A hate crime in the city
When you live in the city, you end up having a lot of conversations about crime. People want to know about your neighborhood, and the conversation inevitably dances carefully around people’s beliefs about the relationship between violent crime and race. The ugly assumption no one ever quite comes out and states plainly (because they totally aren’t racist): We know the perpetrators of violent crime will be people of color. The question is, who will the victims be?
In reality, interracial violence makes up a small share of violent crime—and when it does happen, perpetrators and victims alike are pretty diverse. Nor is the latter fact simply the average of black people killing white people in northern cities while white people kill black people in progress-adverse corners of the Deep South. A 2012 Scripps Howard analysis found that “Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina all have white-on-black murder rates well below the national average, even though these states have large black populations.” Meanwhile, the FBI reports that among single-bias hate crimes, there are three times as many victims of anti-black bias as there are victims of anti-white bias.
Some white people seem to think that people who look like us are only ever in the victim role, except maybe in distant, backwards places-that-aren’t-here. But it just isn’t true.
