Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road? Self-Defense Lessons

 

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The comic, above, is funny because there is an edge of truth to it. And some wisdom, if we are willing to learn. 

    Anyone who lives in a town or city large enough to have local news reporting will likely have noted that certain races or ethnic groups disproportionately show up in articles reporting violent crimes. For instance, even as a teenager, I had realized that reports of violent assaults or murders in my area would almost always involve someone with a Hispanic name--a consequence of local farmers and food processors using illegal aliens as laborers. 

    Micheal Levin delves into this issue in detail in his 1997 book, Why Race Matters, spending a considerable amount of time discussing the disparity in violent crimes committed by blacks versus whites. By necessity, the data he was relying upon was from the late 1980s and early '90s at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic when overall violent crime rates--especially murders--where much higher than we have seen in the intervening decades. Levin, nevertheless, noted that there was a significant asymmetry in interracial crime (footnotes and citations omitted):

... It is widely publicized that blacks are more likely than whites to be crime victims and that their victimizers are more likely to be black than white ....   What is less widely known is the preference of blacks for white victims. More than 97% of white crime is committed against whites, while one-half to two-thirds of black crime is also committed against whites. In 1987, 50.2% of simple assaults by blacks had white victims; between 1979 and 1986, 2,416,696 of the 4,088,945 simple assaults committed annually by blacks were directed against whites, a cross racial rate of 59%. Since blacks are 12% of the population, 88% of the victims of black (and white) crime would be white if victim choice were random. Thus, whites attacked blacks at about 1/4 of the rate predicted by random victim choice, while blacks attack whites at about 2/3 the predicted rate. Taking the ratio of these fractions--.66/.25--as a measure of intensity of preference by race, blacks may be said to prefer white victims more than 2.6 times as intensely as whites prefer black victims. Informative as this ratio is, it seriously understates the racial asymmetry because of the absolute greater crime rates of blacks. Since the average black is more than 2.5 times more likely to victimize a white than the average white is to victimize a black, and 10 times more likely to have committed a crime, the average black is about 25 times more likely to have victimized a white than the average white is to have victimized a black.

 Levin later notes that "[p]roportionally, blacks killed 22 times as many whites as whites did blacks," and that "a black is about 11 times more likely to have raped a white woman than a white is to have raped a black woman." In fact, the number of black women raped by white men is so low statistically that it is "too small to permit calculation of a standard error." He also points out that "80-90% of all interracial crime is black-on-white." 

    While overall crime rates have dropped since the 1990s, the disproportionality of black on white crime seems to have stayed pretty much the same, perhaps with a bit of an increase. Back in 2016,  Edwin S. Rubenstein published a paper entitled "The Color of Crime" as well an article of the same name setting out the highlights.  You can find Rubenstein's article here. The actual report (in PDF) is here. But a couple highlights:

• In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race.

• In 2013, of the approximately 660,000 crimes of interracial violence that involved blacks and whites, blacks were the perpetrators 85 percent of the time. This meant a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa. A Hispanic was eight times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa.

FBI crime statistics from 2019 report that blacks, who represent a little over 13% of population, committed 51.2% of murders, 26.7% of rapes, 52.7% of robberies, 33.2% of aggravated assaults, and, in fact, where grossly disproportionately represented across all crime categories except driving under the influence, violation of liquor laws, and drunkenness where the percentages were close to their share of the population. 

     Of course, these violent crimes are not being carried out equally by black men and black women, or even amongst all age groups. In this regard, a recent article by Addison Flay noted that "[b]lack males aged 14-49, just 3% of the population, commit 43% of the murders." I don't know the source of his number, but it is likely correct given the overall percentage of murders committed by blacks. 

   So, if you are walking down a street when you suddenly encounter a black male coming toward you--and you have no other information about the person than his race--what should you do? If your intuition or "gut feeling" tells you that the situation could be dangerous and you cross the street, kudos to you: that is the basic lesson in Gavin de Becker's book, The Gift of Fear. 

    But even from a purely logical perspective, avoidance is the correct course of action.  Levin,  in his book, goes into detail the statistical arguments on why you should cross the street. If you know nothing else beyond the gender and skin color, the risk of being attacked by a black male is well above a minimal threshold that you could infer you might be attacked, so the reasonable course of action would be to cross the street. It's not racial enmity that dictates that outcome, but rationality. 

     Which brings me back to Addison Flay's article about the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, stabbed to death on a commuter train for making the mistake of sitting with her back to a violent black man. Flay writes:

     ... How could she have avoided this situation? Literally, do not turn your back on a Black man. That’s how you could have avoided it. And any boomer dad or uncle would see their young daughter or niece with no self-awareness sit in front of someone like that and wince. And if she got lucky and got up that day and walked out of that train, they would be called racist for that reaction. But that day was not her lucky day. He was not one of the ‘good ones’. She paid with her life.

   That’s what it comes down to: luck. Sometimes you survive an encounter with an erratic Black man on public transit with only a bruise, a scar, or a shaken memory. Sometimes you end up the one on trial with a manslaughter charge, forced to explain why you defended yourself. And sometimes, like Iryna Zarutska, you don’t walk away at all.

    That day was the unlucky day when she encountered one of those ones; that day was the unlucky day when it cost her her life, and she is now dead, forever. And her family is now left staring at the hole that used to be their daughter, sister, niece. How could it have been avoided? If she were racist.

    We were conditioned to believe that any—any—level of prejudice, any shred of pattern recognition, is not just evil but the highest evil. Oh, you’re racist? I can’t even sit in the same room with you. You do a double-take, you look over your shoulder because a Black man is behind you? That’s a microaggression. You cross the street? That’s systemic racism. You instinctively tense up? That’s internalised hate. How dare you. How dare you feel that. Better to be dead than be caught thinking it. Better to bleed out on the floor than be called racist.

    And yet, if she’d been just a little more racist, she’d be alive. If she had trusted that instinct, her parents would still have a daughter. If she saw that guy and turned and walked the other way, she’d be alive. If she had decided she wouldn’t turn her back to him and sit behind him, she might still be alive. One moment of racism would have kept her breathing.