The False Racial Justice Narrative

The socialist/progressive narrative that America’s criminal justice system is systemically racist is endlessly parroted in the mainstream media, although it has been repeatedly proven false.  To address this, some race-baiting pundits expand the narrative to explain that more blacks commit crimes than other races because more blacks are poor, resurrecting the old fiction that poverty is a “root cause of crime.”   Hans Bader discusses this in a Thanksgiving piece in Liberty Unyielding.

Progressives commonly claim the black crime rate is not really higher than the white crime rate, they are merely overpoliced, resulting in blacks being incarcerated more than whites for committing the very same crime. Or that even if the black crime rate is higher, society is really to blame, by driving blacks to crime through economic deprivation and discrimination. Progressives sometimes make both arguments in alternative, as the progressive Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus once did — she argued that if the black crime rate really is higher than the white crime rate, that reflects even worse on society than if the black crime rate isn’t.

The fact remains that, according to Justice Department data, while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population they commit 52% of all homicides and most of their victims are other blacks.  In 2019 the data indicates that black criminals committed 6,425 homicides while white criminals committed 4,728.

As the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal notes, “black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles since the George Floyd race riots; blacks between the ages of ten and 24 were killed in gun homicide at 24 times the rate of whites in that age cohort. Those black victims are not being gunned down by America’s alleged white supremacists or by the police; they are being gunned down by other blacks.” Most crimes against black people are black-on-black, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to FBI data, 89 percent of blacks who were murdered in 2018 were killed by black offenders.

Blacks do have a higher poverty rate than whites, but most black people are middle class, not in poverty. Racism does not explain what differences in median income exist between blacks and whites. Non-white immigrants from Africa and Asia commonly earn more than whites do, showing that racism is not a barrier to success. Asian Americans have the highest average net worth and highest average income, despite harsh discrimination against Chinese and Japanese Americans in the past.

There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for people of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.”

The variation in arrests and incarceration rates between races in America is rooted in culture not poverty.  In some American subcultures,  human life is valued less than a wristwatch or tennis shoes.  People living in high minority populated urban neighborhoods want more policing and tougher consequences for criminals, not less.