Using Tragedy for Racial Propaganda

President Joe Biden has been lecturing white Americans about hate again. On May 15, the day after an 18-year-old white supremacist massacred ten black shoppers in a Buffalo supermarket, Biden called on Americans to “address the hate that remains a stain” on the country’s soul. {snip}

Two days later, Biden gave a longer speech in Buffalo about the attack. In Biden’s telling, white Americans are at best indifferent to the racist slaughter of their fellow black citizens. “We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None,” Biden insisted. Biden’s exhortations and moral clarity were the only forces impeding a slide back toward Jim Crow and the reign of the KKK: “I promise you. Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word. . . . We can’t allow . . . these hate-filled attacks . . . to destroy the soul of the nation.” We can’t allow this violence, the president intoned, to “be the story of our time.” To “confront the ideology of hate requires caring about all people”—something that whites, in their silent complicity with racist rampages, apparently fail to do.

Last week’s remonstrances were not new. In an August 2019 press briefing, then-presidential candidate Biden claimed that racism was a “white man’s problem visited on people of color.” “White folks are the reason we have institutional racism,” he said. On November 6, 2019, the day before the press declared Biden the president-elect, he claimed a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism.”

Biden carried over the conceit into his presidential victory speech—the same speech hailed across the political spectrum as “unifying.” Among the “great battles of our time” was the still-unaccomplished goal of “root[ing] out systemic racism in this country.” Millions of Americans represent what Biden called “our darkest impulses.”

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{snip} 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.

Local data tell the same story. In New York City, from 2010 to 2020, blacks were 2.42 times as likely as whites to commit a hate crime, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known. Blacks in Los Angeles 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.

Biden, the mainstream media, and Democratic politicians claim that demographic angst is driving whites to paroxysms of violence. As Biden himself said in 2015, an “unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop,” was eliminating the white majority population share. If whites were lashing out against this immigration-fueled shift in U.S. culture, you would think Los Angeles would experience a particularly disproportionate level of white-committed hate crimes, since whites are only 28 percent of the L.A. population, and Hispanics 49 percent. But that is not the case. Blacks committed anti-Hispanic hate crimes in Los Angeles at 13.5 times the rate of whites in 2021.

The media and race activists seize on absolute numbers of hate-crime victims to argue that blacks are the target of disproportionate violence from whites. This is statistical sleight of hand, based on disparate population shares. Take a hypothetical population of 80 whites and 20 blacks, for example, where, for the sake of illustration, blacks commit hate crimes against whites at a 100 percent rate and whites commit hate crimes against blacks at one-quarter that rate. Blacks would commit 20 anti-white hate crimes and whites would commit 20 anti-black hate crimes. Every black would be victimized by a hate crime because of the smaller black population, not because of disproportionate white offending.

In the U.S., blacks commit the vast share of the interracial violence between blacks and whites that is not classified as a hate crime: 88 percent. Some portion of the gratuitously brutal beatings and carjackings that have become even more of a routine occurrence in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd race riots undoubtedly have racial animus behind them. The authorities treat black-on-white crime as unremarkable, however, and rarely look into motive. Authorities almost always scrutinize white-on-black crime, rare as it is, for a hate enhancement, precisely because it is so rare.

Maintaining the fiction of white hate-crime dominance takes work. Video evidence relentlessly shows that blacks are the predominant torturers of frail elderly Asians. Media still present the March 2021 Atlanta spa shooting as an anti-Asian hate crime, though religious torment and sexual guilt motivated it. In Dallas, Asian businesses experienced a wave of drive-by shootings starting in April 2022 and stretching into May, with bullets being fired into Asian-owned establishments from a passing car. On May 11, a man entered an Asian-run hair salon in Dallas and fired off at least 13 rounds, hitting three people, one in the lower back. The victims survived this attempted mass murder only because of the shooter’s poor aim. Police believe the assailant is connected to the previous drive-bys. Had he been white, his shooting spree would have been an international story. Because he was black, it was barely covered outside of Dallas. There has been no handwringing about black hate.

Teenage bullying is racially lopsided. On November 22 of last year, four white female Catholic school students were riding a city bus home in the Bronx. Two black male teenagers started taunting them and were joined by three black girls who beat the white girls up. Riders of mass transit in cities across the country know the dynamic and keep their heads down. Had the races on the Bronx bus been reversed, the incident would have been a national scandal—think the Covington Catholic hate-speech hoax.

The problem facing blacks today is not whites; it is black criminals. {snip}

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The typical mass shooter in America is not a white supremacist. He is black and either retaliating for a previous shooting or impulsively reacting to a current dispute. In 2020, more than two dozen blacks were killed every day—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined—even though blacks are only 13 percent of the population. The country turns its eyes away. As the former Baltimore gang member said of his community: “It’s like a norm now.” The black homicide toll will be higher in 2021 and 2022.

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The Democratic, media, and academic establishments are nevertheless going to exploit the Buffalo atrocity. The recently proposed government disinformation office may be on ice for now, but the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 could be an even more powerful tool for suppressing opposing viewpoints by falsely characterizing them as white supremacy. Though there is no shortage of government officials already investigating domestic terrorism, the bill would create three new offices in the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI tasked with assessing white supremacist and neo-Nazi threats in the U.S. and inside public agencies.

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Figures from President Biden on down are telling blacks, nonstop, that they are under lethal threat from whites, and that it is white supremacists, not black criminals, who pose the greatest threat to their safety. {snip}

The false claim that we are living through an epidemic of racist shootings of black men by police officers arguably led to the crime waves of 2015 and 2016, and to the more dire anarchy since 2020. With the two-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death upon us, it’s not hard to imagine that the equally false claim that we are living through an epidemic of white-supremacist shootings of blacks could escalate America’s violence.