Captain Ahab Gets His Whale

In Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, New York District Attorney Abe Weiss and his assistants, such as Larry Kramer, faced with the constant howling of the wolves of racial grievance stirred up by demagogues like Reverend Bacon, are in a desperate, Captain Ahabesque, search for “the great white defendant”, thinking that they have found him in the book’s protagonist, a Wall Street trader named Sherman McCoy whose adultery has landed him in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Well, it now appears that the “great white defendant” has finally made an appearance in the person of Dylann Roof, the twenty-one year old drug and video game addict charged with the mass shooting in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina last week. Assuming that what we are being told about Roof is accurate, he appears to be everything the progressive Left could have hoped for in a mass murderer: a white, Southern, male who posed with the Confederate battle flag and wrote a lengthy manifesto declaring his intention to start a race war in response to all the black-on-white crime in America. You would almost think the Left had invented him.

Let’s get the ceremonial statement of the obvious over and done with. The shooting of innocent people in a church is a heinous and horrendous crime for which this punk ought to be convicted and executed. There, now that we have gotten that out of the way, we can move on to discuss the larger issues surrounding this incident.

Roof, it has been widely reported, began his descent into homicidal madness, when, following the Trayvon Martin shooting, he searched for black-on-white crime online, was led to the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and found countless examples of rapes and other violent crimes committed by blacks against whites which have gone under-reported in the mainstream media. Progressives in the media, with the help of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Centre which capitalize on the fear of white racism that they spread to raise funds while masquerading as experts on hate, have jumped all over this and concluded, in what passes for logic in the progressive mind, that the Council of Conservative Citizens must therefore be blamed for the Roof’s actions.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Progressives “reason” that the Council of Conservative Citizens by reporting on black-on-white crime is trying to stir up race hatred against blacks among whites. If that is the case, what then are progressives in the media trying to do when they make every single racially-motivated crime committed by a white person a front page headline and breaking news story and then ceaselessly talk about it for months on end while saying virtually nothing about racially-motivated crimes against whites? Are they trying to stir up race hatred against whites among non-whites and/or self-loathing among whites? Stories about racially-motived crimes committed by whites always seem to be interpreted in such a way as into suggest that they are the tip of the iceberg, that many, if not most, white people secretly harbour racism that could easily turn into the kind of violent racial hatred manifested in people like Roof, and that something must be done therefore to re-educate white people. A better case can be made that the mainstream media seeks to make whites the targets of racial hatred, than that organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens, in countering the narrative of the mainstream media, seek to make non-whites the targets of racial hatred.

Douglas Quan, writing in the National Post a few days ago, said:

One statistic the group [the Council of Conservative Citizens]often cites is that there are 20,000 rapes against white women by black men annually.

Immediately thereafter he goes on to write:

What is not mentioned is that the 2008 U.S. justice department report upon which that number is based shows the vast majority of sexual crimes against white women that year — more than 88,000 cases — were committed by white men.

In other words, according to Quan, the Council of Conservative Citizens has misrepresented the facts through partial reporting, presumably to generate fear of black rapists on the part of whites. Quan himself, however, has neglected to mention all of the relevant statistics. The report in question does indeed say that more white-on-white sexual crimes occurred than black-on-white. It also says that more black-on-black sexual crimes occurred than white-on-black. It consistently shows that crimes in which the offender and victim are of the same race, white-on-white or black-on-black, far outnumber either black-on-white, or white-on-black crimes. One more statistic needs to be considered to get the full picture, and that is that of white-on-black crime. The report gives the percentage of sexual crimes committed against black victims in 2008 in which the offender was perceived to be white as 0.0%. Indeed, in the vast majority of categories of crime, the report finds black-on-white crime to be a larger percentage of crimes committed against whites than white-on-black crime is of crimes committed against blacks.

What does this information tell us?

The fact that crime is more likely to take place within a race, by blacks against blacks or whites against whites, than by members of either race against the other, is an excellent argument against racist fearmongering. The fact that interracial crime is far more often black-on-white than white-on-black, however, tells us who the real racist fearmongers are. If white women are far more likely to be raped by white men than by black men, blacks are far more likely to be murdered by other blacks than by whites, much less by deranged racist lunatics like Dylann Roof. One would never know that from listening to the narrative of the mainstream media.

In that narrative animosity towards other races is treated as being an affliction almost exclusively of white people. This narrative is clearly not supported by the facts, as the higher likelihood of interracial crime being committed against whites than by whites indicates a higher level of racial animosity towards whites among blacks than towards blacks among whites, but it contributes to those facts by promoting fear of whites among blacks and other non-whites, which in turn generates racial animosity towards whites. That animosity manifests itself in the black-on-white crime rate that the media ignores on its best days and attempts to hide and deny on its worst. When the facts about black-on-white crime and the media’s mendacious handling of them become known to a diseased mind like Roof’s, mercifully rare incidents like this one can ensue. None of this excuses the crime, of course. My point is that the media figures who are pointing the finger at organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens that exist to counter their dishonest narrative, should look to the proverbial three or four fingers pointing back at them.

The percentage of crimes committed by blacks in the United States is disproportionately high when compared to their percentage in the population. While progressives accuse anyone who notices this of being racist, think about the significance of this fact in light of the statistics we have already considered. If intraracial crime is committed at a much higher frequency than interracial crime then a disproportionately high rate of commission of crimes among blacks means that they are also victimized at a higher rate. If those who sanctimoniously preach that “black lives matter” truly believed their own words they would realize there is a problem that needs to be addressed here and attempt to deal with it rather than scream “racist” at anyone who points out these facts while pretending that the biggest threats to black people are racist cops and Dylann Roofs.

Instead, they prefer, like the prosecutors in Wolfe’s book, to pin their hopes on validating their delusions by finding that “great white defendant”. Of course, unlike the fictional Sherman McCoy, the real Dylann Roof seems to be guilty of the crime of which he is accused. If the murder itself was not proof enough of Roof’s insanity, his handing the progressive Left exactly what they wanted would surely suffice.