Do Blacks Kill Whites Because They're White?

New America Media, News Analysis, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Posted: Jun 04, 2007

Editor’s Note: Are the murders of Channon Christian and Chris Newsom, a
young white couple, by five blacks in Knoxville, Tennessee racially
motivated? White supremacists claim there’s a double standard in the press
when it comes to black-on-white murders. NAM associate editor Earl Ofari
Hutchinson says that it is not true. Hutchinson is the author of “The
Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African
Americans and Hispanics,” to be published in October 2007. This piece also appeared
in the Huffington Post.


A beleaguered Knoxville, Tennessee Police Chief Sterling Owen, IV was
emphatic in his stern remarks at a press conference in mid-May. There was
absolutely no evidence, said Owen, that the murders of Channon Christian
and Chris Newsom were racially motivated.

The chief had to be forceful and direct in his admonition about the torture
killing of the young white couple this past January. As the trial of five
young blacks charged with the couple's murder approaches, several white
supremacist groups have threatened to stage a noisy protest in Knoxville
against what they call the double standard in the case.

They scream that the national press routinely clamps a wall of silence on
black-on-white murder cases because it fears inflaming racial tensions and
is scared stiff that it will be called racist for talking up black-on-white
crimes. Yet when whites assault or murder blacks the press and civil rights
leaders supposedly leap over each other to blare it out as headline news.

This is a false, self-serving, and cheap ploy to knock the press and civil
rights leaders. However, the gruesome murders of Christian and Newsom do
cast a troubling glare on an aspect of violent crime in America -- crime
that isn't much talked about beyond the rants of white extremists. And
that's that whites are far more likely to be the victims and blacks their
assailants in interracial crimes than the other way around. Those crimes
are seldom, if ever, labeled hate crimes. In the past five years according to
FBI figures, on average there were about one-million-and-a-half to two
million racial crossover crimes in the country.

In a well-meaning effort to counter the notion that there's an explosion of
black-on-white crime, authorities in Knoxville culled Tennessee Bureau of
Investigation stats on violent crimes and noted that in the vast majority
of these crimes, whites are more likely to maim and kill other whites, and
blacks do the same with other blacks. Violent crimes in the state and the
nation, no matter the color of the victim and perpetrator, have dropped
during the past five years.

Buried in the stats, though, the report found that black offenders commit
four times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. That inadvertently
adds fuel to the charge that whites are under assault from blacks. The
president of the Knoxville NAACP swiftly denounced the killings and
expressed deep sorrow for the victims' families. Yet, there's some truth to
the charge that civil rights leaders generally don't express outrage at
heinous crimes committed by blacks against whites. Many blacks generally
shrug off the crimes with the bitter remark that whites have been killing
blacks for years and getting away with it, and there has been no massive
explosion of white outrage at the lax treatment of white killers.

The seeming nonchalance of many blacks toward black-on-white crime doesn't
mean that blacks are insensitive to the victims of crime. They are. They
are far more likely than any other group in America to be the victims of
violent crime, and they know first hand the pain and suffering violent
crime causes. They don't color-code crime; crime is crime, no matter the
color of the victim, or assailant. There is also no evidence that black
criminals target whites because they are white. They target them for their
money and valuables. These crimes are almost in all cases garden-variety
street crime.

In trying to determine whether to prosecute an interracial murder or attack
as a hate crime or not police and prosecutors have to figure out the racial
animus in the crime. For it to be a hate crime they have to prove that a
black intentionally targeted a white victim solely because of his color.
That takes hard evidence of racial taunts, threats, writings, or statements
by the perpetrator to prove race was the motivating factor in the attack.
In the absence of that evidence, the charge that the attack was a hate
crime won't fly.

The suggestion that the national press engages in a cover-up to quash
murders committed by blacks of whites because it's afraid to offend blacks
is absurd. The better explanation is that crime news is so routine that
unless the accused murderer is O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, or Robert Blake
there's little chance it's going to be the stuff of endless nationwide
newscasts.

Still black-on-white violence anywhere stirs fear among some whites that
crime-prone blacks are out to get them, and they'll seize any opportunity
they get to commit violence against them. When black leaders say or do
nothing about these attacks it is taken by some as a tacit signal that
blacks put less value on white lives than on black lives.

This is far from true. But white supremacists will still scream loudly that
the Knoxville murders of Christian and Newsom prove that there's a double
standard in interracial murder cases. That scream should be ignored.


Race relations

African Americans


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