Maybe it was a Hate-Crime

Reference the Lenin quote above. Just saying you’ve proved it doesn’t constitute a proof; just claiming it doesn’t constitute a proof. Proofs have, y’know, evidence. Show us a single bit of evidence that the media (not the FBI, not police departments, not your butt) report white-on-black hate crimes disproportionately to how they report black-on-white hate crimes, and we’ll have something to debate. So far, all you’ve done is claim this is true. Claims != evidence.

(Note that citing two examples, even if they’re relevant, ain’t data, either. The plural of anecdote, and all that.)

Daniel

And herein lies the nub of this whole thread.

I am, indeed, making a “big deal” out of the interchanging of “interracial” and “hate,” because the two are not synonymous, either in general or specifically legal language. The fact that you keep conflating them is simply evidence of your ignorance.

And you have yet to demonstrate that this is, in fact, the case. You have discussed four individual cases in this thread: the Souter case, the Byrd Case, the Carr Brothers case, and the church burning case. As others have pointed out, “evidence” is not the plural of “anecdote.”

I have a theory that the best players in the NBA are foreigners. To support my theory, i offer the following evidence: Andrei Kirilenko, Dirk Nowitzki, Peja Stojakovic, Yao Ming, and Jamaal Magliore all played in the most recent All-Star game.

You see why this type of argument doesn’t work? I have provided no systematic analysis of NBA players, but have simply selected the players whose presence in the All-Star game supports my theory.

Simply examining four completely disparate cases, as you have done, might raise questions that require further investigation, but does not by itself constitute evidence of a media conspiracy, or even evidence that the media habitually and systematically under-reports hate crimes committed by minorities. You have to actually do some work to prove that, rather than picking four random cases that you believe support your theory.

You still haven’t demonstrated this, and you provide no guidelines that you believe the media should follow in reporting interracial crime. For example, why should the media report hate crime only by looking at the perpetrator of the crime? Why not use victim statistics? They, surely, are just as important.

As i pointed out, blacks make up about 12 percent of the US population. They are over-represented as perpetrators of hate crimes by a factor of about 1.8. Yet they also comprise 67.2 percent of the victims of race-based hate crimes, making them over-represented as victims by a factor of about 5.6. Furthermore, in the cases where blacks are victims and the perpetrator’s race is known, the perpetrator is white in 89 percent of cases.

Also, you seem to forget the fact that the media, in choosing stories, often pays less attention to proportional numbers than they do to absolute numbers. And, in 2002, whites committed 1,689 racially-motivated hate crimes against blacks, and blacks committed 497 racially-motivated hate crimes against whites. I’m not arguing that the media’s methods of selection are perfect, but when race-based crimes commited against blacks make up such a high percentage of race-based offences, and the perpetrators are white in such a high percentage of those cases, then surely this is newsworthy?

So, is it the media that are to blame now, or is it the FBI that’s subverting white America?

I made clear in my last post that i find the FBI’s way of dealing with these figures problematic. You get no argument from me on that score. But the FBI’s method of data presentation is not the issue in this thread, as you have so often pointed out. The issue is media representations, and i presume you will agree that the media is not controlled by the FBI?

Razorsharp:

Dunno where you are that coverage of this was kept from you, but it was in the local KC paper from the AP. And as has been pointed out to you more than a couple of times, this was something done by a couple of psychopathic wingnuts, not a hate crime. And if you really wanna play the, “Big Bad Media Is Keeping Me From Discovering The Terrible Acts of Blacks, As Opposed To The Veritable Glut Of Coverage That Falls From The Sky When A White Person Commits The Same Acts” game, I suppose that I can mention OJ. Of course, if I were to do that, you would, rightly, point out that he was famous, which would bring us back to your ridiculous assertion that The Media is covering up a potential hate crime in the Souter case. You remember the Souter case, right? It’s what got you all het up and caused you to post, remember? Huh?

You have done your damnedest to demonstrate that The Media is out to shaft Whitey. In doing so, you have presented one instance of this happening, and it hasn’t been repeated in more than a fortnight, so I give it a hell of a lot less credence than if you were at all, in any way, capable of demonstrating that it is happening right now. It’s not, and you flailing away as if it is only makes you and your argument look pretty divorced from reality, which will work against you in the future.

Again, because you have demonstrated a propensity to miss things when they are presented: Carr brothers situation=bad and covered (although evidently not to your liking, which surprises me not at all) by the AP as an instance when horrible murders happened. Byrd situation=bad and covered (too much so in your version of reality, again surprising me in no wise) by the AP as an instance when a horrible murder happened because of the race of the victim.

So, do you have any evidence that the Carr brothers committed a hate crime? Besides what passes for reason in your fevered imagination? If so, present it. Otherwise, you’re just talking out your ass. And (once again) failing to prove a fucking thing.

And what, precisely, was this issue that mitigated the racist element that the media sat on? And do you suppose that they sat on it just because they knew that it would get your, specific, knickers in a twist? I’m guessing that they did.

Waste

We’ve noticed. The only thing from your quote that comes close to “evidence” is this:

This isn’t really evidence either, since you don’t actually give those statistics, but here they are. The careful reader will notice that given a hate crime, the victim is three times more likely to be black. How can this be? Razorsharp told us that blacks are far more likely to be hate criminals! Well, that’s because he normalised by population size, which is frankly silly.

By his reasoning, it is just as valid to say that a black person is vastly more likely to be the victim; let’s work it out. Given a population that is 12% black, 70% white (from wikipedia) we can show that weighted by population, blacks are approximately 15 times more likely to be the victims of a hate crime. This, intuitively, completely contradicts Razorsharp’s claim that blacks have a higher a priori likelihood of being hate criminals. Are black people committing hate crimes against themselves? No. This is just the inevitable result of Razorsharp using those statistics in an entirely self-serving manner. Why is weighting by population pointless? Because it’s the mixture of the populations that is relevant. Significant proportions of the country are almost entirely white - giving the white population a natural “advantage” in this sense - it is hardly an achievement not to assault someone you don’t ever meet. By the same logic as Razorsharp uses, it ought to be that white people commit far fewer hate crimes in an absolute sense, since there are far fewer black people for them to commit crimes against. In short, weighting by population gets us nowhere.

So the only sensible statistic is this: given a hate crime, the overwhelming probability is that the criminal will be white, and that the victim will be black (this according to the more recent FBI survey, here). Namely, 65.5% of the perpetrators are white, and 29.8% of the victims were black (this figure does not include other significant ethnicities such as Hispanic and Asian, and it is worth noting that the figures overall do include other hate crime motivations, such as sexual orientation). Given that 44.9% of hate crimes are racially motivated, we can thus infer that blacks constitute as many as 66.3% of the racially-motivated hate-crime victims.

If Razorsharp wants to know why most hate crime can be interracial without most interracial crime being hate crime, I suggest that this is a useful page.

So, what was this about a conspiracy theory again?

by Razorsharp

This may be news to you, but Carr-style mass murders go underreported in the media all the time. A few years ago, five people in southwest Atlanta were shot to pieces by somebody and I seriously doubt it was even mentioned in the national news. About fifteen years ago in Atlanta, a little (black) girl was sodomized with a broomstick, beaten, and stabbed to death, and the story made little more than a blip on the media radar screen. People get shot and tortured and brutalized every day, but quite of few of these cases don’t even get half of the coverage that the Carr case did. I don’t disagree with your idea that race is a biasing factor in this, though. Because I believe it is. However, it’s the race of the victim that always seems to be the biggest determinant, not the race of the perp or suspected perp.

What criteria must be met before you call something a hate crime? Should every interracial crime be considered a hate crime (and advertised as such) until proven otherwise?

Perhaps it’s got something to do with the fact that to “mitigate” anything about the Byrd murder would have ethically repugnant. Anyway you look at it, racism motivated the crime, so I don’t know how reporting about King’s troubled prison life (instigated, I might add, by white supremacists) would dilute the racism factor involved. Do you?

First, I don’t know where the website you quote got that information regarding his deliberate placement in the “black section of prison” engineered by by a white supremacist prison gang that resulted in repeated gang-rapes at the hands of black inmates, but it sure wasn’t entered by defense counsel at trial. If evidence to that effect had been available and verifiable the defense would have entered it, repeated it, pounded on the table when they said it, and acted it out with hand puppets in press conferences to a gaggle of reporters who would have trampled each other to be the first to print the testimony of the grisly prison gang-rape. But that didn’t happen. There was no such testimony.

The testimony that actually was adduced at trial concerning his prison attacks by black inmates and their effect on his psychological state, on the other hand, was widely reported:

Cite

Second, even if true arguendo, does that mitigate his torture and murder of an elderly man?

Does this in your view mitigate any element of the crime the Carrs committed?

[sarcasm]No, it’s not hate, blacks are just naturally pre-disposed to victimize whites.[/sarcasm]

Pravnik, No, your example does not mitigate any element of the Carr brother’s crimes. See, there is a big difference in our examples. In your example, the Carrs had no reason to hate whites. If anything, they were victims of their own culture.

Is “inaner” a word? “Inanissimo”?

Because that’s what your cite is, Razorsharp. Although you’re to be commended for actually offering some evidence now, the quality leaves quite a bit to be desired.

56% of blacks’ crimes were committed against whites, huh? Whereas if victims of crime were chosen at random, it’d be more like 75%.

[sarcasm]No, it’s not love, blacks are just naturally pre-disposed to spare whites[/sarcasm]

White people make up more of the population. When crimes are committed against random people, they’re more likely to be the target. White people make up lots more of the wealthy population. When crimes of property are committed against random people, they’re more likely to be the target.

Of course, lots of crimes are committed within social/geographic groups, and races tend to be socially/geographically clumped in the US. this accounts for why you don’t see 75% of black folks’ crimes committed against white folks, and why you don’t see 12% of white folks’ crimes committed against black folks.

But still, at least you’re offering something now besides the same parrotlike assertion; kudos on that!

Daniel

Incidentally, the clearest mention I can find of New Century Foundation, the group that published Razorsharp’s little report, is a link from American Rennaissance, a white supremacist Website run by the Foundation. Good going there–no surprise you find stupid and distorted race statistics from a bunch of racists, eh?

Daniel

Yeah, I had a look around for them, too - most I could find was a copy of their report on this site about neo-eugenics. What fun. I did like the way in the frontpagemag.com article it claimed that there was clearly a media conspiracy, because when the New Century Foundation kindly offered a media seminar on the topic of black/white hate crime, almost no-one wanted to go! Unthinkable!

:smiley: Yeah, pretty nice touch. “Hey, guys! We’re this nonprofit nobody’s ever heard of, and we got some real important news on race relations in the United States! Guys? Guys? Aw, c’mon! [grumble grumble] Fine, don’t blame me for when the black hordes tear down white civilization!”

Daniel

Notes

  1. The group has an annual budget of $26,000. Interestingly, because their revenue is less than $25,000, they don’t file a form 990. Huh? Anyway, not a real big group.
  2. If you think the fakeo quote above exaggerrates their racism, poke around their books for sale section. If you think the fakeo quote above is deceptive arguing, get a life.

Razorsharp,

How would you have had the media report the Souter assault, if given your druthers? Would it have been sufficient for them to identify the ethnicity of Souter’s attackers as soon as it was known, or would they needed to have raised the possibility that the attack was a hate crime, whether or not the police had evidence of a racial motivation?

That’s an unfairly compound question. Let me break it down?

  1. Would it have satisfied you if the rest of the media had, like The Washington Times, mentioned the race of the attackers in their news reports as soon as they found it out?

  2. Should the media have speculated about the race of Souter’s attackers even before it became available? Something like, “because Washington is a majority black city, it is statistically probable that the youths who assaulted Justice Souter were African-American”?

  3. Should the media have, at any point, intimated that the assault might have been racially motivated?

  4. Even if the police had no evidence of racial motivation?

I understand, I think, what you believe the media to have done wrong. I’m curious about what they could have done that would have been, in your eyes, right.

I appreciate your effort to break your questions down into short, manageable sections, Gadarene, but i fear that you might have wasted your time.

Others among us have repeatedly asked the OP to outline what he feels the media should have done in this case, and to provide us with some clear insight into his theory of media ethics, but so far he has done nothing but insist that he’s already proven his case.

mhendo:

Well, it just seems to me that Razorsharp’s less mad about the way the media have handled this case–since, as has been pointed out by you and a number of capable others, the press have had almost no actual facts to report other than that a famous person was, seemingly randomly, attacked–as he is about the (to him) assuredly inconsistent manner in which the media would have handled the case if the Justice had been black and the attackers white. If this is true, it’s useless for any of us–including Razorsharp–to do anything but speculate until, in fact, the hypothetical assault on Justice Thomas becomes a reality and we see how the media publicize it. Otherwise we’ve got no comparable data point, and this debate is moot.

So I’m giving Razorsharp the benefit of the doubt and trying to find out what he feels is deficient about the coverage of the case before us, without getting into theoretical future injustices (heh…I said justices). That way maybe there’ll be something concrete we can discuss, instead of the fly-buggering (thanks, Daniel) we’ve got at the moment.

It’s a noble attempt on your part, to be sure. However, all attempts in this thread to determine some of Razorsharp basic attitudes to the issues have so far been in vain.

Long ago, i asked:

No answer to any of those questions.

Then, i asked:

and i also asked

No reply to any of these fundamental questions addressing the specific case, the issue of what constitutes a hate crime, and the general issue of media representation of interracial crime.

I hope you have better luck than i did, but i’m not holding my breath.

It’s funny how people see only what they want to see.

Now, this is from a column written by Walter Williams that was picked up by Frontpagemag.com . Do you think that Dr. Williams would be a racist?

These numbers go way beyond picking victims at random and is diametrically opposed to media’s, especially the entertainment media, presentation. And there is a purpose behind this. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s purpose is political and was best exemplefied by President Clinton amidst the “church burning” hysteria. See, Clinton didn’t just lie about sex, he lied about church burnings as well. If you remember, Clinton described, teary eyed and choked-up, about childhood rememberences of the persecution of blacks and the burning of their churches. But, upon investigation, just as in the recent burnings, there had been no racially motivated burning of black churches. This, like the portrayal of interracial crime and the overrepresentation of whites persecuting blacks by the media, is a political tool designed to keep minorities down on the Democratic plantation by associating racism with whites, conservatives and the Republican party.

Gadarene, as for your questions, what I resent is the media manipulating public opinion for political purpose. That is not the media’s purpose.

On judging the media’s past performance, I beleive that the media (the AP) had the info, but chose not to disclose it because it runs counter to the party line of minorities always being the victims of racism, and whites never. So, let me ask you, judging on the media’s past performance, had Justice Thomas been assaulted by several white “young men”, do you think that the media would have mentioned the race of his attackers?

I need not associate the media’s presentation of black church burnings with your last three questions, do I?

I neither known or care whether Dr. Williams is a racist. To be charitable, perhaps he was only suckered in by a racist. (Yes, of course I noticed that he “independently verified” the racists’ numbers; all he verified was his incompetence at statistical analysis.)

Everything after what I quoted is back to your same old unsubstantiated tinfoil hat theorizing. Howzabout you address my analysis–that black people choose white victims LESS than would be predicted by random chance?

Then you can demonstrate how the media presents criminals, if you’d like. Use some numbers in your presentation, and cite soemthing besides your ass for the numbers. Preferably exclude numbers cooked up by “racial realists” as well.

Your debating in this thread is unbelievably sloppy. Honestly, if you put some hard work into it, you might be able to salvage a point from your central thesis, but I don’t see how.

Daniel

Okay, so; 1,276,030 crimes involving blacks and whites. Assuming the statistics quoted are correct, that’s

1,148,427 black on white
127,603 white on black

Now, according to the same report, hate crimes recorded were:

1,226 black on white (assuming all anti-white crimes were committed by blacks)
2,988 white on black (again, assuming all anti-black crimes were committed by whites)

We can therefore calculate the probability, given an interracial crime, that it is a hate crime:

P(hate given black-on-white) = 1,226/1,148,427 * 100 = 0.106%
P(hate given white-on-black) = 2,998/127,603 * 100 = 2.34%

So by your figures the “media” is actually entirely justified in assuming that there is a higher probability that white-on-black crime is hate-motivated. They are right, according to your own figures. Indeed, the probability is larger by an order of magnitude. Note that the probability of hate as a motivation in either case is tiny, which renders even more ridiculous your assertion that interracial crime should be considered equivalent to hate crime.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, would you like to accuse the notoriously pro-black police of a nationwide campaign to cover up black-on-white hate crime?

Dead Badger, may I just say Boo-Yah? Admittedly I’m no great shakes when it comes to math–my last math course was Precal, twelve years ago. Still, it didn’t even occur to me to analyze the numbers the way you just did. Very good point!

Daniel

I’m not a statistician, but I found this at the USDOJ:

What percentage of the population is white and male? Is it more or less than 40%?