The picture is the same nationally. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 committed homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males combined in the same age category in 2008, resulting in a homicide victimization rate nearly as disproportionate. As for interracial crime, black homicide offenders in 2010 had nearly three times the absolute number of white and Hispanic victims as there were black victims of white and Hispanic homicide offenders, despite blacks’ much lower population numbers.
The “white death threat” meme predominated in the immediate aftermath of the tragic Trayvon Martin shooting as well, of course. But in the intervening year and a half, the mainstream media have been forced, however fleetingly and inchoately, to acknowledge the black-on-black shooting spree that continues to characterize urban America, despite the country’s 17-year crime drop. The January 2013 slaying of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, a majorette in the Chicago marching band that had played at Obama’s inauguration, triggered sporadic attention to Chicago’s hardly unique gun violence over the following months. Even if the press was unwilling to point out that the killers of such inner-city victims share their skin color, that fact should have been obvious to anyone who has even the most remote contact with reality.
Yet this recognition of the real source of black homicide risk has evaporated completely in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, and we are back to the “rampaging white racists” conceit. The American Prospect’s Bouie even argues that “there’s no such thing as ‘black-on-black’ crime.” Black-on-black crime is simply a matter of proximity, he says; blacks kill each other because they usually live next to each other. But Asians also frequently live next to each other; we don’t try desperately to ignore “Asian-on-Asian” crime, however, because their crime rate is so low.
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