The Myth of the 'Dangerous Black Male' and 'Black-on-White' Crime Destroyed: The Statistics and a Televised Debate

Activist Tim Wise (left) and conservative pundit Crystal Wright. (Screen capture from
YouTube video)

Based crime statistics compiled by the FBI:

Only about 1 percent of African Americans — and no more than 2 percent of black males — will commit a violent crime in a given year.

No more than 0.7 percent (seven-tenths of one percent) of African Americans will commit a violent crime against a white person in a given year, and fewer than 0.3 (three-tenths of one percent) of whites will be victimized by a black person in a given year.

Whites are 6 times as likely to be murdered by another white person as by a black person; and overall, the percentage of white Americans who will be murdered by a black offender in a given year is only 2/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.0002).

Any given black person is 2.75 times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by an African American. 

Race, Crime and Statistical Malpractice: How the Right Manipulates White Fear With Bogus Data

By Tim Wise
As soon as news began to spread about the horrific and utterly senseless murder of an Australian-born baseball player in Oklahoma at the hands of three young black males (or at least, that’s how they were first described in the media), I knew what would be coming; specifically, into my e-mail inbox and all around the internet. And even though one of the three implicated in the killing is actually white, and so the supposed racial angle of the crime is incredibly convoluted, if indeed race had anything to do with it at all, I had no illusions that this would somehow change the reaction from certain quarters. Whenever something like this happens, white supremacist groups make sure to blanket the web with vitriol in which they seek to remind white folks how endangered we are at the hands of black people. Knowing that many whites are anxious about the changing demographics of the nation — which portend that around 2043 we will no longer be the absolute majority of persons in the U.S — playing upon fears of criminal victimization by people of color is seen as a great way to win new recruits to the white nationalist cause.

A CNN Debate Between Activist Time Wise and Crystal Wright, a Fox News
Contributor Who Has a Blog Called 'Conservative Black Chick'
The subject is NBA team owner Mark Cuban's use of stereotypes
to defend prejudice and fear of 'black youths wearing hoodies.'

And sure enough, it didn’t take long. As soon as I turned on my computer yesterday morning, there it was: an e-mail from an angry and rather blatantly racist white male, spouting all the same nonsense as I’ve come to expect in moments like this. More savvy than most though, he made sure not to rely on data and arguments from neo-Nazis, but rather from well-known black conservative Walter Williams, who just about a week ago penned a column in which he parroted the line of the white racists, inveighing against the supposed epidemic of black-on-white crime. For Williams, it wasn’t the first time he had done this. Several years back, and taking his cues and information straight from the work of white supremacist and separatist Jared Taylor, he had made the same arguments.

As Williams noted, and as many a white nationalist has over the years, 83 percent of the time when violent crime is interracial, the perp is black and the victim is white. So although most criminal violence may be intra-racial (that is to say, black-on-black and white-on-white), when the offender and victim differ racially, it is typically the case that someone black is doing the crime and someone white is suffering the consequences. As the sender of yesterday morning’s e-mail put it, what do I have to say about that?

The answer, of course, is quite a bit, actually. Williams’s claim — which he makes upon the basis of Justice Department data from the National Crime Victimization Survey — suggests an incredible imbalance, almost as if blacks were deliberately targeting white people in a veritable orgy of hate! And yet, upon closer inspection the number isn’t nearly as meaningful as Williams, or the white supremacists who first began circulating it many years ago, take it to be.

Let’s look at the data, so as to better understand the logical fallacy in Williams’s position.

So Just How Dangerous Are Black Folks? The Trouble With Right-Wing Data Analysis

First, according to the 2008 data Williams relied on (see Table 42), which is the most recent comprehensive data published by the Justice Department on violent crime victimizations, that year there were approximately 3.6 million violent crimes involving a single-offender. These crimes include assault, both simple and aggravated (mostly simple), robbery, and sexual assault or rape. Of those 3.6 million violent crimes, whites committed 2.1 million of them (58.4%) while blacks committed about 830,000 (22.8%) About 442,000 (or 12%) involved perpetrators whose race was not known to the victim. Thus, for crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known to the victims (about 3.2 million crimes), whites would have committed about 66 percent (two-thirds) and blacks about 26 percent (one-fourth). If we assume the same rough racial distribution for crimes where the perpetrator’s race was not known as for crimes where the offender race was known (a reasonable guess), this would mean that whites committed an additional 300,000 crimes, roughly, while blacks would have committed an additional 115,000. In all, this would mean that in 2008, whites committed roughly 2.4 million single offender violent crimes, while blacks would have committed around 950,000.

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