It was shortly after his confirmation that then-Attorney General Eric Holder said that Americans simply don’t have what it takes for a candid discussion of race and crime, and in fact that America is essentially, to quote his phrase, “a nation of cowards.” What I believe he meant was that America refuses to face any part of the “reckoning” it’s due for the social cruelties Holder believes produce crime, and especially black crime.
The actual truth about race and crime is more grim even than Holder thought — but in a different way. He’s right about one thing, though: Honesty is needed, and it’s hard.
Richard Hanania, hardly a movement conservative, spills the beans.
I grew up just outside of Chicago, and [the much heralded “data”] on black criminality is to me just as unnecessary as sex comparisons of grip strength [are in the debate about transgender athletes]. Chicago is about a third black. Like many midwestern cities, it is extremely violent, with nearly all of the crime concentrated in black neighborhoods. When crime does spill over into the nicer areas, it’s committed by the people from those neighborhoods….
Here’s the thing: while only immigrants and white proles explicitly discuss this aspect of their reality, every single person within the orbit of the city behaves as if they know the truth. No matter who you are, unless you’re one of the residents of those communities, your life is organized around avoiding the pathologies of the inner city. If you’re a desperate immigrant, you might open up a store, put up a “We Take EBT” sign, and take the risk of being shot. White Americans are less inclined to do this, so they instead just flee black neighborhoods and do what they can to get their kids out of black schools. They’ll make any commute or pay whatever tuition is necessary. No one is confused about this — liberals are correct that entire swaths of a major city don’t end up with zero white people by accident. They just attribute this to “racism” rather than the desire not to be sexually assaulted or physically harmed.
My experience in the Washington, DC area is similar. Anyone with children moves out of the city as soon as they can afford it because they refuse to have their kids in schools where failure is the accepted norm and there’s a fair chance they’ll get shot. This is not racism (black professionals do it too and just as fast). It’s just sanity.
We can therefore ignore those who deny the reality of black crime. They’re either too stupid or dishonest to engage with. Among others on the left, there has been an acceptance of reality combined with pleas to simply frame the issue differently.
….because, you see, if we liberals just talk about it differently, and endlessly, we can avoid, or at least delay, doing anything effective about it. Avoidance is sorely needed, because supporting the things we know are effective (e.g., cops, prison) will get us, too, accused of racism, and……..oh……..goodness…….where are my smelling salts?
When liberals talk about perspective here, what they usually mean is that the likelihood of a white person being victimized by a black person is small in an absolute sense, so why worry about it? It would be a fine argument, except that we are constantly told to obsess over the harms done by police shootings, white supremacist violence, and vigilantes falsely accusing innocent black men of crimes.
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So the crime debate has been going something like this.
Conservatives: Look at all the black-on-white crime.
Liberals: Get some perspective man. It’s nothing compared to the chances of being murdered by your own race. Not to mention heart attacks or COVID. These are very small numbers.
Conservatives: You guys are the ones telling us blacks are living in constant fear. Stop doing that.
Now, when having these debates, what’s frustrating is that people are usually talking past one another. There’s not like one guy named “conservatives” and one guy named “liberals.” The liberals who are telling you to have some perspective on black crime often aren’t the same ones pushing the narrative that blacks should live in fear of whites….[Yet the] myth of substantial white-on-black violence is so deeply embedded in the culture that it’s a storyline in network TV shows.
The TV shows are a problem, yes, but hardly the main problem. It’s the propaganda (poorly) disguised as news that’s the main problem. This was nowhere better illustrated than in the coverage of George Floyd (and its precursor, Michael “hands-up-don’t-shoot” Brown in Ferguson, MO). To have watched the saturation coverage of those episodes would necessarily lead you to believe, and it was fully intended to lead you to believe, that the main problem in interracial crime is white cops killing unarmed and blameless blacks. The difficulty is that that’s a lie of breathtaking scope.
One odd thing about these calls for perspective is that when liberals say that intra-racial crime is more common than crime that crosses group boundaries, what they are essentially saying is don’t worry about black crime, because the victims are overwhelmingly black people. But wait! Since when are liberals uninterested in problems that disproportionately affect blacks? These are the people who write serious NYT think pieces about how national parks are too white. They now turn around and say, let’s not talk too much about murder, because blacks are the victims?
Remember that the next time some Leftie accuses you of hypocritical callousness.
Some years ago I noticed that fact checkers started providing “perspective” on claims rather than simply saying whether they were true or false.
That line by itself is worth the price of admission. Avoiding a straight answer in favor of what will be labelled “perspective” is one of the Left’s favorite debate tricks, although not quite as frequent as criticizing the question rather than answering it.
Of course, what perspective to take on facts is a huge part of what political discourse is about. Do blacks commit a lot of violence against whites? Compared to the number of cancer deaths, no. But in the context of a comparison to white-on-black violence, absolutely….
Black-on-white violence is not the biggest issue in the world, but it is useful to talk about in order to challenge narratives that pose much more serious problems. Arguments about supposed racism committed by whites against blacks are why we can’t effectively fight crime in this country and why we can’t have freedom of association or meritocratic criteria in hiring. The belief in white racism as a major factor in American life is the force that distorts all of policymaking and culture. Any arguments that are effective at discrediting that narrative are worth making.
And also the main reason you should read Hanania’s entire devastating piece.
One last thing:
Right on. Reminds me of Jessee Jackson's observation that "there is nothing more painful than to hear footsteps and turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved." It's not racism; it's just playing the odds. Jim Dueholm