Race war will continue until we can talk about it honestly

By Charley Reese

Published in The Orlando Sentinel, November 5, 1998 

If there is a race war going on, as some black intellectuals have
contended, it is being waged by blacks against whites.

Let's look at some hard numbers compiled by the U.S. Justice Department
and published in the November/December issue of The American Enterprise
magazine.

Blacks, who are less than one-eighth of the U.S. population (12.6
percent in 1995 to be exact), commit more than one-third of all serious
crimes.

In the statistics published for 1991 by the Justice Department one
finds:

There were 100 rapes committed by whites against blacks but 20,204
rapes committed by blacks against whites. As for robberies, 7,031
involved a white perpetrator and a black victim while 167,924 robberies
involved a black perpetrator and a white victim.

White assaults of blacks were 49,800, but black assaults of whites were
431,670. In the category of all violent crimes, only 55,301 involved
white perpetrators and black victims; 572,458 violent crimes involved
black perpetrators and white victims.

Now, what inferences may be fairly drawn from these numbers?

One is certainly that both the federal government and the news media
are hypocritical. I cannot recall a federal prosecution of a black for
a hate crime against a white, yet both the federal government and the
news media seize on any incident of white crime against blacks to
perpetuate the myth that white Americans are virulently racist.

A history professor recently pointed out that the stabbing death of an
82-year-old Alexandria, La., woman barely got mentioned in the news --
despite the fact that the four black killers admitted that they chose
her ``because she was white.'' That's not a hate crime? Why didn't the
president comment on that? How come the national television networks
didn't put that on the evening news, do specials and invite Rolodex
experts to proclaim how ingrained black racism is against whites?

This huge disparity between white-on-black and black-on-white crime is
the elephant at the tea party that both the press and the federal
government pretend they can't see. They are vile hypocrites.

Another inference that can be fairly drawn is that pizza drivers and
others who decline to deliver in some black neighborhoods at night may
not be, as they are accused of being, racist. They are just prudent. I
can tell you that many white liberal journalists and politicians, quick
to pronounce self-righteous judgments in these cases, are themselves
afraid to go into those neighborhoods at night. Heck, there are
neighborhoods the police are afraid to go into.

Furthermore, if there is any racism in the court system, it favors
blacks, not whites. Conviction rates are lower for blacks than they are
for whites in 12 of 14 felony categories tracked by the U.S. Bureau of
Justice Statistics, according to Enterprise magazine.

America has become an intellectually dishonest nation. No one wishes to
talk honestly about race and a lot of other subjects. Gun control is,
in part, an effort to avoid honest talk about crime. By the way, in
1994, a firearm was present at only 12 percent of the violent crimes
committed in America. Crime is a people problem, not a hardware
problem, and more than a third of it is a problem located among 13
percent of the population.

There is a lot more racist rhetoric and hate speech coming out of black
mouths today than there is coming out of white mouths. There is not a
single white racist anywhere who has any national following in the
United States. You cannot say that about black racists. Just remember,
no problem is ever solved until it's correctly and honestly defined.
  

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