Why Black-on-White Crime Statistics are Not an Appropriate Response

A friend (real friend, someone I actually know) posted this on facebook last week:

Dear Racist FB Friends: I know that black people kill white people, just like white people kill black people. It’s OLD NEWS. Old, ancient, boring, sickening news. Can we please focus on loving one another instead of spreading hate and discontent and fomenting racism? Every time I see one of you post *yet another* status about black-on-white crimes, I feel a little sicker and even more disheartened about our world. Move on.

At the time she wrote this, I hadn’t seen many posts or comments about the black-on-white vs white-on-black crime ratio, but since then it’s become ubiquitous.

I image there are people who don’t understand why black-on-white crime statistics aren’t relevant to the outrage over the delay to arrest George Zimmerman. The following is an attempt to explain it.

I am White. There exist violent thugs who are White. Those thugs do not represent me. They are not my agents. I get nothing from their crimes. When a White murderer kills innocent Black people, the White race does not get a point. And I am not personally responsible for George Zimmerman’s actions.

The same would be true if I were Black, in reference to Black criminals. Black criminals don’t act on behalf of law abiding Black people. The Black race gets no points for crimes against Whites. There have been Black people committing violent acts against White people in retaliation for Trayvon Martin, but most Black people have nothing to do with them, and are not responsible for their actions.

The outrage over Mr. Zimmerman is not about the actions of criminals. It’s not even about George Zimmerman. The outrage is about the apparent approval of Trayvon Martin’s death by the lawmakers and enforcers who are supposed to keep us safe. It’s about the feeling of some law abiding citizens that race and demographics, rather than deeds, determine who gets punished for crimes and who gets to go free.

Gun ownership is much higher among White people than Black people, so stand-your-ground laws do not provide equal protection. While laws and attitudes which encourage vigilantism might increase the amount of people who kill criminals, they also increase the amount of people who mistakenly kill innocents who they assume to be threats. People who fear falling into the “assumed threat” category don’t see this as a fair trade-off.

Some White commenter’s have asked, since so many Black people kill so many White people, why isn’t it White people who are protesting against Blacks? But White people have protested, and the result has been laws and attitudes which enabled George Zimmerman to track down Trayvon Martin and start a confrontation with him while armed and ready to kill.

One particularly mean spirited writer suggested that Blacks and Whites should call it even, considering the balance of racial oppression against the violence of Black criminals. But again I emphasize, criminals are not agents of law abiding citizens, and should not be treated as their representatives.

Instead of Blacks protesting Whites and Whites protesting Blacks, law abiding citizens should protest criminals. And instead of laws which promote confrontations, we should have laws that reduce crime. These laws include youth programs, police outreach and increased patrols (by which I mean more cops, not more overworked cops), better education, safe public transportation, and perhaps even increased gun ownership.

The protests aren’t about equaling the balance of cross-race crimes or the desire to protect Black criminals as equally as White criminals. The protests are about equal protection of the law and and a desire to protect law abiding citizens.

It’s OK to Defend the White Guy

Three innocent Black people were murdered by two White men in an unprovoked hate crime in Tulsa. Two years prior, the father of one of the murderers was killed by a black man after the father knocked the black man down with a stick for making threats against his daughter. In the comments of a story about this horrible crime, I disagreed with a commenter who said the father had it coming, and found myself arguing against people who I might normally agree with and being “liked” by people who I might not “like” in return.

Being progressive doesn’t mean always defending the Black guy. It means looking at the facts and not jumping to conclusions. It means not retaliating against people just because they remind you of others who did you wrong. It means not convicting unless you’re sure beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime, while at the same time trusting facts and logic to guide you towards getting it right more often. And it means considering mitigating circumstances, even if the subject is a crotchety old White man beating a Black guy with a stick.

Edit: I added “by two White men” in the first sentence for clarification.

Update: Soon after I added “White men” I read that Mr. England is Native American. For now, I’ll leave my words up there as written.

George Zimmerman’s Heritage is Inconsequential

When I started looking at headlines about the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, one of the top results from Google was a you-tube video titled “(Jew) George Zimmerman Kills (Black kid)Trayvon Martin”. Then I found on Breitbart.com, “Media Labels Hispanic Man White in Shooting of Black Teen”.

We know now that George Zimmerman is Catholic. His father, Robert Zimmerman is apparently white and, based solely on his name, may be of Jewish decent. His mother is Peruvian.

George Zimmerman’s heritage is not of much consequence. We know that racial stereotypes can be held even by those affected by those stereotypes, as illustrated in the Clark Doll experiments. George Zimmerman assumed Trayvon Martin was a trouble maker who didn’t belong in his neighborhood, and while it’s possible that his assumption wasn’t based on Martin’s race, it seems extremely likely that it was. It wasn’t based on his own race.

Trayvor Martin’s death illustrates an important fact about race in America. That fact is not that Jews hate Blacks, Latinos hate Blacks or even Whites hate Blacks. The fact is that all of us too often assume the worst about Black people.

It will be tough without Lowes, but we can do it.

Sasha and I have been pretty big customers of Lowes, but that ends now because Lowes decided to comply with the demands of bigoted family values organization in Florida to pull their ads from a TV show about Muslim Americans.

I personally find it shocking and heartbreaking, because Lowes was on the correct side of the bullshit English-Only campaign. I guess Lowes decided that Muslim Americans don’t buy as much lumber as Spanish speaking Americans do.

I wish a boycott of Lowes would teach them that it’s worth a business hit not to promote bigotry, but I’ll have to settle for trying to teach them that appeasing bigots isn’t a good business decision.

I hope Lowes apologizes for this miserable decision. Even they only do so for pragmatic reasons, it will demonstrate that Americans who hate bigotry are a larger and more powerful group than they expected, and that would be a step in the right direction.

A Crazy Wingnut Mistake

Doug Ross, a wingnut blogger, misunderstood a tweet and thought Obama had a U.S. flag removed from Ground Zero because he hates America. Then his stupid mistake was repeated by Malkin and Drudge. Malkin later acknowledged the mistake. Ross did too, sort of. He says his mistake was Obama’s fault for making him think such a delusional accusation could be true.

In justifying his hair-trigger overreaction, Ross linked to a video of Obama standing with his hands clasped during the National Anthem, to prove that Obama hates the flag. A little bit of Googling reveals photos of Bush and other presidents also failing to put their hands over their hearts during the National Anthem. A little more Googling led me to videos of Bush sitting, bored, fiddling with a hand-held American flag and drumming it against his thigh, and a photo of Bush stepping on a floor mat with the U.S. flag printed on it. I also remember (because I’m old enough) Bush Sr. draping a flag over his shoulders like it was a bath towel.

People make gaffs and every president has done things that appear to be disrespectful. These are either due to a deficiency in knowledge about ceremonial etiquette or due to being distracted by other things, like running the country. I can find gaffs committed by Republican presidents and Democratic presidents, but I can’t find swells of lunatic reactions from the left that come close to spreading as quickly as those on the right, or which contain the same amount of murderous and hysterical accusations.

I wish the hateful nonsense would stop, but Republicans are at a low. Their obstructionist tactics almost lead to a government shutdown, their plan to kill Medicare didn’t quite slip by without the people noticing, the birther movement is pretty much dead, Bin Laden was caught and killed on Obama’s watch, and the Republicans can’t seem to produce a leader who excites their base without sounding like a lunatic or a moron. Brace yourselves, folks, for a tidal wave of accusations against Obama that are hateful, racist, and most of all, unbelievable, at least to a thinking person.