WEDNESDAY
   AUGUST 18
   1999
   
   A Minority View Walter Williams
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   WND Exclusive Commentary
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   An ugly conspiracy of silence
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   © 1999 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
   If there's to be racial goodwill and harmony, at the minimum we must
   be willing to confront sometimes ugly truths. One of those truths has
   to do with interracial crime.
   
   We all readily condemn highly publicized racial violence, and rightly
   so, such as last year's brutal murder of James Byrd by white
   supremacists in Jasper, Texas. However, there's little notice and
   condemnation of interracial crimes when whites are the victims.
   
   Last June, Jared Taylor, president of New Century Foundation, in
   Oakton, Va., held a press conference at Washington's National Press
   Club to report on the foundation's recently released study, "The Color
   of Crime." Some of the study's findings about interracial crime were
   surprising, so much so that I did an independent verification of the
   numbers.
   
   Since 1972, the U.S. Department of Justice has conducted a National
   Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to determine the frequency of
   certain crimes. One category is interracial crimes. Its most recent
   publication (1997), "Criminal Victimization in the U.S.," reports on
   data collected in 1994. In that year, there were about 1,700,000
   interracial crimes, of which 1,276,030 involved whites and blacks. In
   90 percent of the cases, a white was the victim and a black was the
   perpetrator, while in 10 percent of the cases it was the reverse.
   
   Another finding of the NCVS report is that of the 2,025,464 violent
   crimes committed by blacks in 1994, 1,140,670 were against whites --
   that's slightly over 56 percent. Whites committed 5,114,692 violent
   crimes; 135,360, or 2.6 percent were against blacks.
   
   In 1997, there were 2,336 whites charged with anti-black crimes and
   718 blacks charged with anti-white crimes, so-called hate crimes.
   Although the absolute number of white offenders was larger, the black
   rate per 100,000 of the population was greater, making blacks twice as
   likely to commit hate crimes.
   
   Regardless of race, criminal violence is despicable and deserving of
   condemnation. But far more destructive are the official and unofficial
   attempts to mislead and conceal. Roughly 400 members of the major
   print and electronic media were invited to the press conference on
   "The Color of Crime." According to Taylor, several asked for advanced
   copies before they'd consider sending anyone. Only 14 people stayed
   for the briefing and only a couple reported on the study, most notably
   The Washington Times and C-Span. One reporter said that he'd like to
   write a story but he doubted he could get it by his editor.
   
   If the facts were the other way around, everybody from The New York
   Times and President Clinton to the NAACP, Jesse Jackson and the
   Congressional Black Caucus would be shouting about it and demanding
   that something be done. Some might want to keep silent about the facts
   for fear that publicizing the true nature and magnitude of interracial
   crime might give, as I've been told, "aid and comfort to America's
   white racists."
   
   To the contrary, silence is perhaps one of the most effective
   recruitment tools for racists. They can use our silence for
   proselytizing disaffected whites with demagoguery about how hate
   crimes are not important unless a black is the victim and how no one
   cares about blacks raping white women and assaulting white men.
   
   Interracial crime has other devastating effects on racial relations.
   Whites are apprehensive of blacks, and blacks are offended at being
   the subjects of that apprehension. Whites are less willing to live in
   black neighborhoods. For the unthinking among us, these and other
   responses to racial disparities in crime translate into simple racism.
   
   Multi-ethnic societies are inherently unstable, and how we handle
   matters of interracial crime is just one of the ways that we're
   contributing to that instability.
                                ___________
   
   WorldNetDaily contributor Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin
   Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in
   Fairfax, Va.
  

Return to rants