Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the newly published When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.
Read the whole article here.
If blacks kill at nine times the rate of whites in Kansas City but die of homicide at only six times the rate of whites in Kansas City, what makes up the difference? Blacks killing people outside their own race. That disparity applies to non-lethal as well as to lethal violence. In 2021, 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the U.S. were black-on-white—480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence. In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative.
The distribution of interracial violence means that an “X-ing while white” meme is a more appropriate way of representing racial crime patterns. Recent instantiations of the “while white” meme would include: “accosting shoplifters while white” (California Home Depot employee fatally shot while trying to prevent a theft); “reporting on a crime while white” (Florida journalist fatally shot working the scene of a homicide investigation, cameraman critically injured in same shooting); “riding the subway while white” (two 19-year-old females punched and robbed on Times Square subway by larger group of females wearing dayglo green body suits); “bicycling while white” (California emergency room doctor run over and fatally stabbed by man who reportedly had complained about “white privilege”); “jogging while white” (young Memphis mother abducted, raped, and killed); “walking downtown while white” (Minneapolis man thrown to the ground, stomped on, stripped of pants, run over with a bicycle, hit with planters, and robbed by group of teens); “holding on to one’s wallet while white” (Minneapolis man beaten unconscious after refusing to give up his wallet in attempted robbery); “walking in school hallway while white” (New Jersey ninth-grader punched, kicked, and hit with water bottle in high school, later commits suicide); “existing in school while white” (Florida girl beaten in head by five females); “riding a city bus while white” (57-year-old female hit in the head with an unknown object on a Queens bus by two teenage girls and a third individual); “riding a school bus while white” (12-year-old boy in Virginia choked by female classmate).
If any of these incidents had had black victims and white perpetrators, there would have been a national, if not international, uproar. Every news outlet would be covering the emergency of white supremacy and Joe Biden would have given another of his speeches about the stain of white racism on America’s soul.
“While Asian” is another potentially fertile meme: “wearing jewelry while Asian” (California victims had jewelry forcibly torn from their necks); “possessing property while Asian” (California victims targeted in robberies; suspects tried to run over arresting officer with a loaded firearm and extended magazine in their car); “grocery-shopping while Asian” (two California women violently robbed at an Asian supermarket); “riding subway while Asian” (three Asian boys and a girl attacked by four girls on a Philadelphia subway train; Asian girl punched, stomped on, and shoved in the head against subway door).
(Other “while Asian” incidents are chronicled here, including a 75-year-old man fatally knocked to the ground and robbed while taking his morning walk in Oakland; an 84-year-old man fatally knocked to the ground in his driveway; a 67-year-old man kicked to the ground, dangled upside down, beaten, and robbed in a San Francisco laundromat; and an 88-year-old great-grandmother, beaten so brutally as to be unrecognizable and discarded next to a recycling bin.)
In virtually none of these “while Asian” incidents was the race of the suspects reported, because those suspects were black. The media not only omit a detail that would be automatic if the suspects were white but also compose a racial narrative about anti-Asian crimes and anti-Asian hate crimes that is wholly false: that it is whites who are the threat to frail, elderly Asians.
“While Hispanic” incidents would include: “defending one’s girlfriend while Hispanic” (Minneapolis man pistol-whipped and shot in chest for yelling at someone harassing his girlfriend); “working the cash register while Hispanic” (25-year-old female grocery store clerk beaten in Bronx by two females following argument over recyclables). “While trans” would include: “waiting for light rail while trans” (trans individual beaten by five individuals at Minneapolis light rail station; brain matter found on ground). But because the perpetrators in these attacks were black, the violence is taken as a matter of course.
The anarchy in American cities is carefully de-raced, whether the flash mobs that routinely maraud in shopping malls and down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile; the looters who plunder convenience stores and jewelry stores; or the Miami spring breakers who rape and kill. To name a suspect’s race when that suspect is black is virtually taboo, no matter the race of his victim. Let a white person assault or kill a black person, however, and the entire story will be about race.
This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good, least of all the victims of black crime. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that in the first 18 months of the coronavirus epidemic (read: the post-George Floyd era) black juveniles 17 and younger died of gun homicide at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. If that death rate were due to whites shooting blacks, we would have heard about every one of those shootings. In fact, almost none were widely reported because they were overwhelmingly committed by other blacks. The race activists were silent; Biden was silent; the media were silent; the Black Studies professors were silent. Merely mentioning black-on-black crime guarantees the accusation of racism, as if facts are racist.
And so, with debate silenced about how to overcome the inner-city culture that spawns this dreary parade of drive-by shootings, those shootings continue unabated. This past weekend, six people got out of a car in the heart of Hollywood in Los Angeles and unleashed gunfire at a man and a woman standing in front of a convenience store. Less than a day earlier, shooting broke out at a Hollywood nightclub. Earlier in April, a 37-year-old was shot in the head on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the other side of the country, in Baltimore this past weekend, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the groin, a 55-year-old was shot in the face while sitting in a vehicle, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back, a 25-year-old man was shot in the lower back and legs, a 19-year-old man was shot multiple times in the leg, and a 44-year-old was shot in the knee, all in separate incidents. On Monday, two men were shot. Ho-hum. Because Baltimore does not have the cachet of Chicago, this quotidian mayhem gets even less attention than Chicago’s.
Millions of blacks are walking around believing that whites hate and fear them so much that blacks are at daily risk of their lives from that hatred. This belief is the rankest fiction. Yet it is embraced and amplified by almost every mainstream American institution. We exist mentally in a counterfactual, alternative reality when it comes to race and crime. That alternative reality further poisons race relations, incentivizing more anti-white violence. It creates fertile support for the dismantling of law enforcement and of the meritocratic standards that are said to prop up white supremacy. It is time to unflinchingly pierce that fiction with the truth.
Read the whole thing here.
