The conservative media have locked onto the issue of black-on-white crime, and it’s pushing it this election season. Is it racist? Is it accurate? Who cares? They’re running with it anyway!
McKay Coppins over at Buzzfeed has written an excellent (and must-read) piece on the issue that looks at this phenomenon and the politics behind it. He writes, “The conservative media’s in-your-face reporting of black-on-white crime is a sort of demonstration project — a rebellious response to decades of fielding charges of racism from the cultural elites who run the mainstream press.”
Sadly, I doubt that those people who so gleefully press this issue understand or care about the nation’s sordid history of overreporting (and fabricating) black-on-white crime to justify foment a real war of racial suppression that lasted a hundred years after the Civil War.
Here’s a telling passage from Coppins’s piece:
Indeed, the irony of the race war narrative’s latest flare-up is that it comes at a time when national crime rates have reached historic lows — including reported hate crimes against whites. According to a report released by the FBI, there were 575 anti-white bias crimes reported in 2010 — up slightly from the 545 reported in 2009, but distinctly lower than the 716 reported in 2008. Overall, the past decade has seen a downward trend in anti-white bias crime. What’s more, hate crimes against blacks have continued to outstrip those against whites by about four-to-one: In 2010 alone, there were 2,201 reported. Violent crimes across the spectrum reached a four-decade low in 2010.
But to conservatives, the argument is less about a spike in the actual statistics — or in the eternal, low-profile neighborhood tensions that have been part of the American story since Irish and Italian kids were clashing in the New York City slums of Five Points — than it is about changing the politics of race and the right.
Dan Riehl, a conservative blogger who runs Riehl World View and contributes to Breitbart News, said that black-on-white violence isn’t as predominant as other criminal-victim dynamics, but he still argued the news media have a special incentive to over-report stories of white criminals.
P.S. If you want to see a REAL race war, check out Chapter Five of Brambleman.
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