RUTHFULLY YOURS

The editors of the National Review are back on their high horse again, recalling the days of their “Against Trump” issue devoted to foiling his quest for the GOP nomination.  This editorial in National Review, calling for a “time out” on the NFL for Trump (like some naughty preschooler) and calling for better “judgment” (in other words, their judgment) from the president:

The president has conducted himself here in an unseemly fashion, to say the least, and has exhibited his remarkable knack for making everything he touches about him, which the NFL protests weren’t until he stuck his nose in.  (snip)

This is not a question of rights but a question of judgment, which was, unhappily, in short supply over the weekend.

But along the way, the offer supporting context that makes it seem like the writers on the editorial board never read Heather MacDonald.

We do not believe that simmering white malice is the reason for it, but black Americans are arrested and incarcerated in numbers far disproportionate to their share of the population.

Huh? MacDonald has repeatedly shown that incarceration is not disproportionate to criminality.

Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.

In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the New York Police Department. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the city’s population.

In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects were black in 2015, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city’s residents.

Such racially skewed crime ratios are repeated in virtually all American metropolises. They mean that when officers are called to the scene of a drive-by shooting or an armed robbery, they will overwhelmingly be summoned to minority neighborhoods, looking for minority suspects in the aid of minority victims.

This means that observers have a duty to be realistic in assessing what ought to be of concern. As Mac Donald writes:

Trump’s concern about rising crime is therefore not a concern about white victims and the loss of white life. Rather, it is a concern about black lives. As Trump said: “[Y]oung Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson . . . have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America.” Hint to the media: He was referring to black children in those cities, such as the ten children under the age of ten killed in Baltimore last year; the nine-year-old girl fatally shot while doing homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2015; and the nine-year-old boy in Chicago lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies in November 2015.

And yet the media is twisting itself into knots trying to downplay and trivialize the crime increase. Isn’t it white Republicans (and, of course, the cops) who are supposed to be indifferent to black lives?

Indeed, on their own pages, where Ms. Mac Donald is a contributor, a review of her latest book published by the very same National Review tells us:

You would never know it from the activists, but police shootings are responsible for a lower percentage of black homicide deaths than white and Hispanic homicide deaths. Twelve percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers, compared to 4 percent of black homicide victims.

That disparity is driven by the greatly elevated rates of criminal victimization in the black community. More blacks die each year from homicide, more than 6,000, than homicide victims of all other races combined. Their killers are not the police, and not whites, but other blacks. In Chicago this year through Aug. 30, 2,870 people, mostly black, were shot.

If you believed the Black Lives Matter narrative, you would assume that the assailants of those black victims were in large part cops. In fact, the police shot 17 people, most of whom were threatening lethal force, accounting for 0.6 percent of the total.

The editorial board contends, however:

The United States of America is a good country; it is not a perfect one. And while the United States has made a great deal of progress in the past half-century — and while it is a paragon of racial liberalism compared to much of the rest of the world — that is cold comfort to anyone experiencing injustice in the here and now, and it is only natural that this is felt most keenly by those who bear its burden most directly.

So, Black Americans suffer from injustice more than white Americans? Based on what data? Based on what definition of “injustice?”

I realize that going deeper into the subject via the research of their own contributor is not the sort of thing that wins you invitations to cocktail parties among the swell set in Manhattan and DC. Much better to stand against the uncouth president and engage in ritual shaming. Unless, that is, you find the current situation unsatisfactory and really want to change it. That requires taking some uncomfortable positions and shocking people into changing their minds.