Untold Stories

September 14, 2000

A Justice Department study finds that nearly 80 per cent of the inmates scheduled for the death penalty in federal prisons are nonwhite. Is anyone really surprised?

The Washington Post reports: “Attorney General Janet Reno said she was troubled by the findings of racial disparity, noting that crime is often the product of social ills that disproportionately affect minorities.” After reading a sentence like that, I’m struck by the thought that the reason Miss Reno isn’t married may be that she never met Ramsey Clark. They were made for each other.

Clark, you may recall, was Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general in the mad Sixties. He saw every criminal as a victim of society. He not only wanted an end to the death penalty, he thought no prisoner should serve more than five years for any crime. In his book, poverty and racism explained everything, and to understand all was to forgive all. Clark has a worthy successor in Miss Reno.

Before we adopt the view that “minorities” dominate death row through no fault of their own, we should inquire whether they commit more violent crimes than whites. FBI statistics have found that this is indeed the case with respect to interracial crimes: blacks commit far more violent crimes against whites than whites commit against blacks, by a ratio of more than 40 to 1. Such crimes are apt to be crimes against strangers, rather than crimes of passion.

Whites know this without reading statistics. A white crime against a black is apt to receive national publicity as evidence of “racism.” Black crimes against whites are hushed up — even when the motive is nakedly racial.

In April a black man, yelling racial epithets, slashed the throat of an eight-year-old white child in Alexandria, Virginia. The dead boy was a total stranger. It later transpired that the police had found a note in the killer’s room reading, “Kill them racess whiatt kidds anyway” (spelling in original).

Here was the very model of a “hate crime”: killing a child at random solely because of his race. But the police and the media played down the racial angle. Janet Reno didn’t call and Bill Clinton didn’t give any sermons on how the things that unite us are more important than the things that divide us. You had to follow the story for weeks and read between the lines in order to get the drift, until the details finally leaked out.

In Cleveland recently, a friend of mine — a white woman with an eight- year-old son — was sitting at a Denny’s restaurant waiting for a table. A black woman wanted her to move. She declined. The black woman released a torrent of epithets — “white trash,” “white bitch,” and worse. Eventually my friend left in disgust, feeling she couldn’t win. Several other whites, waiting for their own tables, witnessed the incident; it’s a safe bet that they won’t go back to that Denny’s again.

My friend — Ann, as I’ll call her — having lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, has often had similar experiences. The general rule in such situations is that when blacks attack, whites retreat. Blacks make no bones about their racial feelings; whites have learned to suppress their feelings, though they get blamed anyway.

Ann wound up telling her story to a lawyer from Denny’s. Having lost a costly suit for a single allegation of “racial discrimination” a few years ago, Denny’s is very nervous about such incidents. Ann was nervous too; though she was in fact the victim of racial insults, she feared that the government might somehow get involved and blame her. She has never heard of Janet Reno taking the side of white people, except for Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro.

Then there is her son. At age eight he has learned to expect to be bullied and ganged up on by black kids; now he has seen his mother grossly insulted by a black woman. His racial attitudes aren’t being shaped by David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan; they are being formed by his own fear, humiliation, and misery. When he’s a little older liberals will lecture him on the need for tolerance.

Joseph Sobran

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