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@jahbrudda
Stoking Fears About Interracial Crime — A Look at How Racists Do Math
Next, Taylor claims that most victims of black violent crime are white, and thus, that blacks are violently targeting whites. Furthermore, since only a small share of the victims of white criminals are black (only 4.4 percent in 2002, for example), this means that blacks are far more of a threat to whites than vice-versa. But there are several problems with these claims.
To begin with, the white victim totals in the Justice Department’s victimization data include those termed Hispanic by the Census, since nine in ten Latino/as are considered racially white by government record-keepers. Since Latinos and Latinas tend to live closer to blacks than non-Hispanic whites, this means that many “white” victims of “black crime” are Latino or Latina, and that in any given year, the majority of black crime victims would be people of color, not whites.
But even if we compute the white totals as Taylor does, without breaking out Hispanic victims of “black crime,” his position is without merit. In 2002, whites, including Latinos, were about 81.5 percent of the population (3). That same year, whites (including Latinos) were 51 percent of the victims of violent crimes committed by blacks, meaning that whites were victimized by blacks less often than would have been expected by random chance, given the extent to which whites were available to be victimized (4).
As for the claim that blacks victimize whites at rates that are far higher than the reverse, though true, this statistic is meaningless, for a few obvious but overlooked reasons, first among them the simple truth that if whites are more available as potential victims, we would naturally expect black criminals to victimize whites more often than white criminals would victimize blacks. Examining data from 2002, there were indeed 4.5 times more black-on-white violent crimes than the reverse (5). While this may seem to support Taylor’s position, it actually destroys it, because the interracial crime gap, though seemingly large, is smaller than random chance would have predicted. The critical factor ignored by Taylor is the extent to which whites and blacks encounter each other in the first place. Because of ongoing racial isolation and de facto segregation, the two group’s members do not encounter one another at rates commensurate with their shares of the population: a fact that literally torpedoes the claims in The Color of Crime.