Don't perpetuate the “black-on-white crime" propaganda
In response to my last article on the lip service given to peaceful protest, one critic dropped a meme about the enduring, and damaging, myth of “black on white crime.” The meme relates that blacks commit 25 times more crimes against whites than vice-versa. The suggestion is therefore left that all the attention given to white police brutality on blacks is diverting from the “real” problem confronting us, and that “Black Lives Matter” is therefore not the real emphasis we need.
Or, of course, a dozen variations of such things, such as, BLM is nothing more than liberal media hype, cultural Marxists propaganda, etc. But “look at these stats,” I am directed.
It’s all damaging propaganda. On the surface of it, in the simplistic, abstract way they are the presented, the stats are real. Overall, blacks do commit more crimes against whites than whites commit against blacks; and given that they are a smaller proportion of the population, the crime rate is even higher for blacks against whites. But of course, the details that are not related in memes like this are the most important part. Likewise, the people who compiled such memes and the reasons some organizations perpetuate them is also a huge part of the story. In short, they are bona fide racists.
To begin with, one single variable changes everything: poverty, or disadvantage. When you control for poverty rates, these numbers even out (indeed, less disadvantaged black neighborhoods have less crime that extremely disadvantaged white neighborhoods). Disadvantaged whites commit the same rates of crime as blacks. It just so happens that blacks are in general far more affected by poverty and disadvantage than whites in general. That is where the issue gets real. We are left asking the underlying question: why are blacks in poverty or extreme disadvantage disproportionately?
In answering that, many people are tempted to make the same assumptions they do when they first see the bare stats-meme. There must be something inherently or even genetically wrong with blacks. They are inferior. They are violent, hyper-criminal, and hyper-sexual by nature, somehow. “I mean, I am not a racist, but look at these stats!” Likewise, blacks are assumed, and often stated, to be shiftless, thieving, addicted, lazy, grifters and pilferers, fatherless, etc. That is why they in poverty and disadvantage—it is entirely their fault. So it is said—sometimes openly.
Let’s be clear about a couple things without trying to write a comprehensive history or treatise here. First, people have been saying these things about blacks since the earliest of the Jim Crow era. In other words, even directly after slavery, and ever since, white people blamed the condition of blacks—poverty and crime—on the inferiority of blacks, period. Anyone who has followed black history very closely at all (despite obvious successes in many ways) will know that in this country they were never really given much of a chance at any period to improve without fighting uphill against prejudice, injustice, inequality, and much more. Yet they were always blamed in themselves for their conditions. It’s sick, but the argument has never changed.
In the very first generation after slavery had ended, while blacks were being trampled under Jim Crow, segregation, newly-formed police patrols, and many other oppressions, the earliest of “scientific racism” studies was openly stating that “condition of life,” meaning poverty in the slums in the 1890s, did not explain the black crime problem. It had, therefore, to be blamed on race itself.
It has taken on many variations along the way. And by the way, the variation of retort that says it’s all about the breakdown of the black family, especially since welfarism and the 1960s, is not all that true in light of this history. The arguments were all made and blamed on blacks in various ways long before the welfare issue came along. In other words, the same type of blame existed before that. The welfare angle may have some truth in exacerbating the problem, but as an argument it is nothing more than one variation of the same blame-the-blacks-themselves approach. It is just more convenient now because its proponents are not blaming the individual blacks directly so much as by proxy through a political system. It’s still the same old argument and same old tactic.
Second, the people who created these myths, then and now, and who have been most active in perpetuating the shallow meme version of “the facts” that we see, are openly dedicated to belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks. That is, they are de facto racists. They take different forms and cloak their beliefs in different ways, but this is at root what they are, and have always been.
I said I am not going to write a long treatise here, so I won’t. But I will link you to a very good one that you do need to read. Unfortunately, some of you may not like it for a couple reasons: first, it is a product of the SPLC, and second, it is really, really, long (about 10,000 words, or 25 book pages).
It is called, “The Biggest Lie in the White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling the Truth About ‘Black-on-White Crime.’” Read it all. It has excellent history.
It also has very relevant modern import. It was finding a meme very much like the one posted on my thread that led a young man to start googling about “black on white crime.” In no time, these racist sites, with their persuasive-looking stats and memes, convinced this young man that we are living in the midst of a massive black-on-white criminal nightmare which the liberal media refuses to report. He was radicalized!
He then went in a shot up an AME (historically all-black) church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people and injuring another. His name was Dylan Roof. He is today remembered as one of our mass shooters. He said he did it in order to incite a race war.
It is very sad, but these truncated and sometimes even twisted stats are created and perpetuated by racist websites like American Renaissance or Mankind Quarterly, both purveyors of racist ideas under the guise of “race realism,” ideas about IQ and race, or genetic “differences” between the races leading to crime and poverty, etc. In fact, the first of those two sites continues to publish a report, “The Color of Crime,” despite being debunked widely since its inception in the 1990s. It repeats the same type of oversimplified, abstracted stats as above. Sometimes, it even couches it “major findings” as veiled white supremacist dreams:
If New York City were all white, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent.
The long, openly racist, often eugenicist, history behind the development, research, and funding of such studies since the Jim Crow era is quite eye-opening. The fact that people in the conservative, Christian, Reformed Christian, and Reconstructionist Christian circles today still traffic in these ideas and even share from some of these websites today is discouraging and infuriating at the same time.
I was also moved by how flippantly and ignorantly one commenter plopped out a stats-meme like these with the comment something like, “I can’t figure out why these stats don’t matter”—i.e., black-on-white crime to displace the alleged BLM “narrative.” The irony is that it is so easy to search and find articles that tell you why those stats are skewed and irrelevant, etc., that one wonders if the people saying such things even tried.
And the fact that they apparently did not even try speaks volumes about how willing some of us are to regurgitate racist propaganda without even checking it first. What a self-condemnation!
In the meantime, our own John Reasnor has compiled notes on the issue and may contribute some original, statistical compilations in addition to this article. A few of the research findings available on the web will distill out like this:
When race is visible, black drivers were 20% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers.
Blacks are twice as likely to be arrested as whites.
Blacks are four times as likely to experience use of force during police encounters.
Black men are about 3 times as likely to be killed by police as white men.
Whites actually use drugs at higher rates than blacks, yet blacks are imprisoned for drugs at a rate 10 times higher.
Blacks receive longer sentences than whites for the same crimes, all else equal.
Blacks are 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison, and 21% more likely than whites to be given mandatory minimums.
There is tons more research on such things to go through. The bottom line is that if we squint real hard and only look at some surface stats, then sure, blacks commit crimes against whites far more often. To draw conclusions from this, however, is fruitless and dangerous. When we control for other relevant factors, we start seeing why blacks can rightfully claim they are far more often mistreated or unequally treated by the criminal justice system.
It is because they are.
The more I look at it, the more I see that the chief underlying factor is that of poverty or disadvantage. It is here that systemic racism truly thrives. This is because the system devours the most vulnerable, and the most vulnerable in our culture has always disproportionately included blacks. This is to our shame.
Christians should have been helping our black friends and brothers and sisters build and rise up all along the way, privately and through private enterprise and business. Instead, the Christians of the most conservative stance on the Bible and faith led the way in segregation and hatred and sometimes the violence. Today, as the modern holdouts of the old “scientific racism” live on perpetuating the same brand of propaganda, some conservative Christians and conservative media outlets, continue falling for it, too eagerly, and spreading lies and hate rather than helping.
In doing so, they are not only slandering blacks and failing to provide desperately needed brotherly help and real brotherly affection, they are leaving them to be savaged by a system which corruptly devours the weakest of these for sport and for profit. Too many don’t seem willing even to lift a finger to help either on the personal side with the blacks themselves, or on the government side with the savage, inequitable laws and agents that unjustly enforce them.
There are other matters to deal with, too, which we can get to; but the “black on white crime” myth must be set aside for what it is: a skewed, damaging lie. It distracts us from the most relevant of the facts, covers the further oppression of blacks, and covers the systemic causes and corruptions that perpetuate the harm. Pull back the curtain; quit fearing liberals; tell the whole truth. Overcome evil with good—whether it is evil from leftist agendas or alt-right, racist agendas.