Are sky-high black crime rates responsible for prejudice in America?
by
Clayton E. Cramer
A number of commentators have pointed out the enormous focus that civil rights leaders have put on the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of a white man, while essentially ignoring the vastly more common situation of black on black murder. On an average day in 2010, there were eighteen blacks murdered in the U.S., and sixteen of those black victims were murdered by other blacks — and yet those crimes seem to be of no real interest to the mainstream media or the race hustlers like Al Sharpton.
While I agree that some of this is simply political gamesmanship, there is another part of this strange misfocus that actually does make some sense. It is based on the bitterness that many blacks feel about racial prejudice. NBC News ran a program recently in which they interviewed a number of their black employees about the sensation of being treated as potential criminals no matter where they go. I don’t doubt that they have experienced this, and that it is almost certainly racial prejudice driving this. Most guys have at one time or another have approached a strange woman in an isolated place, and seen the fear. We feel terribly ill-treated because it is apparent what she is thinking: “A man I don’t know is a rapist — or at least, there is a good chance of it.”
What causes prejudices like these? Prejudices usually have some basis to them — either personal experiences, or knowledge that we have acquired from friends or from the news. Sometimes, those prejudices are positive. A friend of mine is a Korean-American. When he was in junior high and high school, everyone wanted to sit next to him in math classes. “Everyone knows” that Asians are good at math; they could learn from him or at least copy from his tests! (And they were disappointed to discover that this is just a prejudice — he was not good at math.) There are still Americans with positive prejudices of Jews as clever, or blacks as especially talented at music (“natural rhythm”).
Even when those prejudices are based on some actual difference in the average for the group, for any particular member of the group, that positive prejudice is often wrong. We tend not to be quite so angry when we are assumed to be smarter, or more talented, or more capable because of our membership in a group, but it is still not a good thing.
The darker problem, however, are the negative prejudices: the ones that cause a store security guard to watch a black guy who enters a store; that cause taxi drivers in big cities to be reluctant to pick up blacks after dark (even when the taxi driver is black himself); that used to cause some employers to assume that women weren’t logical enough to be computer programmers. If you have ever been on the losing side of one of these prejudices, you understand the sense of injustice that is obviously driving much of the rage about the Trayvon Martin killing.
If you experience prejudice long enough, you will see it even where it isn’t. Many years ago, a white woman and a black man came to my door, ostensibly doing some sort of survey. I thought that this was a public opinion survey, but it was actually an encyclopedia sales pitch. As I was looking for a polite way to kick them out, the black guy suddenly says, “You’re looking at me like you think I’m casin’ the joint.” He picked up on my irritation and disgust, and assumed that it was racially motivated, when it was really annoyance that they had deceived me to do their sales pitch. I can see why, after a lifetime being seen as a likely criminal because of his color, he made that assumption.
What causes this widespread prejudice of blacks as likely criminals? It is not a white supremacist conspiracy. Even blacks admit to this prejudice against their own race. Rev. Jesse Jackson made a painfully honest admission, some years ago, that he had reached an age where if he heard footsteps behind him in a city at night, if he looked over his shoulder and saw a white person, he felt relieved. If an Asian guy walks into a department store in America, I am pretty sure that store security doesn’t start following him around. If an Asian guy is driving a nearly new car, I am pretty sure that the police won’t pull him over to make sure the car isn’t stolen. (This used to happen to a friend of mine in San Jose who looked Hispanic, even though she wasn’t.) What causes this prejudice against blacks?
Here is an ugly truth: the source of this nasty prejudice about blacks and crime is the fact that black crime rates are extremely high. Most of it is directed against other blacks, but that doesn’t change the perception by Americans (black, white, or purple). Black murder rates are roughly 4.5x what you would expect for their proportion of the population, with similarly disproportionate rates for robbery (4x), aggravated assault (3x), burglary (3x), forgery and counterfeiting (3x), fraud (3x), and rape (3x). You don’t have to read the FBI Uniform Crime Reports to know this, either. Essentially everyone (white or black) who has ever lived in an urban area in the U.S. has first-hand experience of this.
There is only one way to fix this problem of racial prejudice — and that is to reduce black crime rates to a level commensurate with the black population. The glorification of criminality in urban black culture is shocking and destructive. It encourages more of the same, and teaches young black men that this is an acceptable cultural form. There are black leaders, such as Bill Cosby, who have worked hard, and expended considerable capital, trying to shame black parents into promoting values that were common among poor blacks when Cosby was growing up in a rough section of Philadelphia: education, respect for others, hard work. But Cosby seems to have lost this battle.
Black Americans have good reason to be upset when they are treated like criminals simply because of their color. But as long as crime in America is so disproportionately a black activity, those prejudices will persist.
pjmedia.com
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Burton
“There is only one way to fix this problem of racial prejudice — and that is to reduce black crime rates to a level commensurate with the black population.”
Here’s the problem with that: black folks who are academic and politicians believe that black crime is not a problem about black folks, but about white folks, caused by white racism. Michelle Alexander wrote a book called The New Jim Crow that is based on this idea, and it has great traction in the black community, especially since it dovetails with that community’s view that white people bad and black people are good. If you think that’s simplistic, you haven’t been reading the black press I have.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) recently talked about the year Rodney King was beaten: she said
“We published a report that showed that a third of the prison population was made up of African-American males, compared to 3.7 percent of the state population, so it was during that period that all of this occurred. It highlighted the police relationship with the community in terms of the injustice of [the] criminal-justice system, racial profiling and disproportionate numbers of African-American males going to prison.”
According to Alexander and Lee, and pretty much any other black person who speaks about this as a matter of public policy, the more black folks are in jail, the more evidence it is of my own racism. So, in the minds of the black community, the only way to reduce black crime is for me to stop being a racist, for whites to engage in dialogues admitting white guilt, according to Eric Holder, and then everything will be fine.
I had a friend who was a cab driver for years – he said the reason he didn’t like having them as passengers is that they would jump out without paying the fare. People in their individual lives won’t be guinea pigs for smashing black stereotypes, and as you point out, that includes black folks as well.
Threat assessments may be based on nonsense but also on reality and people will err on the side of caution. Women at night in lonely places tend to look at me with caution because I’m tall and mean looking. I don’t take it personally – even a woman I ended up living with told me that when she first met me she was scared to be with me alone, just because of the way I looked. Unfortunately, I don’t “look” like a comic-book collecting artist.
So, we have a near total disconnect about how to reduce black crime: one side says I need to stop being a jerk, the other side says stop committing crime. One side talks about whites inventing AIDs and importing drugs and alcohol into the ‘hood, the other side says control yourself.
The difference is that when push comes to shove, black folks feel a lot safer and more comfortable around whites, I’ve been around these scenarios enough to know. It’s one thing to write nonsense about whites in articles, and quite another to be on a black bus line with an Apple laptop open. Because, at the end of the day, when you make a person personally responsible for their political and social views, then all of a sudden the liberal Left becomes extremely reasonable, and Conservatives walk it like they talk it.
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vb
The question I have been asking is how the cute 12-year-old Trayvon changed into the gold-mouthed facebook figure we later saw. Every teen-aged boy goes through a rebellious period in which he begins to separate from his parents. During this time, he needs real challenges that allow him to prove to himself his manhood, and he needs role models. Right now, it seems that developing a threatening gangsta rap persona is all they have. The entertainment industry could do more to offer them heroes for today. They need characters just like themselves with all their insecurities who learn to overcome these and to resist the pop culture that is so deadly. They need to see 15 year olds taking care of younger kids who are also anxious and then being praised for their manly efforts. They need to see how a kid their age can empathize with the new hispanic kid in school and break through the barriers to discover common interests. And above all, they don’t need people like Al Sharpton who try to dump hundreds of years of history on their backs before they can carry it. They need a protected space where they can grow.
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