We are beginning to see more and more states and officials begin to come to their senses on openly displaying the
Traitor Flag on public property. You start thinking that people like Dylann Roof, who believes that black men are inherently dangerous and that
something needs to be done about them, is more of an extreme and fringy position. That's when someone like Pat Boone walks in the front door and
poops something like this out on your brand-new area rug.
“As the president who came to office, a black man promising to bring people together, a man ideally suited for that job since you were born both black and white, you had a God-given chance to actually proclaim and demonstrate that racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that our society was truly becoming colorblind,” the former pop singer complained.
“At no time do I recall your mentioning the far greater instances of ‘black on black’ crimes, the high percentage of crimes of all types committed annually by blacks, or the senseless looting and violence that follows the inflamed ‘protests’ after one of the above-mentioned incidents,” Boone said. “Strange that you, our half-white president, have little to say about these things.”
I'm sure it would shock Mr. Boone nearly to death to learn that President Obama has not only spoken about so-called Black-on-Black crime, he's been doing something about it with his
My Brother's Keeper Initiative, that the MBK Task Force has already issued a
1st Year Progress Report (PDF) and that one of the things he said during his talk with Marc Maron besides the unvarnished "N-Word" was that community leaders in cities such as Baltimore following the unrest had coordinated with the MBK Initiative to
work out a set of solutions to the exact problem that Boone says the president "hasn't even mentioned."
But wait, it got worse, as I will describe over the flip.
Before I get into the next set of foolish factless things said by the elder Mr. Boone, who became enormously popular as a '60s pop singer largely by doing material such as "Tutti Frutti" that had been purloined from far better, and also Black, musicians such as Little Richard, let me point just how ridiculous his entire "Black-on-Black" crime meme is.
Oft repeated and oft used the "92 percent" figure is totally and completely wrong.
It comes from a deep misreading and misunderstanding of a portion of the FBI Uniform Crime Report on Murders. First of all, murder isn't the only crime in the world or the most frequent, so when they say "Black-on-Black crime" using the report, they're already way off base. White people are charged with 6.5 million crimes each year, and Black people with only 2.6 million. The one report which breaks down murders by race doesn't include all the murders that actually occur as I've previously written in response to Joe Klein claiming the same dumb-ass crap.
"90% Of Blacks are Murdered by Other Blacks." Actually, Joe it's really 92% if you go by what your obvious source for this number could possibly be, which is this chart from the FBI Uniform Crime Report.
If you go by this chart it appears that the total number of Black Victims [2,648] are mostly killed by Black Offenders [2,412] which is 92%.
However, as Melissa points out in her response to Klein it also says that [3,128] White Victims are mostly killed by White [2,612] Offenders which is 82.4%. So - if you go by this table--if there's a "Black on Black" crime problem, the "White on White" Crime problem is almost as bad.
Except for one minor detail that appears in fine print just above the table.
Single Victim/Single Offender.
The data on this chart wouldn't include the vicious killing of African-American James Byrd by dragging him behind a car until his head popped off by two White Supremacist--because that involved more than a single offender. It wouldn't include the skinhead G.I. from Ft. Bragg who killed an African-American Couple to prove his racist "bona fides" because that involved more than a single victim.
Dylann Roof's own murders
will never be included on that chart because there were nine victims so this is really, really,
really the wrong chart to pull from when making a determination of how bad "Black crime" actually is because it's
totally incomplete. And even if it were complete the "white on white" is also pretty darn bad, so why isn't Pat Boone upset about
that too?
Think about it, if 92 percent of Blacks are killed by Blacks, then it seems to me they're a bit too busy to be bothering people like Boone or Roof. They got shit to deal with.
Here's the thing though, there is better data available from the Supplemental Homicide Report which includes all murders not just those that involve a single victim and a single offender and looking at the results of that data by race is very enlightening.
Here are the racial percentages of killings with Black victims.
As you can see that actual rate of Blacks killed by Blacks when all the cases are included isn't 92 percent—it's only
about 55 percent. And the reason it's so low is first because the clearance (arrest) rate for murder is only 62.5 percent to start with.
It can't get any higher than that! So 62.5 percent is all they actually
catch.
Just for comparison, here the percentages for white victims.
And here you see that actual rate of whites who kill whites is
62.2 percent, which is 7 percent higher than the figure for Blacks. When you compare the two charts you also can see something quite odd: the "unknown" figures are quite different. The unknown percentage for Black victims (40 percent) is nearly twice the unknown rate for white victims (24 percent), so nobody really knows who killed who in twice as many cases when the victim is Black—so exactly what the FRACK do people like Pat Boone think they are talking about?
It may be that whites are killed mostly by acquaintances and/or family in domestic disputes and Blacks are more often killed by strangers (rival gangs, arguments), or that the cases where the victims are Black simply go unsolved more frequently, or some other factors, or a combination of all these factors, right now no one knows, certainly not Pat. Either way, these numbers do seem to show that when it comes to the level of enforcement priority this country places on the killing of Black people, Black lives don't seem to matter all that much.
Also when it comes to hate crimes, white people are the Kings of that Shit.
But as I said, Boone did go on, and did so by denying that Dylann Roof was inspired by racial hate, apparently the "Devil Made Him Do it" after he went by Georgia for another fiddling contest. Please put down anything you're drinking or snorting before you read the next bit, as your computer monitor will thank you.
“Yes, I said, ‘inspired by Satan’!” Boone reiterated. “Though this had a racist element, to be sure, it was more than that and of far greater significance to America than that. This boy wasn’t just a sadist, or even criminally insane – he was carefully prepared and led by the Devil himself to kill as many Christians as he could. The fact that they were black was an excuse more than a reason.”
Yes, dear gentle reader—you can pick your jaw up from the floor now. We've got
Dylann Roof's manifesto, which specifically states his reasons for doing what he did, we've got the Colonial Rhodesian flag, and the apartheid-era South African flag, and segregation was a "good thing" and slavery wasn't so bad, and "
niggers are stupid and violent"... but nooooo ...
Pat Boone "thinks" that's just an excuse? An excuse!
Then he asked Obama to "look into the souls" of killers like Roof, and Adam Lanza and James Egan Holmes.
“Look deeply into their inner beings (not their skin color or professed motives), and you’ll encounter demons from hell, minions of Satan himself, coming diabolically against anything that God loves,” he said.
“Simple, stupid ‘racism’ is not our problem, Mr. President,” Boone said. “It is declaring that we are no longer a nation ‘under God.’ And as our society increasingly moves away from God’s protective, loving hand, we can expect more and more horrific demonic evil.”
Hmm. M'kay. Kinda like the "godlessness" thing that caused Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and, according to Jerry Falwell, September 11th.
Fine, I got one simple thing to say to that, and also to all his blather about "protests" but I won't use my own words, I'll use some very important words that many so-called constitutional Christian conservatives just magically seem to forget, or don't notice, or never actually READ.
1st Amendment of the United States Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
'Nuff. Said!
10:19 AM PT: Reposting my response to a very good comment.
As far as black on black crime vs white on black crime, I think it may be useful to point out a few things that have nothing to do with these kinds of statistics. Most times that black people kill black people it's just like white people killing white people. Family members killing each other. Men killing women. The local criminal fucking up a robbery at the local convenience store. Horrible, but too run of the mill to take note of every single time. You'd go nuts.
White on black crime is epitomized by cops murdering unarmed black men. Cops, who are supposed to and who claim to be protecting the community, killing people who were no threat. That is a big difference, and no one who is capable of being honest will fail to concede it.
Not to mention that black people who are caught murdering black people are usually punished. White cops who are caught murdering black people are almost always excused, patted on the back, and given plaudits by a third of the country. The problem of this kind of white crime against black people is also a story of crime that no one will punish. Again, a bit more noteworthy and infuriating than somebody shooting the clerk down on the corner and getting put away for 25 years for the deed.
All this is true, but the data set is the key to undermining the entire rationale for this. That one chart is pretty much the only one they use, the one with the "92 percent Black on Black [single offender/single victim] murders." Yes, the murder and robbery rate for Black people is high—
as victims.
Sure, some people, like Joe Scarborough just will NOT accept data that proves his ideas of how police should work are dead wrong.
The fact is that when it comes to the offenders all that data is skewed because the arrest rate for Black people is higher because police reaction to them often makes it higher, it's not always because they actually commit more violent crimes on a "per capita" basis. All the data shows police target Black people and enforce the laws more harshly with them. And 87 percent of those repeatedly harassed, cursed out and roughed up by NYPD's former Stop-n-Frisk policy were Black or Latino. Ninety percent of them hadn't done anything wrong, didn't have a gun, didn't have drugs and didn't even get written a citation—but they still kept doing it for year after year after year as if a 90 percent failure rate was gonna somehow improve things. The fact is they were trying to meet a quota for stops (as a hidden recording revealed), and doing it on the backs of young Black and brown men, not actually fighting crime.
The BJS when tracking law enforcement encounters with people across racial lines states that Black people get stopped twice as often, are searched three times as often (even though they find guns and/or drugs less often on Black people), they get arrested in those traffic stops twice as often, ticketed more often, given a warning less often, and have force (punches, kicks, batons, pepper spray) used against them three times more often. According to the Center on Juvenile Justice, young Black men are 7.1 times more likely to be killed by police.
That's just raw data and that's your white on Black crime spree, right there.
Nearly all of that has been justified and rationalized time and time again, as Scarborough does, because "Black-on-Black crime is 92 percent." And that's totally false.