Obama's Preemptive Strike: Playing the Race Card Early

Drudge reports:

OBAMA: IF YOU LOOK AFRICAN-AMERICAN, YOU ARE TREATED LIKE ONE
Fri Feb 9 2007 15:51:32 ET

Acknowledging that his presidential campaign has opened a racial debate, Sen. Barack Obama, who has a white mother and an African father, says if you look African-American, you are treated like one. Obama and his wife, Michelle, who also addresses the race issue, appear in an interview with Steve Kroft to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES, Sunday Feb. 11 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS television Network. If, as expected, Obama declares his formal candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination tomorrow, it will be his first interview to be broadcast after that event.

When asked by Kroft if growing up in a white household had caused him to make a decision to be black, Obama replies, "I'm not sure I decided it. I think... if you look African American in this society, you're treated as an African-American. "It's interesting though, that now I feel very comfortable and confident in terms of who I am and where I stake my ground. But I notice that... I've become a focal point for a racial debate," says Obama.

Obama's wife also addresses the race issue when asked by Kroft whether she fears for her husband's life as a black candidate. "I don't lose sleep over it because the realities are that... as a black man... Barack can get shot going to the gas station," says Michelle Obama. "You can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen."

Will being African-American hold him back as a candidate? "No.... If I don't win this race it will be because of other factors --[that] I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go that they can embrace," Obama tells Kroft.

X X X X X

While Obama is addressing the subject of race perhaps he could express to potential voters his opinions on the following issues.

Not a Chance
The electoral journey of Proposition 54.
By Ward Connerly
Oct. 15, 2003

When it comes to race, America is governed by a grievance industry. They make their case by the use of data, citing the number of black males in prison, the number of blacks who have difficulty hailing a cab, the dropout rate of Hispanics, the incidence of hate crimes and "racial profiling" by the police, and on and on. Whenever there is a disparity between whites and "people of color," that disparity is defined as a form of "institutional racism." During the [CA Prop 54] campaign, two additional forms of institutional racism were unveiled: "environmental racism" - the number of toxic-waste sites located near "minority" communities, for example; and "disenfranchisement" - the disparity between the number of blacks and Hispanics who vote and the number of whites who vote. In response to the latter, the California legislature enacted legislation a few weeks before the recall election requiring local elections officials to include race check-boxes on forms to be completed when individuals register to vote.

With "institutional racism," actual incidents of discrimination are not required. It is the mere existence of statistical disparities that confirms patterns of "discrimination" by public and private institutions. The presumption of those who advance this argument is that if there were "social justice" and equity, the disparities would not exist; instead, all groups would be proportionately represented.

An ugly conspiracy of silence
Walter Williams

Last June, Jared Taylor, president of New Century Foundation, in Oakton, Va., held a press conference at Washington's National Press Club to report on the foundation's recently released study, "The Color of Crime." Some of the study's findings about interracial crime were surprising, so much so that I did an independent verification of the numbers.

Since 1972, the U.S. Department of Justice has conducted a National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to determine the frequency of certain crimes.

One category is interracial crimes. Its most recent publication (1997), "Criminal Victimization in the U.S.," reports on data collected in 1994. In that year, there were about 1,700,000 interracial crimes, of which 1,276,030 involved whites and blacks. In 90 percent of the cases, a white was the victim and a black was the perpetrator, while in 10 percent of the cases it was the reverse.

Another finding of the NCVS report is that of the 2,025,464 violent crimes committed by blacks in 1994, 1,140,670 were against whites -- that's slightly over 56 percent. Whites committed 5,114,692 violent crimes; 135,360, or 2.6 percent were against blacks.

In 1997, there were 2,336 whites charged with anti-black crimes and 718 blacks charged with anti-white crimes, so-called hate crimes. Although the absolute number of white offenders was larger, the black rate per 100,000 of the population was greater, making blacks twice as likely to commit hate crimes.

So far the only answer the left has for Ward Connerly, Walter Williams, or Jared Taylor is ad hominem. The self-righteous self-proclaimed owners of the moral high ground on race shall not be compelled to answer lowly Uncle Toms and Klansmen.

Even the conventional wisdom, promulgated ad nauseum by our academia and press, is that racism is predominantly a white crime whose victims are predominantly non-whites. Notwithstanding presumptions of "institutional racism" crime statistics indicate the conventional wisdom is in fact backward.

Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide trends in the U.S.: Trends by race

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders

In 2004, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.

In 2004, offending rates for blacks were 7 times higher than the rates for whites

The race distribution of homicide victims and offenders differs by type of homicide

For the years 1976-2004 combined -

* Black victims are greatly over represented in homicides involving drugs. Compared with the overall involvement of blacks as victims, blacks are less often the victims of sex-related homicides, workplace killings, and homicide by poison.

* Race patterns among offenders are similar to those among victims.

                       Homicide Type by Race, 1976-2004
                                     Victims                   Offenders
                             White   Black   Other      White   Black   Other
    All homicides             51.0%   46.9%   2.1%       45.9%   52.1%   2.0%
Victim/offender relationship
    Intimate                  56.5%   41.3%   2.2%       54.3%   43.6%   2.2%
    Family                    60.6%   37.1%   2.4%       59.1%   38.6%   2.3%
    Infanticide               55.8%   41.6%   2.5%       55.3%   42.2%   2.5%
    Eldercide                 69.1%   29.3%   1.6%       54.4%   44.0%   1.6%
Circumstances
    Felony murder             54.8%   42.7%   2.5%       39.1%   59.3%   1.6%
    Sex related               67.0%   30.6%   2.4%       54.9%   43.3%   1.9%
    Drug related              37.2%   61.9%    .9%       33.8%   65.1%   1.1%
    Gang related              57.6%   39.0%   3.5%       54.4%   41.3%   4.3%
    Argument                  48.5%   49.4%   2.1%       46.7%   51.1%   2.1%
    Workplace                 84.9%   12.0%   3.1%       70.5%   26.4%   3.1%
Weapon
    Gun homicide              47.3%   50.8%   1.9%       42.0%   56.2%   1.7%
    Arson                     59.2%   37.9%   2.9%       55.7%   42.0%   2.3%
    Poison                    80.2%   17.2%   2.5%       79.6%   18.6%   1.8%
Multiple victims or offenders
    Multiple victims          63.6%   33.1%   3.4%       56.1%   40.5%   3.4%
    Multiple offenders        55.0%   42.3%   2.7%       44.8%   52.8%   2.4%

Although slightly less true now than before,
most murders are intraracial

From 1976 to 2004 --

* 86% of white victims were killed by whites

* 94% of black victims were killed by blacks

These are government statistics, not the KKK's. Though I only found out about the link because I was reading something written by Steve Sailer, who would undoubtably be dismissed by the media as a fascist xenophobe klansman for having the audacity to note that the white statistics include Hispanics, which obscures the relatively high rate of Hispanic crime.

US race problems go far beyond "the soft bigotry of low expections". The truth revealed by crime statistics is shocking. The deliberate suppression and inversion of this truth by our politicians and media is disgusting. By so quickly appealing to the victimhood of being "treated as an African-American" Obama chooses to perpetuate the distorted fantasy rather than facing the distasteful truth. Anyone who thinks Driving While Black is a burden should try to imagine Walking While White.

UPDATE 17 Feb 2007: Long Beach Hate Crime:

Suddenly, newspaper editors, TV-news directors and other media faced an unsettling prospect of their own: If white-on-black hate crime is covered with an apologetic tone and references to the legacy of slavery, what’s the tone for covering black-on-white hate crime? Can a minority be a racist? And how can we, the media, get out of this?

As the Press-Telegram reported on November 3, three white women aged 19 to 21 emerged from a “maze” walk in a house and were confronted by up to 40 black teenagers who pelted them with pumpkins and lemons. The paper said, “The taunts and jeers grew more aggressive, the victims recalled, as did the size of the crowd. Now females joined in, and everyone began saying, ‘We hate white people, f--- whites!’ ”

The bizarre case, now in its fifth week of trial, resulted in hate-crime charges against nine girls and three boys, two of whom will be tried later. Yet the story didn’t run in the Los Angeles Times until November 7, buried inside local news. In that piece, writer J. Michael Kennedy quoted the Press-Telegram’s interview with the victims, watering down the racist language to the vague and more acceptable phrase “a series of antiwhite epithets.”

While some media tiptoed around the story, another outlook was emerging as the fast-tracked trial — required in youth cases — hurtled toward its late-November start date. Well-known black political columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who has explored both sides of the story in a levelheaded manner, was quoted by City News Service as noting that the latest FBI hate-crimes report showed that blacks now commit more than 20 percent of the hate crimes, the majority of victims white.

Emphasis mine.

In other words blacks commit a disproportionate share of hate crimes. Imagine how much more lopsided the statistics would be if DAs did not operate in a PC intellectual environment where simple questions like "can a minority be a racist" are considered profound.

This "bizarre case" is a wonderful illustration of the cognitive dissonance that arises when the liberal J schooler's minorities-as-victims view of race and hate crimes meets the reality.