Lies cost lives. That is the lesson of the last 24 hours. In the last day, police shootings have occurred all over America. The largest one, which occurred in Dallas, TX, saw 11 police officers get shot and, so far, 5 die, during a Black Lives Matter protest. The shooter was candid about his motives: he wanted to shoot White people and especially White cops.

Similarly, a man in a hotel in Bristol, TN, shot four White people, including one police officer, today. He has said that he was motivated by the recent supposed instances of police brutality which have fueled BLM protests across the country.

In Valdosta, GA, a man called police about a break in and, when they arrived, ambushed them and shot a police officer. The motive behind this crime is not yet clear. Another officer was shot during a traffic stop in St. Louis. Finally, today a man in Roswell, GA, slowed down his car to shoot at a police car.

To put these numbers in perspective, typically, in America, about 1 cop is killed per week. In the last 24 hours alone at least 5 police officers have been killed and at least 15 have been shot across 5 different incidents.

Several of these shootings are known for sure to have been motivated by the Black Lives Matter narrative of police brutality against African Americans. The killers explicitly said they targeted Whites and, thus, this was clearly also motivated by anti-White racism.

Many public faces of the BLM movement have claimed that they don’t condone this kind of violence. However, these people are hard to take seriously given that BLM marches in several places across the country have literally featured chants calling for police to be killed.

There is no War Against Blacks

To the degree that these killings were motivated by the idea that the police are systematically killing African Americans they were motivated by a lie. African Americans are killed by police at lower rates than you would expect given their crime rates (2).

Moreover, African Americans actually make up a greater proportion of cop killers than they do people who are killed by police (3).

Whites in general aren’t waging any kind of war against African Americans either. African Americans kill Whites much more often than Whites kill African Americans.

These Lies Costs Lives

The Black Lives Matter movement is thus a sham. It is based on nothing but lies. There is no problem of mass discrimination against African Americans by police. They are killed by police as often as they are because they commit crime more often than Whites do.

These lies motivated the various shootings that have taken place across America today. BLM has blood on its hands and has inspired multiple instances of political terrorism not to mention fostering a general sense of anti-White racism.

Unfortunately, the story of police killing African Americans is not the only lie about race and crime which can fuel anti White narratives and which could, and historically have, led to violence.

Lie #1 The System is Biased

Some people pretend that African Americans are arrested as frequently as they are because of anti-Black bias among Police. This argument can easily be refuted using data from The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS is a survey carried out yearly by the Department of Justice in which a large random sample of Americans are asked whether or not they have been the victim of a crime within the last year and, if so, to describe both the crime and its perpetrator.

Using this data, the proportion of violent criminals who are Black, according to the victims of violent crimes, can easily be calculated. We can then compare these figures to the crime rates suggested by the FBI’s arrest data.

“The National Crime Victimization Survey Validates the Uniform Crime Report’s Data on Black Crime“

As can be seen, the crime rates suggested by the two data sets are virtually identical.

The National Incident-Based Reporting System is the other major crime victim survey in the US. As can be seen, if we compare the percent of offenders who are Black, based on the victim survey, to the percent of arrestees who are Black we once again find no evidence of anti-Black bias.

Rubenstein (2016)

Even if they concede these facts about violent crime, some people will argue that drug arrests are biased because self report surveys show that African Americans and White use drugs at the same rate while arrest data shows that African Americans are more likely than Whites to be arrested for drug related crimes.

The first problem with this argument is that African Americans are more likely than Whites to lie about using drugs. How do we know this? Well, criminologists sometimes conduct studies in which they run biological tests on people’s hair, blood, urine, etc., to test what drugs they have recently taken and then compare the results of these biological tests to what drugs they claim they have recently taken. Such studies consistently find that Blacks are more likely than whites to lie and claim that they have not used a drug when they actually have (Page et al. 2009, Falk et al. 1992, Feucht, Stephens, and Walker, 1994, and Fedrich and Johnson 2005).

In fact, as reviewed in Ellis, Beaver, and Wrights Handbook of Crime Correlates, most self report studies find that Blacks not only say they have committed less drug crime than Whites but, in fact, less crime in general, and we’ve already seen that that’s false.

This argument also ignores important differences between African American and White drug users. What kind of differences? Well, to quote one study comparing African American and White drug users:

“African Americans are nearly twice as likely to buy outdoors (0.31 versus 0.14), three times more likely to buy from a stranger (0.30 versus 0.09), and significantly more likely to buy away from their homes (0.61 versus 0.48).” Ramchand , Pacula, and Iguchi MY 2006.

Similarly, a report issued by the Justice Department found that African American drug users use drugs more often than White drug users, use more dangerous drugs than White drug users, and are more likely to use drugs in areas with high crime rates (Lagan 1995). All 6 of these differences will make African American drug users more likely get to arrested than White drug users.

Given all this, there is no good reason to suppose that African American drug arrest rates reflect racism. It is far more likely that they reflect African American drug user’s dishonestly as well as the reckless manner in which they use drugs.

Finally, some people will claim that even if the arresting process is not bias against African Americans, the sentencing and conviction process is. If this is true, African Americans should make up a greater proportion of people in jail for various crimes than they do people arrested for these crimes. An analysis of these numbers shows that, once again, there is no evidence of bias against African American.

Rubenstein (2016)

Moreover, research shows that if you control for racial differences in self reported aggression and and a few other variables you find that African Americans and Whites get the same sentences for the same crimes (Beaver et al., 2013).

There is no important sense in which “the system” is biased against African Americans. This is just a lie propagated by people who should know better.

Lie #2 Poverty

Another popular lie about race and crime is that African Americans commit more crime than Whites simply because they are poor which, as we all know, is White people’s fault.

Given how extremely popular this myth is, it is surprisingly easy to show that it is false. Rich African Americans have higher crime rates than poor Whites. In light of this fact, it is completely ridiculous to claim that poverty explains why African Americans commit more crime than Whites.

Chart from Ehrenfreund (2016) data from Zaw and Darity (2016)

Speaking of lies that are easy to refute, let’s get a few more out of the way all at once. The percentage of an area’s population that is Black positively correlates with its crime rate even after controlling for regional differences in family structure (single mothers), poverty, education, income inequality, geography, and population density (Kposowa, Breault, and Harrison, 1995; Land, McCall, and Cohen, 1990). None of these things explain African American crime rates either.

Lie #3 Racism

The third and final major lie that I want to look at is that African American crime rates are caused by racism inflicted upon African Americans by Whites.

Racism is not a simple thing to measure, so the evidence bearing on this question is a little more indirect. But, first of all, it is important to realize that official crime statistics have replicated the African/White crime disparity in many nations all over the earth including, but not limited to, Canada, Britain, Australia, France, Israel, Brazil and Japan. (Ellis, Beaver, and Wright, 2009; Macimo, 2004; Ministry of Justice, 2012; Murray et al., 2013; Ray, 1985).

Moreover, African nations have far higher crime rates than White and Asian nations do

Rushton and Whitney (2002)

Given this, if we want to say that racism causes African crime rates then we are going to have to also say that anti-African racism is ubiquitous in Canada, Brazil, Japan, and Africa. This is obviously nonsense.

In America, people are divided on how common they think racism is. However, basically everyone agrees that there is less racism now than there was one hundred years ago. Thus, if racism causes Afrian American crime rates then African American crime rates should be lower today than they were back then.

This is not even close to being true. African Americans have much higher crime rates today than they did in the first half of the 20th century (1).

Finally, if racism in America was causing African American crime rates it would have to do so through some mode of action other than by impacting poverty, family structure, and other variables which we have already seen cannot explain African American crime rates.

This would probably mean a psychological variable would be at play such as racism lowing African American’s self esteem or causing them to experience higher levels of stress. Indeed, I have heard both of these things asserted multiple times.

However, both of these theories are ridiculous and extremely easy to refute. Like others looked at in this article, these narratives took off without even the most basic fact check occurring first. Compared to Whites, African Americans have higher self esteem and self report feeling less stress.

Racism, poverty, and an unfair justice system are not to blame for African American crime. White people are not to blame for African American crime. We may be getting killed for it, but we are not to blame.

Conclusion

Returning to today’s events, some will say that we should not view these incidents through a racial lens. This was, they will say, anti-police violence, not anti-White violence. That this is false is easy to see. By their own admission, these shooters are not just targeting cops but also White people, and in some cases that has included White civilians.

For instance, here is the Dallas Police chief speaking on what the man who shot 11 police officers, 5 of which died, had to say about his motives:

“The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.” – David Brown, Dallas Police Cheif

Imagine if this had happened to African Americans. Suppose that people were running around attempting to mass murder African Americans and, when asked why, explained that they wanted to kill Black people because they blamed Blacks for various social problems. Imagine if this it was happening to Jews. What do you think the response would be? What was the response to Dylan Roof like?

It didn’t look anything like the reaction we are seeing today.

People supposedly on the right, like Newt Gingrich, are running around today scolding White Americans about how they don’t know what it is like to be Black. Whites are mass murdered, for being White, and Newt’s response is to talk about how hard it is to be Black.

Meanwhile, liberals all over the country are trying to find ways to exonerate BLM, which had protests explicitly calling for police to be killed, of any responsibility, and to blame either White racism or gun laws for these incidents.

This is insanity. A race of people are being purposefully targeted for mass murder and the responses range from finding roundabout ways to blame White people to explicitly sympathizing with the groups attacking them!

This could never happen to any-other ethnic group because no other ethnic group has allowed itself to be so thoroughly stripped of its group identity. Most White people, at a conscious level at least, either don’t care that they are White or, even worse, feel guilt about their ethnic group.

But guess what? These shooters don’t care what you think about race, nor do the people pushing anti-White history, anti-White politics, and anti-White social attitudes. White people might not care about being White but when people look for who to blame societal problems on, or when one of these shooters looks for their next murder victim, everyone knows who the White people are.

Whether we like it or not, White people are a group with a shared interest, even if only because non-Whites, and, increasingly, many Whites themselves, have something against us for being White. We’ve ignored this fact for too long, we’ve let anti-White lies flourish and anti-White attitudes strengthen while establishing not even the most basic sense of group identity which would allow us to respond to days like today with strength.

If we had not sat by and watched this happen these killings might not have taken place. If we continue to do nothing as animosity against our race grows, more will be killed in the future.