The Inconvenient Truth About Violent Crime
By ignoring the data about violent crime in America, Joe Biden does us all a deep disservice.
With an unspeakable tragedy still unfolding in Uvalde, Texas, it seems tasteless beyond words to consider counting crime by race.
But that’s what Joe Biden does — at least when it’s convenient. It’s what he did last week in Buffalo, the site of a white-on-black massacre by 18-year-old Payton Gendron, and it’s what he’d no doubt like to do now if he and his fellow racial arsonists can somehow convince us that the 18-year-old Uvalde man responsible for the murders of 19 elementary school children and two teachers is a white Hispanic white supremacist.
So we’ll oblige him.
During times of great tragedy, the American president takes on a special role: that of consoler-in-chief, mender of broken hearts. As such, Biden last week could’ve uttered words similar to these last week:
My fellow Americans, what happened here in Buffalo was pure evil. Let there be no equivocating about this moral fact. If evil exists, what happened here was evil. But, my fellow Americans, this young man and his race-based homicidal hatred represents an infinitesimally small number of Americans, white or otherwise. The overwhelming majority of Americans of every race, ethnicity, and religion get along with each other beautifully. We work alongside each other, date each other, socialize with one another and marry one another. We are the most successful experiment in creating a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious country in world history. The actions of a deranged teenager do not change this fact.
But those were Dennis Prager’s words, not Joe Biden’s. Instead, Biden, seeking to score partisan political points among his most loyal voters, black Americans, opted for a more accusatory and incendiary approach. “White supremacy is a poison,” he said. “It’s a poison. It really is. Running through our body politic. And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more. I mean, no more. We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.”
And it’s here that any informed American should call “BS” on the American president. White supremacy very rarely rears its ugly head in an attack like the one in Buffalo. The far greater fear among black Americans should be the everyday genocide being perpetrated upon them by other black Americans, the “inconvenient truth about race and violence” Biden willfully ignores.
As researcher and author Heather Mac Donald points out: “White-supremacist shootings like the Buffalo massacre are so rare that they do not show up statistically in the tidal wave of black homicide victims between the ages of 10 and 34. Blacks going about their quotidian chores in inner-city areas do have reason to fear, but the threat is not from white supremacists. It is from other blacks.”
This is the inconvenient truth for Joe Biden, and for anyone else bent on so cynically misleading the black community. Mac Donald went on to chronicle a typical stretch of violent crime in inner-city Black America, and it was unimaginably bloody. Baltimore by itself is worse than many war zones. Same with Chicago’s South Side. That Americans live under such conditions is a damned disgrace.
“We have to refuse to live in a country where black people going about a weekly grocery shopping can be gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause,” said Joe Biden, shamefully ignoring the fact that black Americans are much more likely to be gunned down by other blacks than by whites.
Here, the president is hiding the truth and missing the bigger point: We have to refuse to live in a country where black people anywhere can be gunned down by anyone. But so long as Joe Biden and his handlers keep blaming whitey, blacks will keep paying the price.
But it’s not only blacks who should fear other blacks. It’s everyone else, too. As Mac Donald continues: “Biden’s recurring suggestions that white hate crimes are America’s dominant reality are false. Whites are not the biggest source of hate crime and interracial violence in the U.S.; blacks are. From 2016 to 2020, blacks nationally were twice as likely to commit a hate crime as whites, according to FBI data, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known.”
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks commit 90% of interracial felonies — black on white, Hispanic, or Asian — despite representing just 13% of our nation’s population. In some areas, the disparity is far worse. Take Los Angeles, for example, where, as Mac Donald points out: “Blacks committed anti-Asian hate crimes at 4.8 times the rate of whites in 2021, according to internal LAPD data. Blacks in L.A. committed anti-gay hate crimes at seven times the rate of whites, and anti-Semitic hate crimes at 2.4 times the rate of whites, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known. Blacks committed anti-trans hate crimes at 2.5 times the rate of Hispanics; there were no white suspects in anti-trans hate crimes in L.A. in 2021.”
As our Mark Alexander has argued, the rare instance of white supremacist violence is a loud and diversionary dog whistle meant to distract us from the very real disparity in interracial violence, and from the awful cultural reality of black-on-black violence.
The longer Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats ignore these realities, the greater disservice they do to all Americans.