Los Angeles Times: “Although six in 10 Metro passengers are Latino, black passengers reported the highest rates of indecent exposure, physical contact and harassment overall.”
I wonder how much of what happens on LA Metro mirrors the rest of life? Which groups of people disproportionately commit more crimes and more harassment and more rape?
There’s a video that’s been circulating online since Tuesday, and it frames itself like this: a woman walks around New York City for 10 hours, with a camera secretly recording as she gets street-called 100 times by men.
The woman who does the walking is Shoshana Roberts. Most of the men who street-harass, call out and follow her are black and Latino. Noticeably absent from the video? White men.
It’s something a lot of people noted.
“The racial politics of the video are [f*****] up,” the author Roxane Gay commented on Twitter. “Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?”
Slate’s Hanna Rosin noticed the same.
“The one dude who turns around and says, “Nice,” is white, but the guys who do the most egregious things—like the one who harangues her, “Somebody’s acknowledging you for being beautiful! You should say thank you more,” or the one who follows her down the street too closely for five whole minutes—are not.”
“Catcalling has always been an uncomfortable feminist issue because of the class and race dynamics involved,” Rosin said Friday in an interview with NPR’s Here & Now. “And that’s a much more difficult conversation to have than the straight forward one of look at this woman being harassed looking down the street.”
And Akiba Solomon at Colorlines echoed both Gay and Rosin’s concerns. But she also pointed out — albeit, a little tentatively — that the video “characterizes all of the men’s behavior as the same. So ‘hello,’ a demand for gratitude, and following the woman all carry the same weight.”
The video was created by an anti-harassment organization Hollaback! and Rob Bliss Creative, an ad agency. Rosin says that Bliss apologized on reddit — in a post that’s now deleted — for editing out white men. Bliss wrote “We got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera.” That’s why Bliss said he had to edit them out. (Serious question: Weren’t most of the street harassers in the video interacting “in passing”?)
This isn’t the first time Bliss’ work has had some troubling portrayals of brown folks, Rosin writes. When he created a promotional video for Grand Rapids, Mich., Bliss reportedly minimized the city’s sizable minority population.
Nationwide, according to the 2011 Obama Administration study “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008,” blacks were almost eight times more likely to be homicide offenders.
But, of course, noticing patterns and looking for simple explanations runs afoul of that dominant rule of 21st Century thought: Occam’s Racist.
Lawrence Auster wrote in 2007:
Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.
To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.
The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.
The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:
Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”
No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.
