A startlingly common response to recent rioting and looting has been to treat it as a desperate yet understandable response to longtime oppression.
The implication, although sometimes it’s put explicitly, is that only the hard-hearted, who don’t suffer under the yoke of daily repression themselves, would dare preach caution and civility. For beleaguered minorities, a more radical Malcolm X tack is justified.
The media have not hesitated to cover instances of police confrontations with black civilians. Whether or not officers’ use of force is justified in any given case, the media have a way of distorting such incidents, credulously believing whatever narrative the putative victim puts forward. Moreover, journalists lunge at apparent cases of white-on-black crime, all but nonexistent according to FBI data, as with the Ahmaud Arbery fracas. Here too, they suspend skepticism in order to advance the standard victim-oppressor narrative.
Meanwhile, police misconduct and brutality involving white victims, much like black-on-white crime, are assiduously ignored by the national press. Stories about these, if they appear at all in local newspapers, have all mention of race expurgated.
This selective media coverage is helping to create an impression that black Americans are routinely hunted by rogue cops and armed white hordes. So pervasive is the propaganda that one could hardly blame them for believing it. But the facts on the ground simply don’t justify such a perception.
Recent scholarship indicates that, after accounting for crime rates (which vary dramatically along racial lines), black people are no more likely than white people to be gunned down by cops. And white cops are no more likely to shoot black civilians than are officers of other races. (Criticism of this study rests on untenable premises — the authors amply refuted the weak criticisms here.)
Additional findings reveal that, contrary to tendentious statistics cited in the press, factors other than racism (such as prior convictions and other aggravating factors) account for disparities in other realms of the criminal justice system, such as prosecution rates, drug arrests, and more.
Of course, individual cases of police brutality against African Americans are far too common. Some of the involved officers might indeed act from racist motives. Black victims of unjustified and disproportionate police force deserve justice — as do the largely unknown but more numerous white victims of police misconduct, such as Tony Timpa, who died after police pinned him on the ground and mocked him as he pleaded for his life.
As for white crimes against black people, data going back to the 1980s show that they are exceedingly rare. African Americans commit between 70% and 90% of black-white interracial violent crimes each year. The media’s monomaniacal focus on unicorn white-on-black crime, intended to evoke the historical memory of lynchings, misrepresents the facts of interracial crime in modern America.
The media’s cherry-picked coverage, much like the noxious ideology in universities blaming omnipotent white supremacy for all society’s ills, has had grave consequences. Reprisals against random whites and police officers occurred in the wake of cases involving Travyon Martin, Ferguson, Eric Garner, and other notable episodes.
After the tragic El Paso shooting, some claimed that the shooter was inspired by the president’s immigration rhetoric. If this ludicrous standard is to be applied consistently, then surely the media have blood on their hands.
The killing of George Floyd was unconscionable. His family deserves justice. But former Vice President Joe Biden was simply in error when he averred that the death is “not an isolated incident, but a part of an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice.” The actual data contradict the media’s negligent framing and coverage, even as prominent commentators make excuses for lawlessness and thus stoke further racial division.
Max Hyams is a student at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. Follow him on Twitter @Maxjhyams1.
