by
Walter E. Williams

Recently
by Walter E. Williams: Should
We Obey All Laws?

Each year,
roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time,
the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black
murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were
murdered by other blacks. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s
population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims.
Nationally, black homicide victimization rate is six times that
of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites. Coupled
with being most of the nation’s homicide victims, blacks are most
of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery.

The magnitude
of this tragic mayhem can be viewed in another light. According
to a Tuskegee Institute study, between the years 1882 and 1968,
3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites. Black fatalities
during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and all wars
since 1980 (8,197) come to 18,515, a number that pales in comparison
with black loss of life at home. It’s a tragic commentary to be
able to say that young black males have a greater chance of reaching
maturity on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan than on the
streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other
cities.

A much larger
issue is how might we interpret the deafening silence about the
day-to-day murder in black communities compared with the national
uproar over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Such a response by politicians,
civil rights organizations and the mainstream news media could easily
be interpreted as “blacks killing other blacks is of little concern,
but it’s unacceptable for a white to kill a black person.”

There are a
few civil rights leaders with a different vision. When President
Barack Obama commented about the Trayvon Martin case, T. Willard
Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, told The
Daily Caller that “the outrage should be about us killing each
other, about black-on-black crime.” He asked rhetorically, “Wouldn’t
you think to have 41 people shot (in Chicago) between Friday morning
and Monday morning would be much more newsworthy and deserve much
more outrage?” Former NAACP leader Pastor C.L. Bryant said the rallies
organized by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson suggest there is an epidemic
of “white men killing black young men,” adding: “The epidemic is
truly black-on-black crime. The greatest danger to the lives of
young black men are young black men.”

Not only is
there silence about black-on-black crime; there’s silence and concealment
about black racist attacks on whites – for example, the recent attacks
on two Virginian-Pilot newspaper reporters set upon and beaten by
a mob of young blacks. The story wasn’t even covered by their own
newspaper. In March, a black mob assaulted, knocked unconscious,
disrobed and robbed a white tourist in downtown Baltimore. Black
mobs have roamed the streets of Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, New
York, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles and other cities, making
unprovoked attacks on whites and running off with their belongings.

Racist
attacks have been against not only whites but also Asians. Such
attacks include the San Francisco beating death of an 83-year-old
Chinese man, the pushing of a 57-year-old woman off a train platform
and the knocking of a 59-year-old Chinese man to the ground, which
killed him. For years, Asian school students in New York and Philadelphia
have been beaten up by their black classmates and called racist
epithets – for example, “Hey, Chinese!” and “Yo, dragon ball!” But
that kind of bullying, unlike the bullying of homosexuals, goes
unreported and unpunished.

Racial demagoguery
from the president on down is not in our nation’s best interests,
plus it’s dangerous. As my colleague Thomas Sowell recently put
it, “if there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is
a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers
the other several times over.”

May
22, 2012

Walter
E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics
at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.

Copyright
© 2012 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The
Best of Walter E. Williams