One of the many efforts by White racists to demonize Black people has been stopped dead in its tracks, thanks to some updated statistics provided by the federal government. Unlike what appears to be popular opinion, the rate of violent Black-on-Black crime is lower than how often White criminals victimize other White people.
To be sure, “the rate of white-on-white violent crime (12.0 per 1,000) was about four times higher than black-on-white violent crime (3.1 per 1,000),” according to new the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) “Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012-2015” report published last Thursday.
Research for the report was conducted over a four-year period during which “U.S. residents experienced 5.8 million violent victimizations each year.”
Still, not surprisingly, those findings didn’t stop former controversial (read: racist) White House adviser Sebastian Gorka from sticking to his White supremacist script on Monday when he told Sinclair Broadcast stations, “Our big issue is black African gun crime against black Africans.”
On a Sinclair station, Gorka refers to “black African crime on black African crime” & says black men are killing each other “by the bushel”
The so-called Black on Black crime argument has resurfaced lately in an attempt to delegitimize the NFL kneeling protest of the national anthem, which was founded to highlight social injustices against Black people and not because of violent crimes Black people commit against one another.
It appeared as if Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill, who is Black, also missed the BJS report.
“One of the most dramatically difficult things to fathom in this country is the amount of lives lost — black lives lost — as a result of black-on-black violence,” Hill said Saturday in an appeal for the NFL kneeling protest of the national anthem to be refocused. “In the same year that we experienced about 259 police officer shootings of blacks in 2015, there were 6,000 black lives lost to murders from black people.”
However, as has long been pointed out, the argument posited by Gorka and Hill is misguided because so-called Black on Black crime is the byproduct of structural racism resulting from centuries of social injustices.
The report did yield one bit of good news in particular: “From 1994 to 2015, white-on-white violence and black-on-black violence declined at a similar rate. White-on-white violence declined 79 percent (from 52.5 to 10.8 victimizations per 1,000 white persons). Black-on-black violence declined 78 percent (from 66.6 to 14.5 victimizations per 1,000 black persons). Information on Hispanic origin of offenders was not collected prior to 2012.”
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