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The Truth about Interracial Violent Crime

The Truth about Interracial Violent Crime
Debunking the Left’s pernicious lies.
By John Perazzo

John Perazzo is the author of Betrayal: The Democratic Party’s Destruction of America’s Cities.

Prior to the May 25th death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a major focus of the media during the preceding two weeks had been a video showing an incident where a young black man named Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot by two white men in Glynn County, Georgia. The killers say that they pursued Arbery, whom they suspected of having been involved in some recent local burglaries, when they spotted him running through their neighborhood – though some accounts claim that he was merely out for a jog. Eventually a fight broke out, and Arbery was shot and killed. After a video of the deadly altercation went public in early May, there were massive protests in Arbery’s behalf. On May 8 – which would have been Arbery’s 26th birthday – activist Al Sharpton used the Internet to lead a “virtual rally” in the young man’s memory, drawing some 105,000 participants.

In an interview four days later, Sharpton, exhorting members of the black community to “sustain” their “indignation” vis-a-vis the Arbery case for as long as possible, portrayed the Georgia killing as an extension of racist American violence dating back to the epoch of slavery: “It was expected that if you saw a black, that you would suspect that he was a runaway slave, and you had the runaway slave laws that … they would use that to hunt down blacks for vigilante groups, the KKK and others, all the way up until the modern era.”

Television personality Oprah Winfrey likewise characterized Arbery’s death as a consequence of intransigent white racism: “He went out for a jog while being Black. I wonder what was he thinking in those last seconds of his life? Unimaginable to go for a run in 2020 and end up dead because of the color of your skin.”

Notably, there is no record of either Sharpton or Winfrey uttering even a single public word in memory of 34-year-old Zackary Randalls, 37-year-old Mark Gassett, or 58-year-old David Jackson. You’ve never heard of these individuals, of course, because they were merely three white men who were murdered three years ago in Fresno, California by Kori Ali Muhammad, a black racist who candidly sought “to kill as many white males as possible” – killings for which the perpetrator was convicted just six weeks ago. Regarding the Zackary Randalls murder, Mr. Muhammad has since explained: “When I walked up to the truck, I saw a Mexican driver and a white guy. I didn’t want to target the driver because he was Mexican, so I shot the white dude.” The media, for some mysterious reason, didn’t find the story compelling enough to cover.

Neither is there any record of Sharpton or Winfrey lamenting the deaths of 86-year-old Paul Marino and his 85-year-old wife, Lidia, both of whom were murdered in cold blood by a black gunman on May 8 – the very day of Sharpton’s “virtual rally” in honor of Ahmaud Arbery – while they visited the gravesite of their late son, Anthony, in a Delaware cemetery. To borrow Oprah’s pithy maxim, we might say that Mr. and Mrs. Marino were just “visiting their son’s grave while being white.”

Other victims whose recent murders were ignored by media outlets and camera hogs like Sharpton and Winfrey include:

– Joyce Whaley, Patricia Nibbe, and Nettie Spencer – three middle-aged white women who were brutally stabbed to death by a black killer at a Tennessee truck stop in early April;

– Heather Perry, a 21-year-old white woman who was shot to death in a Denver alleyway on May 9 by Cornelius Haney, a convicted armed robber who had just been released from prison in order to protect him from contracting the coronavirus;

– Logan Allen Stacks, a 17-year-old white boy who was gunned down by two black teens on March 27 in Lancaster County, South Carolina;

– Dr. Beth Potter, a 52-year-old white physician who dedicated her career to helping “underserved communities,” and her husband, educational consultant Robin Carre, who were shot execution-style by a pair of black teens on March 30 in Madison, Wisconsin; and

– Kristopher Dacus, a 33-year-old white man who on February 26 was shot multiple times and killed by four black teens in the North Little Rock, Arkansas cemetery where he worked.

Let us assume for a moment that Ahmaud Arbery – who quite obviously was a volatile and menacing character with a criminal history – was in fact the innocent victim of a horrific, wholly unjustifiable murder. Even if that were the case, why should his death garner more attention from American media outlets and civil rights activists, than, say, the deaths of the 13 aforementioned whites whose lives were mercilessly snuffed out by black killers in 6 different states? Perhaps a case could be made in favor of such a double standard if white-on-black killings were commonplace in American society – on the theory that the condemnation of such occurrences might help raise people’s collective consciousness about the deadly ramifications of white racism. But in fact, white-on-black homicides in the U.S. have been exceedingly rare for many decades.

Conventional “wisdom” maintains that violent crime tends largely to be an intra-racial affair, where whites target mostly whites, and blacks target mostly blacks. This is certainly true for homicide, but much less true for other crimes of violence such as assault, rape, and robbery.

Let us look first at homicides that involved whites and blacks during 2012 and 2013. During those years, white killers nationwide chose to target white victims approximately 93 percent of the time, and black victims 7 percent of the time. Meanwhile, black killers targeted black victims 84.7 percent of the time, and white victims 15.3 percent of the time.

But violence in America crosses racial lines much more frequently when the crimes in question are rape, robbery, and assault. In 2012 and 2013, for instance, blacks in the U.S. committed an annual average of 560,600 violent crimes (excluding homicide) against whites, while whites committed a yearly average of 99,403 violent crimes against blacks. In other words, blacks were the attackers in about 85 percent of all violent crimes involving blacks and whites, while whites were the attackers in 15 percent.[1]

Those broad figures, however, do not even begin to tell the full story about interracial crime. To get a complete picture, we must also look at crime statistics from the perspective of the offender. That is, when a given violent offender chooses a victim to target for a crime, does he tend to target a victim who is a fellow member of his own racial group, or does he tend to go after a victim from another racial group? Here are the facts:

– When white offenders committed crimes of violence (excluding homicide) against either whites or blacks in 2012-13, they targeted white victims 95.8 percent of the time, and they went after black victims a mere 4.1 percent of the time.

– By contrast, when black offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks in 2012-13, they targeted white victims a whopping 48.5 percent of the time, and they went after black victims 51.4 percent of the time.[2]

If we factor into the equation the relative sizes of America’s white and black populations, we find that, statistically, any given black person in 2012-13 was about 27 times more likely to attack a white, than vice versa.

In more recent years, the disproportionate prevalence of black-on-white crime has only gotten worse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2018 there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites in the United States. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90.4 percent, while whites committed 56,394 of them, or about 9.5 percent. Moreover:

– When white offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks in 2018, they targeted white victims 97.3 percent of the time, and they went after black victims 2.6 percent of the time.

– By contrast, when black offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks during that same year, they targeted white victims 58 percent of the time, and they went after black victims 42 percent of the time.[3]

City Journal also reports that according to Justice Department data, blacks in 2018 were overrepresented among the perpetrators of offenses classified as “hate crimes” by a whopping 50 percent—while whites were underrepresented by 24 percent.

These numbers are staggering. If America were teeming with white racism, those guilty of interracial crime would be disproportionately white. But instead, the exact opposite is the case. Thus, the enormous amount of attention given to white-on-black attacks – which are statistically rare in the United States – is an obscene and senseless absurdity. The notion of ubiquitous white racism manifesting itself in unacceptably high levels of white violence against blacks, is one of the most destructive and monstrously evil lies of our time, creating levels of racial mistrust and animosity that are wholly unwarranted.

Notes:

[1] Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2012-13, Special Tabulation, Table 10.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization, 2018, Table 14.

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