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In
a well-meaning effort to counter the notion that there’s
an explosion of black on white crime, authorities in
Knoxville culled Tennessee Bureau of Investigation stats
on violent crimes and noted that in the vast majority
of these crimes whites are more likely to maim and kill
other whites, and blacks do the same with other blacks.
Violent crimes in the state and the nation no matter
the color of the victim and perpetrator have dropped
during the past five years.
Buried
in the stats, though, the report found that black offenders
commit four times as many crimes against whites as the
reverse. That inadvertently adds fuel to the charge
that whites are under assault from blacks. The president
of the Knoxville NAACP swiftly denounced the killings
and expressed deep sorrow for the victim’s families.
Yet, there’s some truth to charge that civil rights
leaders generally don’t express outrage at heinous
crimes committed by blacks against whites. Many blacks
generally shrug off the crimes with the bitter remark
that whites have been killing blacks for years and getting
away with it and there has been no massive explosion
of white outrage at the lax treatment of white killers.
The
seeming nonchalance of many blacks toward black on white
crime doesn’t mean that blacks are insensitive
to the victims of crime. They are. They are far more
likely than any other group in America to be the victims
of violent crime, and they know first hand the pain
and suffering violent crime causes. They don’t
color-code crime, crime is crime, no matter the color
of the victim, or assailant. There is also no evidence
that black criminals target whites because they are
white. They target them for their money and valuables.
These crimes are almost all cases garden-variety street
crime.
Police
and prosecutors in trying to determine whether to prosecute
an interracial murder or attack as a hate crime or not
have to figure out is their racial animus in the crime.
For it to be a hate crime they have to prove that a
black intentionally targeted a white victim solely because
of their color. That’s takes hard evidence of
racial taunts, threats, writings, or statements by the
perpetrator to prove race was the motivating factor
in the attack. In the absence of that evidence, the
charge that the attack was a hate crime won’t
fly.
The
suggestion that the national press engages in a cover-up
to quash murders committed by blacks of whites because
it’s afraid to offend blacks is absurd. The better
explanation is that crime news is so routine that unless
the accused murderer is O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector,
or Robert Blake or a name celebrity there’s little
chance it’s going to be the stuff of endless nightly
nationwide newscasts.
Still
black-on-white violence anywhere stirs fear among some
whites that crime-prone blacks are out to get them,
and they’ll seize any opportunity they get to
commit violence against them. When blacks say or do
nothing about these attacks it is taken by some as a
tacit signal that blacks put less value on white lives
than black lives. This is ridiculous. But white supremacists
will still scream loudly that the Knoxville murders
of Christian and Newsom proves there’s a double
standard in interracial murder cases. That scream should
be ignored.
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.
His new book "The Latino Challenge to Black America:
Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and
Hispanics" (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics
New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.
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