Perpetuating the Myth

Friday's Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Donna Brazile. Brazile's column was a condemnation of anti-semitic bigotry in which she compares anti-semitism to the sort of prejudice blacks have faced in this country.

In the course of her essay she says this:

As a black woman, I’ve experienced plenty of discrimination, though far less than my ancestors suffered. And in the past year I’ve watched the same videos and read the same accounts that millions of people around the world have seen—images of police killing unarmed black people in American cities.

I cried over these horrific killings, as I cried for the victims gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston.

There are a couple of things about this passage that are problematic, but one of them is that she, perhaps inadvertently, perpetuates the myth that unarmed black people are uniquely victimized by white police. Despite the strenuous efforts on the part of the left/liberal media, politicians and celebrities to convince us that this is so, it simply isn't.

In his book Fault Lines, black pastor Voddie Baucham cites several examples of prominent individuals and media reinforcing the myth:

NBA player Lebron James: "We're [black men] literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our home."

The New York Times quoting a protest organizer: "I'm just as likely to die from a cop as I am from COVID."

A Washington Post headline: "Police Killing Black People Is a Pandemic, Too."

The media also reinforces this myth every time they use the phrase "unarmed black man." NPR for instance, used the phrase 82 times in 2020 when reporting on the deaths of black men at the hands of whites. The phrase was used 65 times in the 187 days after Ahmand Arbery was killed in Georgia by two white men (who were not police officers).

In that same 187 day period the phrase "unarmed white man" was not used once even though 11 unarmed white men were killed by police during that stretch.

We hear a lot about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile and other innocent victims of police brutality, mistakes or incompetence. But when the victim is black and the officer is white the killing is automatically imputed to racism.

Baucham points out, however, that for every case like those mentioned in the previous sentence there are numerous similar cases which never make it onto the evening news. For example, Tony Timpa's case is much like George Floyd's but we never heard about it. Timpa was white.

Tamir Rice was shot and killed because the police thought that a toy gun he brandished was real. It was a national story because Rice was young and black, but in 2016 the Washington Post reported that over a two year span police killed 86 people under similar circumstances, 54 of whom were white and 19 of whom were black.

Baucham describes similar circumstances with regard to almost all of the killings that have achieved notoriety in recent years. Yet the myth persists. Baucham writes:

In a recent man-on-the-street interview conducted by Prager University, three young black men were asked how many unarmed black men the police killed in 2019. "About a thousand," said one. "At least a thousand," said the second. The third estimated "Fourteen hundred." When asked how many unarmed white men were killed by police that same year, their answers ranged from four to fourteen.

The young men were astonished to learn that only nineteen white men and nine black men had been killed by police in 2019....

I suspect a lot of others would be surprised, too, given how disgracefully tendentious and pernicious our news reporting on these incidents has been.