In the wake of the brutal killings of 9 black South Carolinians, many fingers have been pointed toward long-recognized -- but rarely-addressed -- blights on the American ethos: the prevalence of systemic racism, a steady rise in white supremacist hate groups, and heedless gun laws, among others. The manner in which mainstream news outlets grapple with these issues, however, underscores a deep-set reticence in this nation's ability to talk about race without trying to absolve white people of all responsibility. It took these media outlets a painfully long time to finally start referring to the Charleston Shooting as a hate crime, and Dylan Roof as a terrorist. And yet, numerous outlets and talking heads are still billing the massacre as an instance of a lone wolf acting independently of larger forces. "Unthinkable," these public figures call the shooting, as if it were impossible to imagine a white man massacring a group of marginalized bodies.
But what is even more dangerous than the problematics of the reporting on the Charleston Shooting, is the sheer amount of misinformation that is being tossed around on the internet by individuals with little will to actually fact-check or critically engage with the information that is being fed to them. One popular report in particular, from conspiracist website Infowars.com, proves to be especially toxic. Watch the video report below:
The following are excerpts from the report, each followed by rebuttals that either refute misleading statistics or offer a larger critical perspective.
Liberals are hastily exploiting this tragic incident to fabricate the myth that there are armies of white people waiting to commit violent hate crimes against blacks.
Rebuttal: According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, South Carolina alone is home to 19 hate groups, which are defined as having "beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics." Of these 19 groups, 16 are either the Klu Klux Klan , Neo-Confederate, Neo-Nazi, or White Nationalist oriented. So while the hyperbole of literal "armies of white people" may not hold true, there is a staggering amount of white groups that are inclined to use violent means in order to advance their racist doctrine.
There's no wave of hate crimes being committed by whites against black people. Justice Department figures show that Black people comprise 13% of hate crime victims -- a figure in line with their population numbers. White people on the other hand comprise 65% percent of hate crime victims.
Rebuttal: Oh how giving statistics out of context can be a dangerous game… According to census data, African Americans do make up 13.2% of the population. But saying that 65% of hate crimes are committed against white people actually undermines the argument that the rate of hate crimes against white people is higher, since caucasians make up 77.7% of the population. Doing some simple division with the data that the video cites, one finds that 1 in 1,000 black people experienced a violent hate crime between 2007 and 2011, while 0.9 in 1,000 white people experience a violent hate crime between the same time period. The reporter, Paul Joseph Watson, brings in a table from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but fails to point out that the table indicates an increase in hate crimes against black people over the last decade and that the rate of hate crime infliction is higher for black people than it is for white people.
Black people are responsible for half of all homicides within the United States, despite making up only 13% of the population.
Rebuttal: According to the FBI, 2,698 homicides were committed by black offenders and 2,755 homicides were committed by white offenders in 2013. So the statistic given by Mr. Watson does hold true at face-value, but the way in which he presents the figure is meant to illustrate the idea that white people are actually in more danger than are black people (see later excerpts from the video). In reality, only 409 of the 2,698 homicides committed by black people were against white people. The majority (2,245) were committed against other black people. So the issue at stake is really the epidemic of black-on-black violence, rather than -- as Mr. Watson would have us believe -- a problem of black violence against white people.
Despite being outnumbered by whites 5:1, blacks commit 8 times more crimes against whites than vice versa, according to FBI statistics.
Rebuttal: The operative word here is "crimes." While these statistics in question could not be readily found in the FBI's database or another reputable source, it is interesting to see that Mr. Watson suddenly shifts his language from "homicides" to just run-of-the mill "crimes" in order to keep in line with his argument. For example, a black youth convicted of tagging property owned by a white adult would contribute to this exceedingly general statistic, being lumped in with both homicides and home-invasions. Saying that black people are 8 times more likely to commit crimes against white people is misleading in that the statistic does not reveal the intricacies of what actually constitutes the crimes in question, whether they be quality-of-life or of a more violent nature. Again, it would be greatly helpful if Mr. Watson could provide a link to the FBI's data from which he calculated this statistic…
Incidents involving hate crimes, including murders, where the perpetrator is black and the victim is white are almost universally ignored by the mainstream media. For years, the phenomenon of overwhelmingly black people randomly attacking white people on the street was disguised by the press, calling it 'The Knockout Game,' when in reality it represented a disturbing wave of violent black-on-white hate crime.
Rebuttal: While horrific and senseless, reported instances of "The Knockout Game" are incredibly rare, relative to the size of the US population and the national murder rate. The attacks themselves are real, but the frightening trend or epidemic, it seems, is not. According to the FBI, a whopping 66.5% of all hate crimes committed in 2013 were motivated by the offender's anti-black or anti-African American bias. 21.2% were motivated by an offender's anti-white bias. White-on-black hate crime does exist, but white-on-black hate crime is over three times as common.
Once again we're seeing this dumb argument made by liberals, who claim that the Charleston shooting isn't being called an act of terrorism, simply because the perpetrator is white. They seem to be incapable of visiting Dictionary.com and finding out that terrorism means to use violence to coerce for political purposes, particularly targeting institutions of government. Newsflash: when white guys commit acts of terror, which are politically motivated, they are labeled 'terrorists.' Bill Ayers, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Robert Rudolph. They were all denounced as terrorists. But when Ishmael Abdullah Brinsley shot two NYPD cops in the head last December in a Black Lives Matter revenge attack, which was clearly politically motivated, he wasn't called a terrorist. So by that benchmark, neither should the Charleston shooter.
Rebuttal: This one is tricky and multifaceted, but here goes: shooter Dylan Roof allegedly wanted to start a race war and reinstate segregation -- both political desires. Thus his massacre, by the very definition used by Mr. Watson, falls under the realm of terrorism. The list of white terrorists is accurate, with the exception of Bill Ayers, who was never officially deemed a terrorist by the FBI (his non-lethal attacks were only on physical property and not individual lives). Bringing in the example of Brinsley, however, highlights the sort of pick-and-choose argumentation of the report. While true that Brinsley could have been labeled a terrorist under the Dictionary.com definition, the media has, in fact, previously labeled black individuals as terrorists (i.e. members of the Black Liberation Army, Cheri Laverne Dalton, and Christopher Dorner). So making an eye-for-an-eye argument in favor of leaving 'terror' out of the discourse surrounding this massacre is both childish and ill-informed.
Should law-abiding blacks be made to feel guilty for disproportionately high black homicide rates? No. But by the same token, law abiding whites should not be figuratively put on trial and pressured to atone for their white guilt and relinquish their Second Amendment rights in response to events like the Charleston shooting. So long as the debate continues to be centered around hating on and shaming people for their skin color, resentment on both sides will continue to boil over, encouraging mentally disturbed people to violently act out, with more innocent victims being the price we pay for our obsession with race.
Rebuttal: This is where the report makes only the slightest bit of sense. It is true that black people should not be made to feel guilty for the high (largely black-on-black) homicide rate, but only because systemic racism -- stemmingfrom the birth of this nation -- has made legitimate routes for economic empowerment unattainable for the vast majority of black and brown bodies (a great read on this subject can be found from author Victor M. Rios) . But this systemic racism was put into practice by white people, and thus it only follows that the "guilt" (and the moral onus to amend) rests upon the white population. Furthermore, the calls for Second Amendment Rights to be taken away from white people are about as serious as Mr. Watson's argument. It is completely -- and constitutionally -- implausible that such a law would ever be passed in a nation dominated by white voters. The sentiment illustrated by the Tweets alluded to in the video are clearly more representative of a deep-set frustration than a legitimate political movement. Mr. Watson's final comment is valid only in that it is true that violence will continue to persist unless drastic action is taken. But boiling down this incident to a "lone wolf" scenario is dangerous (and unfounded) because it masks Roof's motive behind a chemical imbalance instead of a societal one.
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