Race war will continue until we can talk about it honestly

Published in The Orlando Sentinel, November 5, 1998

If there is a race war going on, as some black intellectuals have contended, it is being waged by blacks against whites.

Let's look at some hard numbers compiled by the U.S. Justice Department and published in the November/December issue of The American Enterprise magazine.

Blacks, who are less than one-eighth of the U.S. population (12.6 percent in 1995 to be exact), commit more than one-third of all serious crimes.

In the statistics published for 1991 by the Justice Department one finds:

There were 100 rapes committed by whites against blacks but 20,204 rapes committed by blacks against whites. As for robberies, 7,031 involved a white perpetrator and a black victim while 167,924 robberies involved a black perpetrator and a white victim.

White assaults of blacks were 49,800, but black assaults of whites were 431,670. In the category of all violent crimes, only 55,301 involved white perpetrators and black victims; 572,458 violent crimes involved black perpetrators and white victims.

Now, what inferences may be fairly drawn from these numbers?

One is certainly that both the federal government and the news media are hypocritical. I cannot recall a federal prosecution of a black for a hate crime against a white, yet both the federal government and the news media seize on any incident of white crime against blacks to perpetuate the myth that white Americans are virulently racist.

A history professor recently pointed out that the stabbing death of an 82-year-old Alexandria, La., woman barely got mentioned in the news -- despite the fact that the four black killers admitted that they chose her ``because she was white.'' That's not a hate crime? Why didn't the president comment on that? How come the national television networks didn't put that on the evening news, do specials and invite Rolodex experts to proclaim how ingrained black racism is against whites?

This huge disparity between white-on-black and black-on-white crime is the elephant at the tea party that both the press and the federal government pretend they can't see. They are vile hypocrites.

Another inference that can be fairly drawn is that pizza drivers and others who decline to deliver in some black neighborhoods at night may not be, as they are accused of being, racist. They are just prudent. I can tell you that many white liberal journalists and politicians, quick to pronounce self-righteous judgments in these cases, are themselves afraid to go into those neighborhoods at night. Heck, there are neighborhoods the police are afraid to go into.

Furthermore, if there is any racism in the court system, it favors blacks, not whites. Conviction rates are lower for blacks than they are for whites in 12 of 14 felony categories tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, according to Enterprise magazine.

America has become an intellectually dishonest nation. No one wishes to talk honestly about race and a lot of other subjects. Gun control is, in part, an effort to avoid honest talk about crime. By the way, in 1994, a firearm was present at only 12 percent of the violent crimes committed in America. Crime is a people problem, not a hardware problem, and more than a third of it is a problem located among 13 percent of the population.

There is a lot more racist rhetoric and hate speech coming out of black mouths today than there is coming out of white mouths. There is not a single white racist anywhere who has any national following in the United States. You cannot say that about black racists. Just remember, no problem is ever solved until it's correctly and honestly defined.

[Posted 11/04/98 8:57 PM EST]