The Race War That Isn’t

I f you are a white person, you are probably not going to be killed by a black person.

Of course, if you are black, you are probably not going to be killed by a white person, either. But, every quant on the right makes that point from time to time. The reverse is worth noting as well — especially in the context of today.

Throughout modern internet culture, we often see snickering references to the idea that black people commit virtually all modern crime, and that a huge amount of this crime targets white people. The common phrases “13/52” and “13/60,” for example, are oblique references to the allegation that African Americans make up (X) percentage of the U.S. population but commit (Y) percentage of either murder or all violent crime. This sort of claim is hardly marginal: No less a giant of the modern Right than President Donald Trump once tweeted out a famous graphic asserting that, in the representative year of 2015, “whites killed by blacks” made up 81 percent of all white murder victims.

The majority of stuff like this is not even in the same ballpark as the truth. The black homicide rate, specifically, is quite high. But, by most accounts, over 80 percent of the murderers of white Americans are themselves suntan-challenged, and the person most likely to kill you — “Cherchez la femme” — is your wife or husband. More broadly, there exists a national crime report (the “BJS-NCVS”) which comes out annually, and we can . . . just look at it to get a near-exact fix on totals, rates, and trends across all crimes nationally. Per this data, in 2018–19 (the last year to include Asian Americans as a distinct category, and a year during which white and Hispanic crime totals were reported separately), blacks made up “just” 21.7 percent of the offenders responsible for index violent crimes. This is, importantly, according to a victim-reported table subject to neither racial bias effects nor intentional under-reporting by the police.

Whites committed the empirical majority of serious violent crime, including 62.1 percent of all offenses against whites, roughly 11 percent of the offenses against blacks, 28.2 percent of offenses targeting Hispanics, almost 25 percent of offenses against Asians — and over 50 percent of all index violent offenses. Hispanics, a mostly Caucasian ethnic group, committed another 14.4 percent. To be sure, the black figures do indicate overrepresentation among criminals — we make up barely 13 percent of the American population — but to nothing like the degree alleged online, and before any adjustment for obvious factor variables like median or modal age, region of residence, and income or social class.

It should also be noted here that rates of racial-group representation vary dramatically across each criminal offense (“illegal immigration” being perhaps the most obvious example) which makes any single offense category, such as murder or robbery, almost useless as a proxy for group crime rates overall. This point — “Different groups have different problems” — in fact holds true for social pathologies more generally. The white suicide rate is often three-to-four times the black rate, and suicides can make up 3 percent or more of all Caucasian male deaths — while the black rate of specifically homicide is far higher, and the two groups contribute about proportionately to the staggering annual overdose tolls.

Indeed, when the full list of felony criminal offenses is printed out, white Americans currently seem to be overrepresented among perpetrators of some of the worst crimes. A classic 2004–13 analysis of the “characteristics of commercial sexual exploitation of children suspects” found that 82 percent of all suspects, 81.1 percent of child-pornography producers, and 87 percent of both distributors and large-scale purchasers of this content were non-Hispanic whites. Black offenders made up just 3.1 percent of this last category.

This data, obviously, do not mean or even imply that all or most whites are child molesters. But, neither are most blacks gangland shooters, most Arab-Americans international terrorists, most Italian males hit men, and so on down the line. A relatively tiny percentage of each ethnic group commits the most-serious crime, and only those criminals are responsible for their crimes (a good moral rule, in fact, would seem to be that no one is responsible for things he did not personally engage in — such as historical slavery).

Another point which should be made here is that interracial felony crime, in any direction, is extraordinarily rare. Once again, anyone with a computer has surely seen viral claims that black-on-Caucasian crime is “an epidemic” or “42.3 times” that of the white-on-black rate. Once again, we can simply check the crime report to see how true all of this is. And, once again, the answer is “not very.”

During 2018, per the universally accepted Table 14 of the BJS-NCVS, 62.1 percent of the violent criminals who targeted whites were themselves white, while 15.3 percent of them were black. Both figures, obviously, are almost exactly representative of the national population: 61 percent of Americans at present are non-Hispanic whites, 13 percent are non-Hispanic blacks, and the two groups interact constantly. Indeed, the most notable thing about the BJS findings is that whites, who are constantly accused of the most extreme forms of Ku Kluxery, in fact almost never rob or jump black people. Whether this is due to fear of allegations of bigotry and subsequent hate-crime charges, or simply to the assumption that we don’t usually have much hard coin on us, whites make up only 10.6 percent of criminal attackers of blacks.

As a result of this bizarre pattern, rates of interracial crime are disproportionate: There are about 500,000 black-on-white crimes, and fewer than 100,000 white-on-black crimes, in a typical year. However, it should be noted that all of these combined constitute well under 5 percent of all crime. In the year under review, there were a total of 607,726 violent crimes involving both blacks and whites. However — and this is almost never noted by activists of Right or Left — there were 20,648,040 total crimes. Classic interracial crimes — violent clashes between black and white people — made up exactly 2.94 percent of all index, serious crime.

And, that “42.3x” chart I linked? It’s the result of a simple statistical trick. In layman’s terms, the designer adjusted an initial ratio figure, which represented something like the 5:1 difference in rates of black-on-white as versus white-on-black crime mentioned in the last paragraph, to reflect the smaller size of the black population (thus multiplying it by five or six: i.e. 7 x 6 = 42), and then . . . “failed” to adjust again to reflect the larger number of white targets that a criminal of any race would have access to. Doing that, obviously, would have returned us almost exactly to the original number.

Data games aside, there in fact is one fair and legitimate reason to bring up black-on-white interracial crime: to counter constant, and even stupider, claims that white-on-black crime is currently some kind of epidemic. I.e., there may have been only 566 white victims of single-offender black murderers across an entire widely used year — but that’s still more than twice as large as the number of blacks killed by whites (246), and some of the latter cases drove the entire nation into a frenzy. Fair enough: This should sometimes be noted.

But, only a fool believes her own press releases and battle fodder. You simply are not going to be unprovokedly killed by warriors of another race. The annual risk of that happening, across all sizable groups, is right about (246 + 566)/330,000,000. If you really want to lower your risk of being murdered, go home early a few nights per week and keep your wife happy.