Mapping The Unmentionable: Race and Crime

In the climactic final scene of Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, the highest grossing documentary before Moore’s own Fahrenheit 9/11, the rotund one stalks Charlton Heston, the elderly president of the National Rifle Association, to his lair, and asks him:

Moore: But you don’t have any opinion as to why we’re the unique country, the only country that does this? That kills each other t this level with guns.

Heston: Well, we have, probably a more mixed ethnicity, than other countries, some other countries.

Moore pounces on Heston’s shocking faux pas:

Moore: . . . So you think it’s an ethnic thing?

Sensing his gaffe, Heston paddles desperately upstream:

Heston: Well, I don’t think it’s — I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. We had enough problems with civil rights in the beginning.

For mentioning ethnicity’s connection to crime, Heston was trashed in the press as a racist. However, his announcement that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s led many critics to recommend pity rather than censure — he must have been senile to say such a horrible thing.

Yet everybody knows Heston was telling the truth.

{snip}