Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers Don't

So this past Sunday I was invited back once again to The One Mic Stand radio show with Simply Nay, where I will be henceforth and forevermore (or until the government shuts us down) a guest a la J. Anthony Brown to her Tom Joyner. The main topic was Slutwalk DC, but we dabbled in a few other topics prior to that, namely the state of Black affairs. In that vein we were talking about some black lady on one of those reality shows who misspelled bitch and whether or not there was a responsibility of the producer (who is also a black woman) to edit or reshoot that scene. The idea being that we have a responsibility to protect our image. I voted no, the host thought I'd lost my mind and a discussion ensued. But that's not the topic of today's article. You can follow the link to hear that. No, today I want to talk about what happened after the show was over.

I went to the website of DC's ABC affiliate, WJLA, where I read an article about the unfortunate soul who was severely beaten and placed into a coma this weekend following a robbery that occurred while he was walking home from a bar. Normally I avoid the comments section of their site, because a lot of it is just racist drivel. Some sites now require people to register using their Facebook accounts to cut down on the He-Man complex that comes from anonymity. WJLA does not require this so people post things that even offend me and I have very thick skin.

For whatever reason, I found myself scrolling through one racist comment after another. They always amount to the basic ideology that Black people are violent and if they were removed from DC then the crime rate would go down. Someone suggested that there is evidence to support the claim that black people are the more violent race. It's been my position in the past to not even dignify such things with a response, but I figured why not.

I sought out this mythical data and found myself on the FBI's Uniform Crime Report site. You can read it for yourself here, but I'll summarize it for you: I'm done. That's my summary. I joked about this back in (what was it?) 07? Whenever Three 6 Mafia won that Oscar for It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp I said that I was done with the Black race. I was cutting up my Black card and entering the Race Draft. After reading those numbers, I couldn't do anything but shake my damn head.

Of all murders in this country during 2009, slightly more than half were committed by a Black person. Considering that we make up about 13% of the population, that's a damned shame. The only other major crime that we seem to lead in is robbery. For just about everything else on the list of approximately thirty crimes, we come in second. Now that's nothing to be proud of at all. Take aggravated assault for example: 64% White vs 34% Black. Remember, we make up 13% of the population! Why are we committing more than a third of the crime?

What confounds me even more is that Hispanics and Latinos aren't carved out in this data, so I'm thinking that they're being lumped into the White category. That skews things even more because the White category includes two races worth of crime yet we still beat the cumulative efforts of both for murder.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hate my race. I'm not Uncle Ruckus. You won't see me running around talking about I have reverse-vitiligo, but I'm done trying to defend it. Yeah I could go down the route of talking about the systemic economic and educational disparity between the races that modern crime theory attributes to the seemingly one-sided crime rate in major urban areas. We could get historical and look at the WTF handling of Reconstruction following the Emancipation and how that laid the foundation for the plight of our people. But I'm not doing that today! Because the truth of the matter is, if a Black person hurts someone close to me today, the last thing I'm going to do is try to understand how the system made them this way.

I don't care what caused the cancer, I just want it gone. I'm certain someone will take offense to this. Somebody out there has a degree in African American studies and thinks I've sold out or lost my mind. Fine. Whatever. It's annoying walking down the street and having half the people you pass cross to the other side or clutch their purse. It's even more annoying when I look at crime statistics that make me understand why. If you told me that there's a 1 in 3 chance that the car I'm riding in might explode, I wouldn't trust it either.