past few months. On December 28, 2019, a bearded
black man wielding a machete stabbed five Orthodox Jews inside Rabbi Chaim
Rottenberg’s in-home shul in the New York suburb of Monsey. The sole suspect in
the attack had previously Googled phrases like “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”
on his home computer. This incident occurred less than a month after six people
were killed during a shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New
Jersey, apparently carried out by acolytes of the racialist Black Hebrew
Israelite movement. These were far from the only anti-Semitic attacks in and
around New York during this period. New York City police have cited “at least
eight anti-Semitic incidents” between December 13 and December 31 of the past
year. In one case, an African-American woman, Tiffany Harris—who was arraigned
on December 28 for slapping and cursing at three ultra-Orthodox women in the
Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights—was charged again, on December 30, for punching a Jewish woman in the face in
front of her two young children. Notably, Harris was released from custody
without paying bail in either case, courtesy of “bail reform” laws championed
by current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
New York does not appear to be an extreme outlier. It
would be virtually impossible to determine how many attacks against Jews have
been subsumed into the “white” category of interracial crime statistics and
thus estimate the percentage of all crime directed specifically at them. It
definitely can be said, however, that American Jews—who, with an estimated
population of 6,829,000, represent 1.7 percent of the total U.S.
population—were the targets of at least 11.7 percent of all U.S. hate crimes
(835 out of 7,120) and almost 60 percent of hate crimes motivated by the
victim’s religion (835 out of 1,419) in 2018. In contrast, American Muslims,
with a population very similar in size to that of Jews, reported only 188 total
hate crimes in 2018, while blacks experienced slightly more than twice as many
hate crimes as those against Jews (1,943) despite having a population more than
six times as large. As with Asian Americans, Jews are attacked by members of
multiple ethnic groups. In 2018, 179 of the 835 attacks on Jews were
perpetrated by whites, 41 were described as black, and there were at least 14
incidents involving multiracial groups who attacked Jews. Two hundred and
fifty-eight perpetrators were not definitively identified in racial terms.
Three-hundred forty-three police/FBI reports apparently did not include a
racial description of the suspect.
Analysis of patterns of interracial crime in general, and
of the Asian and Jewish case studies in particular, lends support to a point
frequently made by conservatives: The presentation of interracial crime by the
center-left mainstream media dominant in the United States is more than a bit
dishonest. While there is little serious interracial violence, black-on-white
crimes make up about 80 percent of violent criminal incidents involving whites
and blacks in a typical year. It’s fair to say, based on empirical analysis,
that mainstream media coverage of interracial crime slants in almost exactly
the opposite direction: Rare incidents of white-on-black violence receive far
more coverage than more common black-on-white assaults. At the most basic
qualitative level of review, every single one of the incidents of
white-on-black harassment discussed in this piece became a national or
international story, while the black-on-white cases received mostly local
coverage.
More broadly, entire storylines that characterize
American criminal justice, such as the epidemic of diverse and
minority-generated violence against Asian Americans and Jews, are frequently
missing from the national headlines. In a remarkable piece headlined “Is It
Safe to Be Jewish in New York ?” Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times largely admits that the legacy media underreport
East Coast anti-Semitism because of the diverse racial backgrounds of those
brutalizing Jews. To quote directly: “The varied backgrounds of people who
commit hate crimes…make combatting and talking about anti-Semitism in New York
much harder.” This blunt statement by Bellafante, who deserves credit for her
honesty, caused David Marcus of the Federalist
to point out the obvious: If dozens of Jewish taxpayers were being beaten
bloody by white men in MAGA hats or Pepe the Frog T-shirts, this “would not be
hard to talk about—it would be a clear cut case of bigotry.”
Similarly slanted media coverage is not uncommon as
regards other important issues involving race and violence. When, for my book Hate Crime Hoax, I conducted in-depth
quantitative analysis of how police shootings are covered, I found that
non-blacks make up 70 percent of police-shooting victims but receive perhaps 20
percent of national media coverage of police shootings. A Google search for the
phrase “well-known police shooting” turned up four white cases, four Hispanic
cases, and 32 black cases in the first 10 pages of search results, with all
cookies and trackers that might affect these results having previously been
deleted.
But the big picture of interracial crime—and ethnic
conflict more broadly—in the United States is a surprisingly positive one.
There certainly are small groups that are targeted with disturbing frequency,
and the mass media have certainly failed in reporting honestly on these trends.
However, there is no current or upcoming race war, or indeed general epidemic
of interracial violence.
Given the actual statistical demographics of violent
crime in America, the best advice for most of those who are terrified by its
specter is this: Get out of the house, go to your gym or library or place of
worship, and mingle with your countrymen.
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