The straight and narrow

The long flower spikes of gulf vervain, Verbena xutha, can curve a lot. They can also grow erect, as shown here on May 23rd at Strathaven Pass and Wells Branch Parkway on the Blackland Prairie along the Pflugerville–Austin border.

 

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The title of today’s post describes not only the portrait of a flower spike but also what I believe is the right approach to reporting on the world: we must do our best to get straight to the truth and then report only things that we’ve verified are true. Unfortunately I hear many things cited in the media as facts that aren’t facts—sometimes even when the people making the false claims know that they’re false.

On June 1, 2021, the President of the United States announced: “According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.” Some people in the “intelligence” community may have claimed that, but the government’s own statistics show it isn’t true, as Jason Reilly pointed out on May 27, 2022, in the online British magazine Sp!ked. The article bears the headline and sub-head “Buffalo and the myth of America’s race war: Talk of rampant white supremacy is divisive nonsense.” Here are some of the relevant statistics that Jason Reilly (who incidentally is black) reveals in his article:

In 2018, there were 59,778 white-on-black violent crimes, compared with 547,948 black-on-white violent crimes, out of roughly 20 million total crimes. This category of crime, broken down along racial lines, is just over 90 per cent black-on-white. Those figures are not entirely typical, but the black-white ratio has been at least 75:25 in every postwar year I have ever examined.

Unexpectedly, similar patterns exist within the sub-category of ‘hate’ crimes. While a significant number of the hate-crime incidents serious enough to be reported to a police department and then the FBI (1,930 in 2019) do target blacks — again, crime is bad, and scumbags of all races should be arrested — it is also the case that blacks are dramatically overrepresented as hate-crime offenders. Out of 6,153 hate-crime offences in 2019, 1,385 (23 per cent) involved a black lead offender while 3,564 (58 per cent) involved a white offender. This is striking, given blacks make up just 12 per cent of the US population while whites, here including Caucasian Hispanics, make up 75 per cent.

African Americans represented a substantial percentage of the 666 hate attackers of whites in 2019, and both whites and blacks behaved badly toward Hispanics (527 total attacks), Jews (953) and gays of all races (746). Numbers of this kind, while obviously unfortunate, undercut the prevalent narrative of a nation riven by near race-war levels of ethnic conflict. All hate crimes combined – 7,314 – made up only an infinitesimal chunk of the full annual caseload of millions of crimes.

Actual research into mass shootings again uncovers patterns of rare, racially diverse violence. While the archetypal pop-culture image of a mass shooter is almost certainly a mentally troubled white, conservative young man in a black-stretch trench, an empirical database put together by Mother Jones reveals that the demographics of the crazed mass-murderer ‘population’ roughly match those of the US overall. Out of the just under 65 cases recorded between 1982 and 2012, which involved a lone gunman or pair of gunmen attacking strangers and killing at least four people, 44 (almost exactly 70 per cent) of them involved a white male perpetrator. This rate appears to have declined to about 60 per cent in the 65 cases added to the database between 2013 and 2022.

You’re welcome to read the full article, which includes even more statistics to refute the false and therefore malicious claim that “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman