The events of the last few weeks seem to have sparked a renewed conversation about the threat posed by, in the words of a recent USA Today headline, “white violence.” Despite the fact that the Boulder shooter wasn’t even white (though all of his victims were) and a lack of evidence that the Atlanta shooter was motivated by race, the emerging narrative is that both incidents stemmed from an alleged pandemic of white brutality. A quick trip through Google will pull up countless articles and editorials with phrases like “white rage” and “weaponized whiteness” and “the threat of whiteness.” As Kamala Harris’s niece Meena Harris put it in a now-deleted tweet, “violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.” The website MLive has a story this week about black people in Michigan who are afraid to walk through the suburbs for fear of violence from whites. It’s reported that increasing numbers of black people are purchasing guns in order to defend themselves against these hordes of white villains. The message from all of this is clear: white people are uniquely dangerous. We are meant to believe — or at least to shut up and pretend we believe — that “white violence” is a massive problem in this country, and that much of that violence is interracial.
As the media tries its hardest to stir up panic over the hordes of murderous, bloodthirsty white men supposedly roaming our streets, it becomes necessary to introduce some truth and sanity into the picture. Fortunately, the FBI (for the time being, at least until the woke mob demands that they take it down) provides homicide statistics organized into handy charts and available on their website. A look at those charts shows, first, that the vast majority of murder is intraracial. In the lion’s share of cases, one member of a race is killing another member of the same race. In 2019, there were 3,299 white victims of murder, of which 2,594 (79%) were killed by other white people. There were 2,906 black victims of murder, of which 2,574 (89%) were killed by other black people. Given the sort of wanton slaughter between races and ethnicities that you find in other parts of the world, and throughout other periods in history, it is quite remarkable how little interracial violence we actually have in this country, though the race-baiters on the Left are doing what they can to change that.
As for interracial murder, the statistics just as clearly show that whites fall victim more often than any other race. In 2019, 566 whites were killed by blacks as opposed to 246 blacks killed by whites. The numbers are very similar through all other years in recent history. Outlets like Reuters have run fact checks on memes and social media posts that make exactly the claim that I just made, which is based entirely on publicly available FBI data, and determined that the claims are somehow still false or “misleading.” They explain that though it’s true that more white people fall victim to interracial murder, it’s also true that, given the population disparities, black people are more likely to fall victim to interracial murder.
That is technically correct, though it’s nonsensical to accuse someone of stating a falsehood just because they didn’t frame the statistical data in the way that you subjectively prefer. But the “more likely” knife cuts both ways. If we say that blacks are more likely to fall victim than whites, we must also say that blacks — again, given the difference in population size — are more likely to victimize whites. According to the left-leaning fact-checkers’ logic, statistics show that any given black person is more likely to die by violence, even violence from a white person, but is also more likely to be the one committing violence.
What is the point of presenting this information? Why bother citing FBI homicide statistics? Well, because the truth matters. When someone like Jessica Valenti claims, as she did in a post on Medium, that “young white male rage is the biggest threat to our country,” she has no facts supporting her fearmongering. She has only her feelings, her perceptions, what she wishes were true and thinks ought to be true. Truth matters for its own sake, and must be asserted and reasserted in the face of lies and false narratives.
Also, we have to consider why these lies are being told. It should make us suspicious, and deeply worried, whenever we notice that any racial or ethnic group is being assigned the role of bad guys. Humanity has a long history of doing this sort of thing — positioning a certain category of humans as the societal scape goats — and we have seen the terrifying results, time and again. When it becomes taboo to defend that group from the false narratives used to slander it, when the average person slightly recoils and grimaces at the presentation of factual information, that’s when you know that we have truly entered the danger zone. Our cultural overlords have their reasons for lying about the Great White Menace. The reasons cannot be good, and they cannot lead to anything but horror and suffering and hate. That, after all, is the whole point.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.