When the Truth Becomes a Dog Whistle

By Rich Lowry

Monday, May 08, 2023

 

There’s a school of thought that believes that every instrument that makes a sound is a dog whistle.

 

The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan provided a remarkably telling example of this perspective a week or so ago when he objected to Bill Maher’s talking about the problem of murders in Chicago in particular and black-on-black crime in general.

 

Hasan’s rant is worth dwelling on because it’s such a clear demonstration of how intolerable certain realities are to left-wing opinion, even when they involve black lives in the starkest way possible.

 

Hasan sounded as if Maher was the moral equivalence of Lester Maddox for retailing such “racist tropes.” Hasan said Chicago is “the predictable go-to criminal dystopia for right-wingers, but that’s not the reality.”

 

According to Hasan, Chicago is talked about so much because it has a majority-minority population and a black progressive mayor-elect (just the way it did prior to the current surge in murders).

 

So why Chicago? Hmmm. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Chicago has more murders than any other city in the country. In 2022, according to the Illinois research outfit Wirepoints, it had almost 700 murders. Next was Philadelphia, at a little more than 500. New York City, a much bigger city, had about 440. Houston also had about 440, and Los Angeles 380.

 

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Chicago has led the country in murders for more than a decade. Saying that it’s out of bounds to talk about Chicago in the context of murders is a little like saying no one should talk about San Francisco when discussing homelessness or Albany when the topic is political corruption.

 

Hasan observes that, well, Chicago is all the way down at No. 28 in per capita murders.

 

One wonders what major city it would be less racist to cite among those with the highest per capita murder rates? New Orleans? St. Louis? Baltimore? Detroit? Memphis?

 

Columbus, Ga., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. — jurisdictions in red states — had higher murders rates than Chicago, Hasan notes. True, but the scale is completely different. Columbus has about 50 murders a year, and Tuscaloosa had 20 in 2022.

 

Both are majority-minority cities, by the way. Hasan seems to think, or want his listeners to believe, that every city in a red state is lily-white. Then Hasan turned to the notion of black-on-black crime, showering it with contempt:

 

Are you kidding me? White people kill other white people at almost the same rate black people kill other black people, and yet you never hear anyone complaining about ‘white on white’ crime.

 

Obviously, people point out the phenomenon of blacks killing blacks to push back against the pervasive idea that the police account for a large share of black deaths. Of course, cops do shoot black people, and some fraction of the shootings are unjustified, but we are talking about a tiny proportion that looms so large because of all of the media attention and political advocacy around the exceptional cases.

 

If conservative commentators made up a false narrative about murders of white people, there’d indeed be more focus on white-and-white homicides, which are also a real thing that no one should deny.

 

Further, the innumerate can perhaps have some sympathy for Hassan’s confusion of the concepts of rate and proportion, but that doesn’t make it any less egregious or devastating for his case.

 

The proportion of white and black murders that are intra-racial are about the same, roughly 80 percent and 90 percent respectively. But the rate at which blacks kill other blacks is much higher. In 2019, African Americans were about 14 percent of the population and 52 percent of homicide victims.

 

As Charles Lehman of the Manhattan Institute points out, the key takeaway here is that it is much more dangerous to be a young black man than a young white man.

It’s not true that there is no focus on this; at the community level, in particular, civic leaders and activists try to bring attention to it and combat it. But at the national level, anything that doesn’t play into a narrative of systemic racism is ignored or relegated to a second-tier concern.

 

So it is that the likes of Mehdi Hasan hear only dog whistles when someone speaks plainly about what’s destroying black lives in Chicago and elsewhere.