Due to the media not promoting this topic equally to other recent events I made the thread. The narrative the media pushes is that black men are under attack by white people, so I posted a graph showing that white people commit less murder per 100,000. Add in the fact that most murder is committed within ones own racial group, I feel like it's a reasonable counterargument to the narrative being force fed down America's throat. I also think it identifies a social issue that needs to be addressed/corrected. If you're specifically looking for an answer as to why I think its important, it's due to the fact were discussing a murder.
Now that I've answered your questions maybe you can give me your opinion on how the issue can be resolved. The numbers paint a very clear picture yet we are all being told to look in another direction during a push to reduce law enforcement in areas with record setting crime disproportionately committed by young black men.
So then your claim is about media? Which media? All of it?
I looked it up and there are a few thousand stories in Google news about the incident even though it just happened last week.
According to Google Trends, it's been picking up pretty steadily since the incident. Do you feel like the national media should be devoting more coverage to the murder of a child by a neighbor? I guess I can't argue with that, but what would be an acceptable amount of coverage for this kind of person to person crime? Should CNN, MSNBC, and Fox do a special on the incident? Should it be on the front page of every paper? Maybe so.
But your graph doesn't have anything to do with comparative rates of coverage of child murder to killings that involve police, media calls for reductions to law enforcement, or media coverage generally. So I find it hard to believe that media attention is what you're saying that graph matters to.
Here are the actual FBI statistics:
Expanded Homicide Data Table 3
What you can see is that in 2018, there were 16,335 offenders for the crime of murder. (Note that "offender" as defined by the FBI in uniform crime reporting means suspects, not people convicted of murder) Of those, 4,884 were white, 6,318 were black, 312 were other and 4,821 were unknown.
If you dig a bit deeper into
this chart, you see ~2600 white people were allegedly killed by white people and ~2600 black people were allegedly killed by black people (where race was known). Obviously this lends credence to the idea that people mostly kill people in their neighborhoods or people they know and given longstanding patterns of segregation in the US, it's not terribly surprising that the overwhelming majority of murders are committed within racial groups.
But your graph speaks to proportionality, that is to say "per 100,000." Firstly, the UCR doesn't have reporting on murders by race per 100,000 (in 2018 at least),
as you can see here. So someone with a vested interest obviously tried to do some creative math just for the purposes of making this graph. What the graph is pointing to is that 12 out of every 100,000 black people have been accused of being murderers, which translates to roughly 0.012%. I'm not sure if you thought the graph meant 12%, but it doesn't. Of course, because there are many more white people in the US, the proportion argument suggests that their number of murders is dwarfed by black people.
The irony of this is when you make a proportionality argument, you're using the same logic as Black Lives Matter, which argues that police disproportionately deploy lethal force on black suspects more than others, as
@Splinty pointed out to you in a response. Similarly, you could use the proportionality argument to look at poverty, limited access to legal defense, bias in arrests, or any number of claims. The problem is that every time you turn to race, and by extension proportion, what you're actually suggesting is that race is causing the difference. In other words, you're suggesting black people have some inherent quality that forces them to kill more, maybe more savagery? More bloodlust? More animal like instincts? A degraded culture?
These arguments are old. Slaveholders used them to justify slavery from the 1500s-1800s. Race scientists and a rigged legal system used them to justify Jim Crow from the late 1800s to the 1960s. Some social scientists have used them to justify deeply flawed anti-poverty initiatives from the 1960s to as recent as 5 years ago. The idea that there is some intrinsic racial difference whether genetic or cultural is the literal textbook definition of racism. Once you make race the cause (e.g. "white cops can't help themselves; they just murder young black men because they hate them" or "black people don't want any part in society; they're just criminal scum"), you end up making race the causal factor rather than the usually much more complex circumstances that lead to an individual standing over another human being who has suddenly become a corpse.
So when you say "this is what matters" to wage a race centered argument, you are using the same type of logic that you claim to despise in media (even the same word, maybe not ironically, in "matters"). If you are determined to resist the race first narrative that you claim is so divisive, you're instead only falling for it yourself and amplifying it, and even using a completely unrelated tragedy involving a 5 year old to do it. Across every conversation we've had on this forum, this is what I've been trying to put across to you because I take you at your word when you say you're disgusted by the way media uses race to polarize people. In a lot of ways, I share your skepticism of the motivations for how some media outlets frame stories. But unfortunately, in the vast majority of threads on this forum, you are the one who is over and over again rehearsing race centered arguments, all while claiming to be victimized somehow by all media.