In my last post, I laid out a definition of antiwhite nihilism. I explained that it had its origins in Marxism, but I didn’t elaborate much on Marxism because I believe many others have already done much better work. I’d be out of my depth, and that’s not really where my interest lies. For those interested in great science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy, I’d again recommend John C. Wright’s blog and his published work. For those who want a more focused discussion on the nature of Marxism and Critical Theory, I’d recommend New Discourses. Much of what I discuss will be based on my personal experiences. Most black people display an extreme uniformity in thought around certain issues. If I were to try to talk to most black people about police violence, there exists a set of beliefs that I am expected to have. If I contradict this socially approved set of beliefs, I will face intense scrutiny and social censure.
The problem is that the approved set of beliefs is false. They are often so obviously and plainly false that one can recognize the belief’s absurdity on its face. Either that or the belief expressed is unfalsifiable. Even better, no actually verifiable belief will be expressed at all. Instead, the speaker will simply express an emotion which you’re expected to validate. Let’s use police violence against black people as an example. I will be taking data from the Fatal Encounters database for the year 2020. I choose this database because it reports the highest numbers I have found for any organization that reports these types of figures.
The following statements express black-approved sentiments. It’s not that every black person would agree with each of these statements, but if you say any of these things, you are unlikely to face the type of opprobrium you’d receive for saying “I voted for Trump”.
- “The police are hunting us (usually black men) down.”
- “The police are targeting black men.”
- “The police are killing thousands (or any absurdly high number) of black men.”
- “We (black men or black people in general) are scared of the police.”
- “They’re looking for a reason to kill us.”
- “Calling the police on a black person should be considered attempted murder.”
- Using the absurd term “slave catcher” to refer to police.
Underlying all of these statements is the idea that the police are racist. The institution of policing is racist. The laws which they uphold are racist. White police officers are so racist that they can’t police black people with any degree of professionalism. Nothing has changed in this country. It’s just as racist as it’s always been. You’ve heard it all before, but, as I’ve already said, many of these statements are false on their face.
Before looking at any data, we know that a black person could be attacked, beaten, and/or killed by a white private citizen with impunity in this country at one time. If the police wanted to kill us and this country is as racist as it’s always been, they’d just kill us. No need to hide anything or find a reason for it. If the racists have to hide, then the country they’re operating in can’t be that racist. Yes, I’m aware of the weaponized Newspeak definitions of racism specifically designed to apply only to white people whether or not they do anything meaningful to harm anyone (click here and scroll down to enjoy six different definitions). I reject the use of language that is designed to obscure and confuse rather than to clarify and communicate meaning.
A cursory examination of the data from Fatal Encounters for the year 2020 makes the above claims even more ridiculous. Fatal Encounters records 2,085 total deaths caused by the police. This is from all causes. Most news organizations will report a number between 1,000 and 1,200. I immediately assume upon seeing these values that not only are black men not being hunted down by police, but I would bet that the majority of police shootings don’t involve black men at all. Why?
Black men are not hard to find. We are not hard to identify. We are no more difficult to kill than any other human being. If we are being hunted by people who can kill us with impunity, why is the death count so low? If it’s being covered up, why bother unless you live in a country where that kind of information would need to be hidden? We know what it looks like when a large, determined force wants to exterminate a people. Let’s take the Rwandan genocide for example. According to the wiki, it lasted approximately 100 days and, by the lowest estimate, 491,000 Tutsis were killed. That’s 4,910 people a day on average. Roughly 205 per hour over a 24-hour period. This was in a country with a population of around 7,000,000 people at the time.
There are of 600,000 police in the US right now and more than 20 million black males available to kill. If they were hunting black men down, there would be no denying or hiding it in the age of smartphones. Thousands of black men would be dead within hours. Black people wouldn’t be able to live normal lives. People would actually be fleeing to the border rather than just talking about leaving America.
Instead we have a series of increasingly absurd, utterly farcical hate crime hoaxes.
Leaving that aside, let’s dive deeper into the data. For these calculations, I will be removing the female portion of the population (223 in total) for simplicity’s sake and because represent a little over 10% of the total. That leaves the 1,862 men. Looking at just black men, we see that 393 were killed by police in 2020. For white men, it’s 551. About 21.1% of all men killed by police in 2020 were black men compared to 29.6% for white men. Approximately half of every ethnic/racial group in the country will be male, so we can assume that about 13.1% of the male population of is black and 57.8% is white. We can see from looking at this information that white men are underrepresented by a factor of 2. Black men are over-represented by a factor of 1.6.
On the off chance that you get someone to accept that police aren’t actually killing black men by the thousands by police, this fact will be trotted out as a smoking gun. Black men may not be hunted, but they are over-represented in police killings. Again, I’m using Fatal Encounters’ data here. Most news organizations will report a higher rate of over-representation (usually a factor between 2 and 3 in my experience). Racism is the only approved explanation.
I have a different one. I think the police, for the most part, are shooting violent criminals who attack them. If this is true, then we would expect that the demographic breakdown of people killed by the police will roughly match the demographic breakdown of the “violent criminal” category. When looking at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data, that is what we see. Close to 90% of those killed by the police are men, and men are 77% of violent offenders.
I’ll also note briefly here that men comprise a little less than half of the population, yet 90% of those killed by the police are men. Even looking at violent crime stats, men are (slightly) over-represented. No one has a problem noting the reality that violent criminals are overwhelmingly male. No one claims that the police are hunting men down. Only black men.
With that last statement in mind, let’s take a look at arrests for violent crime. I’ll be taking data from table 43A. Scroll down to the heading “Crime in the United States Annual Reports” and download the “Persons Arrested” tables. I’m using that data because it breaks down arrests by race. It should be noted that the Crime Data Explorer reports higher numbers of arrests for these categories and has data from a higher number of reporting agencies (11,253 vs. 10,466 for table 43A). From table 43A in 2020, there were 8,618 arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter, 14,181 for rape, 47,674 for robbery, and 264,450 for aggravated assault. Looking at the stats, we find that Black men make up
- 51% of arrests for murder
- 25.4% of arrests for rape
- 49.3% of arrests for robbery
- 33.1% of arrests for aggravated assault
Black men are over-represented in each one of these categories. Looking at the Crime Data Explorer Data in fig. 2, we see that black men commit more violent crime than any other demographic in the country.
White men outnumber black men more than 5 to 1. If violent crime rates among black and white men were the same, we would expect the number of white offenders to be more than 5 times the number of black offenders.
If you think my work is lacking, you may be right. This was a fairly cursory examination of the evidence. If you want a more thorough analysis, I’d suggest this paper from Roland G. Fryer, a black man himself and a professor at Harvard University.
This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account (emphasis mine). We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. – “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (accessed Dec. 20, 2021)
Here’s a quote from the end of the paper on page 41:
The importance of our results for racial inequality in America is unclear. It is plausible that racial differences in lower level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external forces.
Roland G. Fryer, Jr. – “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” (accessed Dec. 20, 2021)
Much more troubling, due to their frequency and potential impact on minority belief formation, is the possibility that racial differences in police use of non-lethal force has spillovers on myriad dimensions of racial inequality. If, for instance, blacks use their lived experience with police as evidence that the world is discriminatory, then it is easy to understand why black youth invest less in human capital or black adults are more likely to believe discrimination is an important determinant of economic outcomes (emphasis mine). Black Dignity Matters.
Now depending on your background, you may not have been able to follow that statistical analysis. That’s fine, but let’s be honest – most of the black people you know who might’ve made some of the statements on that list don’t act like they’re under attack. They don’t act like they’re being hunted. They don’t act like they’re afraid to go outside. They don’t act like they’re afraid to go jogging. Many black criminals act without any apparent fear of serious consequences or reprisals.
To repeat, if black men were actually being hunted in this country, you’d know it unmistakably. You wouldn’t be able to live a normal life. People would be fleeing to the border trying to get out. We wouldn’t have thousands of very black Haitians trying to enter the country illegally.
So what gives? Why all the theatrics? Why the hysteria? Why all of the anger when these obvious things are pointed out? Why isn’t it good news to find that you aren’t being hunted?
As I said, there exists an approved set of statements and sentiments that one is allowed to express freely as a black person. Many of them are plainly false if given even a moment of thought. Other sets of claims, when taken as a whole, are outright self-contradictory or, at the very least, unlikely to be true when taken together. However, if it’s really that obvious, surely more black people would realize it, right?
You’re right.
They do.
Continued in part 4.
Repairing Black Thought 
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