The Patriot Post® · Do All Lives Really Matter?

It’s been a busy few days, so you might’ve missed the disturbing story out of Georgia last week that a middle-aged black man was stabbed multiple times in the neck and torso by a young white man in an AutoZone store. The assailant reportedly smiled when he told police that he “felt the need to find a black male to kill.”

Early last month in Colorado, there was an even more awful incident of racial violence. A 21-year-old white man from Aurora was driving down a suburban street when he began following a trio of 11- and 12-year-old black boys walking home from school. The man then hit the gas, jumped the curb, and mowed down two of the three boys.

Given the racially charged tensions of the day, it’s hard to believe these stories haven’t received more attention. Or maybe it’s not hard to believe at all. Because the victims in these two cases were actually white, and the assailants were black.

But does anyone doubt that had the races been reversed, these terrible stories would’ve been more extensively covered by the mainstream media? If you doubt this, think back a month ago to the execution-style slaying of five-year-old Cannon Hinnant, who was out riding his bike in front of his house when he was shot point-blank in the head by a neighbor, a 25-year-old black man named Darius Sessoms.

Perhaps there’s a shrine somewhere commemorating the too-short life of young Cannon, but perhaps not. Either way, we certainly won’t see the protests, the looting, the arson, and the nationwide violence we’ve seen in response to the death of 46-year-old career criminal George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Why not?

The answer might be, at least in part, that black-on-white crime is so commonplace as to not be newsworthy. Of course, it might also be that reporting on black-on-white crime discomforts our mainstream media and distracts from its narrative of the U.S. as an irredeemably racist nation shot through with white supremacy.

Our Mark Alexander picked up on this blame-shifting charade recently, and he cited some compelling statistics from researcher and author Heather Mac Donald regarding the interracial crime disparity. Such as: “There were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations … between blacks and whites [in 2018], including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.”

Mac Donald goes on to note that blacks represent just 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they commit 90% of our nation’s violent crime. She adds that this ratio is becoming even more skewed despite the Left’s continuous claims of Trump-inspired white violence. “Blacks,” she writes, “are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017.”

When was the last time you read crime statistics like these in The New York Times or The Washington Post, or heard them discussed on NPR, or saw them displayed on CNN or CBS or NBC or ABC or PBS?

If racism in America is indeed worthy of our discussion, then by all means let’s have a discussion. But let’s be sure to have a thorough discussion, a legitimate discussion, an honest discussion — rather than a politically correct one that avoids these inconvenient and troubling truths.