The ‘paper of record’ obfuscates and outright lies when it comes to race.
The New York Times has been furiously penning policy briefs to the Obama administration. A recent editorialon black crime compresses within a few hundred words decades of failedthinking on public safety. If the president-elect follows its hoaryprescriptions, he will be guaranteed to waste taxpayer money withouthaving the slightest effect on crime.
A new studyof homicide among young black males prompted this latest editorial.James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University found that thenumber of homicides committed by black males under the age of 18 rose43 percent between 2002 and 2007, while the number of gun homicides bythis same group rose 47 percent. Homicides by white youth during thatperiod decreased slightly. But more significant were the differenthomicide rates that the report calculated, which no news story dared to divulge. Whereas the report’s graph for white homicides over the last 30years plots the rate in increments of 10, the black rate is demarcatedat intervals of 100. The highest homicide rate for whites over the lastthree decades was 32 homicides committed per 100,000 males between theages of 18 and 24 (reached in 1991), whereas the highest homicide ratefor blacks was approximately 320 homicides per 100,000 males betweenthe ages of 18 and 24 (reached in 1993).
Even this apparent ten-to-one disparity between black and whitehomicide rates doesn’t tell the full story. Fox and Swatt includeHispanic homicides in the white rate, though they do not disclose thatthey are doing so (both the inclusion and the silence about it followFBI practice). Hispanic crime rates are between three and four timesthat of whites—meaning that if one excluded the Hispanic homicides fromthe white rate, the black-white differential would be even larger thanten to one.
The Times responds to the report with the key strategies ofliberal apologetics. Strategy Number One: strip moral agency fromfavored victim groups. Bad things happen to favored victim groupsbecause of forces outside their control; good things also happen tofavored victim groups because of outside forces—above all, wisegovernment programs. Any expectation that members of a favored victimgroup can take responsibility for their lives must be expunged.Strategy Number Two: Never let the following controversial anddangerous word enter a discussion of the underclass—“marriage.”
The editorial initially conceals the Northeastern study’s findings.The report, it writes, suggests that “violent crime among young peoplemay be rising”; then, as if in a stray afterthought, the editorial addsthat the “study also shows that the murder rate for black teenagers hasclimbed noticeably since 2000 while the rate for young whites hasscarcely changed on the whole and, in some places, has actuallydeclined.” That finding—the rising juvenile black homicide rate—is thestudy’s actual import, of course. But the Times would rather contradict itself than lead with the politically incorrect truth.