Excellent. Via Scott Lemieux, what Radley Balko said about the Duke lacross case.
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Making the Point
16 Apr 2007 02:56 pm
Comments (50)
Seems to me that Radley Balko has it exactly backwards. Balko seems to think that the number of news stories about the Duke kids is a good thing; that the lack of stories about the Giles is bad. But that has it completely wrong. The number of news stories about the Duke case is what makes the case so horrendous. Thank goodness that Giles's mug shot wasn't on the cover of Newsweek too.
Balko's post merely provides more evidence of his fundamental wrongheadedness.
Al,
The Duke players were treated unfairly, no doubt, and on this point I have fought tooth and nail with many on the left, so I think I've earned an assumption of credibility when I say that it disturbed me.
But surely you see the point that where there was outrage about the Duke players, when we've never even heard of this man in Texas.
Whether this is indicative of the media being more cynical than the public or the media responding to a bias public, I don't know, but I imagine that it is some of each.
On the larger issue of race and class, is it not concerning to you that the Duke case was so controversial and the case of the man in Texas was virtually unheard of nationally?
You can hyper-focus on the narrow issue of the fact that the Duke guys had their reputations smeared, but this man in Texas spent years in jail!!!
Surely the message isn't lost on you right?
This makes a point, and a particularly important one.
But similarly, from the Nifong angle, these three guys did get railroaded (to the extent they did - not the worst case in history, but still) because of the racial context. It's more a problem with Nifong than "the system," but it's still shows how much power to destroy a "rogue" prosecutor can have.
As for Giles - he's emblematic of a flawed system - and what it's capable of - as well. And there are always going to be more eggregious cases than the next.
Giles is free. What about innocent men who get exectuted for a crime they didn't commit?
The real problem: The fact that the prosecution bar has fought/lobbied against DNA exonerations for years - and if not for the hard work of people like Barry Scheck and his Innocence Project, on individuals cases, lobbying the broader issue and keeping this stuff in the media/public consciousness, things would be much, much worse - and it's sad that someone like Scheck is even needed. Prosecutors (and lawmakers) will argue that they don't want to keep opening the door for endless appeals - but it's sad and frightening that, in some cases, certain prosecutors would rather win than be sure they have the right person.
But yes - the Duke 3 - not the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct or justice system failure in history. Still sucks to be them - as it sucks to be many other people.
It wasn't conservative outrage that made a media circus of the Duke case.
It wasn't conservative outrage that made a media circus of the Duke case.
Perhaps not, but the conservatives did send in the clowns.
As is so often the case with Al, it's hard to tell if we're looking at deliberate stupidy or a clever simulation. Obviously it's unpleasant to have your face on the cover of Newsweek, but to think that it compares in any way to spending ten years in the hellhole of a Texas maximun security prison labeled as a rapist, requires a particularly perverse and inadequate mind.
Enough additional cases like these, and political pressure will build for a return to the old system under which the victim's uncorroborated testimony was not sufficient to secure a rape conviction.
Matt, you were a philosophy major, so surely you can appreciate the sharp distinction between the media not doing enough to help some innocent guy in Texas versus the national press fomenting a giant hate rally media circus against innocent guys in North Carolina?
The New York Times fanned the flames of the Duke Hoax throughout the spring of 2006, running dozens of stories about a dubious edging toward preposterous small town crime accusation hundreds of miles from New York City. Why? Precisely for the same reason the "Law & Order" juggernaut runs so many stories about rich white people plotting murder in their Park Avenue lairs: it's the hunt for the Great White Defendant as Tom Wolfe called in it in his prescient "Bonfire of the Vanities."
The Duke Hoax was anticipated in Tom Wolfe's 1987 "Bonfire of the Vanities." As I wrote a year ago:
Let's review the similarities
1. Bonfire: In Wolfe's classic, the Bronx District Attorney Abe Weiss "was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature."
Duke: The Durham D.A. did nonstop interviews to publicize the Duke case initially, although he has clammed up since the DNA tests that were supposed to prove a rape had actually been committed came back negative.
2. Bonfire: Weiss is known to his underlings as "Captain Ahab" for his pursuit of the "Great White Defendant." The D.A. finds the perfect Great White Defendant in Sherman McCoy, a rich, pompous, adulterous WASP bond trader, whom he charges with running over an innocent black ghetto youth with his Mercedes. McCoy is Central Casting's dream candidate for the role of GWD. The only minor flaw is that McCoy is not, actually, guilty. But a little thing like his innocence doesn't stop the DA's office and the New York media from ruining his life.
Duke: On the Duke Lacrosse team, 46 of the 47 players are white. Worse, many come from WASP prep schools.
3. Why was the Bronx D.A. fixated on finding the almost-mythical Great White Defendant?
Bonfire: First, as Wolfe explains:
"Weiss had an election coming up, and the Bronx was 70 percent black and Latin, and he was going to make sure the name Abe Weiss was pumped out to them on every channel that existed. He might not do much else, but he was going to do that."
Duke: Nifong's Durham, North Carolina is 45 percent black.
Bonfire: Second, Wolfe notes:
"Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx … shared Captain Ahab's mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, "What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail."… It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins."
Wolfe, America's leading expert on contemporary status wars, observes that nobody wants to be suspected of political incorrectness because:
"These days the thing about bigotry was it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste."
In New York state, blacks are imprisoned at a rate 11.9 times as often as non-Hispanic whites, according to a new analysis based on 2000 Census data by the pseudonymous statistician La Griffe du Lion.
Duke: As is common in more politically conservative states, the black-white incarceration ratio is lower in North Carolina at 7.2 times, but it is still huge. As every careful student of American crime patterns has discovered, racial bias in the criminal justice system does not play an important role in causing these radical racial disparities. Wolfe points out:
"Not that [the overwhelmingly black and Latin defendants] weren't guilty. One thing [Larry] Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming that you didn't waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton...
Bonfire: Third, persecuting a Great White Defendant provides a vacation from the depressing day-to-day routine of prosecutors: "the shoveling of the chow into the gullet of the criminal justice system." Wolfe explains that unlike on TV, prosecutors are not normally engaged in a battle of wits with criminal masterminds:
“But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things."
Duke: The prosecutor seems likely to get all the legal challenge he wants, because wealthy parents of Duke players are hiring expensive defense attorneys, including Bill Clinton's lawyer Bob Bennett.
Bonfire: Fourth, prosecuting minorities is a thankless job, one the press takes almost no interest in, which is galling to ambitious D.A.s:
"The press couldn't even see these cases. It was just poor people killing poor people. To prosecute such cases was to be part of the garbage collection service, necessary and honorable, plodding and anonymous."
Duke: The New York Times, which seldom deigns to notice crimes committed in New York City, has given this distant case a couple of dozen articles.
You can find links to documenting evidence at:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/060430_unequal_justice.htm
Steve Sailer,
I believe Al Sharpton is keeping me and my white brothers down. I believe the Duke case is yet another example of this.
Is there some type of ointment or unguent you can recommend for me to use to rid myself of Al Sharpton keeping me and my white brothers down?
Steve, you seem to have some interest in the intersection between race and American politics, so surely you can appreciate the sharp distinction between a principled advocacy for the rights of the criminally accused, and the motives of those who referred to this case as a "lynching" and compared "The Duke Three" to the Scottsboro Boys.
I've written here and elsewhere about my dismay with the way certain elements in the media convicted these guys without a trial. But there was more than one group fanning the flames of this story. And many observers took an interest for precisely the same reason that they themselves convict criminal defendants in the media without a trial: it's the hunt for the Great White Victim.
I think the media is far too comfortable reporting on "alleged" occurrences. Nancy Grace, etc., report breathlessly every day on crimes that were "allegedly" occurred by x person or y person. Some of these have, of course, proven false, but since Nancy Grace says "allegedly," they're not held liable for their non-stop coverage of these "alleged" murderers, rapists, etc.
Maybe if CNN, MSNBC and FOX News had higher standards for journalism instead of going for ratings, then we wouldn't be in this situation. But then again, pigs are allegedly not flying.
The prestige national media (NYT, Newsweek, etc.) promoted the Duke Frame-Up from the get-go, with mostly bloggers and small websites pointing out the obvious flaws in the case. For example, I wrote about how Wolfe's "Great White Defendant" concept was being played out to a T in this case 50 weeks ago, after the NYT had already run two dozen mostly credulous articles on the case.
As it turns out, we members of the fringe element who looked at the facts of the case in the spring of 2006 and said it was a hoax were right, while the mainstream media were wrong.
That's not a coincidence. There has been a long-lasting pattern of anti-white male hate hoaxes on American college campuses, a general trend that has gotten almost no coverage in the mainstream media. Duke had all the hallmarks of another anti-Great White Defendant hoax. For example, see my 2004 article about the incident at the Claremont Colleges where a professor tried to frame the white male students in her class for trashing her car with anti-minority slogans:
http://www.isteve.com/Hate_Hoax.htm
This is just one of dozens of such incidents in recent years.
There are several sharp distinctions between the two cases.
For one, in the Giles case, the victim really was gang raped. By a man named James Giles; and a confederate who gave the cops his name. And the victim picked James Giles -- the wrong James Giles -- out of a photo lineup. He wasn't exactly clean, either, or the cops might not have been so easily convinced he was the man. (He was "on probation for the attempted murder of a co-worker".)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-exonerate9apr09,0,2045894,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
So: a co-rapist gives his name, victim identified him, and the guy's already known to be violent.
In the Texas case, someone deserved punishment. That they punished the wrong man was in part malfeasance, in part laziness, in part bad luck. In the Duke case, the accuser was lying. Nobody deserved punishment. That the kids were only punished reputationally, for a year, and monetarily was in part malfeasance and laziness. But it was mostly malice. MALICE. That's a big difference.
There's a second big way the two cases are different. As far as I can tell (which isn't much, so I'm open to others' interpretations), in the Texas case there was not much questioning of the case as it went to trial. There was contrary evidence; Giles had a good alibi including physical evidence that he could not have been present at the crime. This was ignored. Racism? Probably. Poverty? Probably. But the case did not become obviously untenable based on the evidence until DNA could be tested. That is because, again, the victim -- a real rape victim -- picked the wrong man out of a lineup. That is strong evidence, and hard to overcome.
Finally, for better or worse, there was a media circus about the one case, and nothing around the other. I would have been perfectly happy having no opinion about the Duke case, but it kept coming up, and eventually I got curious as to why everyone was so up in arms about what seemed like an open/shut gang rape. (I read "Our Guys".) I read up and amazed at how shoddy the case seemed, and how badly it was being run. And the further it went, the worse it got. It stank to high heaven, and the political motive for Nifong was transparent enough.
If I had read about the Giles case before DNA testing exonerated him? I would have thought he was innocent, but I would not have been outraged because the mistakes made by the police were understandable. I was outraged at the Duke thing when it came out that Nifong had conspired to repress the exculpatory DNA evidence.
"That's not a coincidence. There has been a long-lasting pattern of anti-white male hate hoaxes on American college campuses, a general trend that has gotten almost no coverage in the mainstream media."
So we really do agree. Al Sharpton is keeping the white man down.
Again, is there sometype of ointment or unguent I can purchase to regain my racial pride and thus fight off subsequent efforts of Al Sharpton to follow me around trying to keep me down?
So in other words, Steve, you aren't really interested in protecting the rights of the criminally accused. You're more interested in building a narrative about the Great White Victim.
Thanks for conceding the point. Saves me a lot of trouble.
Steve Sailer, as per his usual, creates a comment that is unwittingly useful (though not useful in the way he thinks).
The real question is: what is the really substantive problem in the US? Is it prosecutors using accusing innocent white wealthy males as ploys to get votes? Or is it prosecutors accusing innocent black poor males as ploys to get votes?
Not only was (and is) white prosecutors/police/politicians accusing innocent black poor males extremely common, it was a crucial centerpiece of American politics until the mid-Sixties - and it remains important today. It was (and is) a primary reason many whites could convince themselves that their racism was justified.
Which was (and remains) a critical fact in all sorts of things beyond just the justice system - America's real estate industry is entirely predicated on the segregation partially created by white realtors fanning hysteria over nonexistant black criminals in the 1950s-1970s that created our current living patterns (read: trillions of dollars in real estate determined by this factor in our largest economic sector).
Hyped-up hysteria over black criminality also drove much of the politics of the 1970s through early 1990s. It wasn't a random occurance that Nixon, Reagan and Bush all had as a central platform "law and order", which was clearly a codeword for black criminality (all three campaigns, when illustrating criminality, often picked black criminals to demonize).
Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is especially un-truthful to reality, because the politics of New York is often been driven by white politicians' efforts to ride propaganda about black criminality. Guiliani was clearly a vote by New Yorkers to "kick the darkies in the ass and keep them in their place", which he proceeded vigorously to do. Koch and Bloomberg certainly had that element in their politics, too.
On the other side, how many politicians (white or black or purple) have ridden white criminality into office? Sure, there are some (Eliot Spitzer perhaps, perhaps Tom Bradley), but while focusing on black criminality gets you into the White House, focusing on white criminality doesn't get you anywhere near that far.
It really helps to remember things: Giuliani became nationally prominent in the 1980s for arresting Wall Streeters and hauling them out of their offices in handcuffs on television.
Burritoboy should take up his concerns about "propaganda about black criminality" with our host, Matthew Yglesias, who wants the gun control laws in Washington DC eased because his house was recently the victim of a horrifying home invasion, and he wants to buy a gun to defend it from another one. I don't think he's worried that he needs a gun to defend himself from, say, Charles Krauthammer. Perhaps Burritoboy could persuade Matt that he's just suffering from white racist hallucinations ...
"It really helps to remember things: Giuliani became nationally prominent in the 1980s for arresting Wall Streeters and hauling them out of their offices in handcuffs on television."
I'm confused. Was Sharpton keeping Giuiani down, or was Sharpton keeping the Wall Streeters down?
Oh, by the way, I'm Pomona '95, so I have some visibility into Sailer's bullshit on that one, too. One central problem is that the Claremont campuses have a long-standing problem with people writing anti-gay, racist or sexist things on walls. Pomona has a long wall next to CMC which has been a target of that sort of activity for well over a decade - I know, because I covered one major incident of that as a sophomore writing for the 5-campus newspaper in 1992. So, it wasn't surprising if someone did that again in 1999 (true, 1999 was a hoax, but the administrators didn't know that).
And I fail to see how any administrator acted inappropriately in the Dunn case. No student was punished or even individually accused. To everybody except Dunn, it looked like another instance of something that's happened several times before. Why having a rally against writing shit on other people's cars is a bad thing, I don't know. Did Sailer want CMC to have a rally pro-"writing racist shit on people's cars"?
"I'm confused. Was Sharpton keeping Giuiani down, or was Sharpton keeping the Wall Streeters down?"
Petey is, of course, precisely right. Guiliani prosecuted individual Wall Street figures, mostly for quite well-founded reasons. When he was Mayor, the NYPD would often search every young black male in a neighborhood. Young Wall Streeters were not searched, even when they were publically drunken and exposing themselves. Young black males coming home from their jobs would get shot because their wallets supposedly looked like guns. Young Wall Streeters coming home did not get shot. Most people can tell the difference between the two types of law enforcement.
Several hours before the Claremont administration held their night rally with thousands of black shirted student howling their hatred of "hate," the administration already knew that two eyewitnesses had stated that the Claremont professor Kerri F. Dunn had defaced her own car. Yet, they went ahead.
Leonard, they gave the guy's name; but it was also the name of someone who lived across the street from the victim and who fit the description better. And the prosecution knew this, and withheld the information from the defense. How is this different from Nifong's withholding of exculpatory evidence?
Also, the Dallas DA's office has a serious history of racism, including a stated policy of illegally striking black people from juries. Which means that, unlike the Duke lacrosse players, James Giles is probably not the only guy to get railroaded the same way. That's what I call MALICE.
Steve buddy! Keep up the good fight! Some day a rich white guy will get a break in this country and all the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons (the only two black guys I've heard of, by the way) of the world will be shown for the tyrants that they are.
I don't think he's worried that he needs a gun to defend himself from, say, Charles Krauthammer.
This is truly classic Sailer stuff. MY is worried about crime, and crime is mostly perpetrated by blacks, so therefore MY is worried about black crime, and the commenteriat ought to give MY a good lecture on the perniciousness of racism. Wow.
The reason why the Duke guys got off is the exact reason why the narrative of white victimhood never dies: they got off because they have a constituency. Never mind how much the NYT and other liberal loudmouths tried to hang them; they had the resources and the megaphone to get their own story out, and so in the end the truth prevailed.
Whereas when some poor black guy from the ghetto gets picked up on suspicion of dealing drugs, there's no liberal media conspiracy out to convict him, but it makes no difference because he has no one on his side in the first place. He just loses.
Less advantaged folks get falsely accused of stuff all the time and no one knows or cares. Falsely accuse a middle-class white guy and the whole world will know about it. And yet, somehow, this state of affairs is supposed to support the case that white people are the victims. I guess, when you have a victim complex like Sailer, that's the way the story always ends.
That is because, again, the victim -- a real rape victim -- picked the wrong man out of a lineup. That is strong evidence, and hard to overcome.
Before you go too far with this line of argument, consider that when the wrong guy gets picked out of a lineup, it's often the result of a bad-faith lineup process.
Knowing what we know now, why do you suppose the victim picked Giles out of a lineup? Sure, it could have just been random chance, but it's far more likely given the context that the police steered her towards making the "right" pick, or that the process was abused in a similar way.
Good instinct, Steve non-Sailer:
Mr. Giles said he was told that the victim learned the name "James Giles" from a neighbor before the photo lineup and was instructed by police which picture matched. Police detectives have denied the identification was tainted.
Obviously there's dispute here, but Giles may have more credibility right now.
"Several hours before the Claremont administration held their night rally with thousands of black shirted student howling their hatred of "hate," the administration already knew that two eyewitnesses had stated that the Claremont professor Kerri F. Dunn had defaced her own car. Yet, they went ahead."
There were only roughly 4,000 students at the 5 colleges at that time. Thousands of students don't show up to anything, because "thousands" would be more than half of the entire student body. Which includes the usually apolitical Mudders and a more conservative CMC student body. The only way you could get thousands of students is if you offered either free weed or guaranteed A's (and preferably both).
Again, what's wrong with a rally against racism, sexism and Anti-Semitism? It wasn't like they lynched any accused students - they had a rally against vandalizing things by writing nasty stuff on them (which, again, has happened multiple times). That, to me, is certainly a valid reason to have a rally at any time. That Dunn created a hoax doesn't invalidate other people's motivations in having the rally - it only invalidates her comments.
. . . the conservatives did send in the clowns.
Not a single non-conservative clown?
"Several hours before the Claremont administration held their night rally with thousands of black shirted student howling their hatred of "hate," the administration already knew that two eyewitnesses had stated that the Claremont professor Kerri F. Dunn had defaced her own car. Yet, they went ahead."
Is anyone else as tired as this sort of argumentation as I am? Like, because two people come out of the woodwork a couple hours ahead of time and make allegations which we now know to be true, everyone is blameworthy for not instantly acting as though the allegations were true? Yes, the world should stop every time someone says "wait."
Uh, yeah, the Claremont administration should have stopped and not given their hoaxing professor a platform to make a demagogic speech blaming her own white male students to what was, indeed by all accounts, thousands of students.
Is this all that complicated?
Just google "Kerri F. Dunn" and decide for yourself if Sailer cares an inordinate amount about this particular story.
Sometimes I'm reminded of that lonewacko commentor (from prospect.org and elsewhere) who will go on for days about some random school board member from San Luis Obispo who reeks of reconquista.
The Claremont and Duke frauds were both part of a widespread pattern of hate crime hoaxes on American campuses.
As John Leo wrote in 2005:
"Campuses are developing new doubts about reports of race and gender crimes. Last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a roundup of campus hoaxes, cautioning that this "flurry of fabrications doesn't necessarily suggest a trend." But it certainly looks like a trend. Race and gender are the dominant concerns at colleges today. Sometimes the temptation to prove that racism and sexism pervade campus life leads people to fake incidents."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/leo053000.asp
He goes on to list a fraction of the campus hate hoaxes that have been documented in this decade.
As I've pointed out before, white vs. white status competition is the biggest game of all in modern America. So there is an insatiable demand for tales, no matter how implausible, of heterosexual white males behaving badly because the allow whites to tut-tut over them to demonstrate their superior sensitivity over other whites. That's why the national media fell for the Duke lacrosse hoax hook, line and sinker.
Yeah, the Duke thing was super-duper implausible because - although a tale of rape at a campus house party might sound conceivable on its face - the reality is, as Sailer has noted, it's black people who commit crimes in America. Thus the Ahab-like search for a white defendant goes on.
According to the best data, interracial rape is hugely skewed.
In the FBI's annual National Crime Victims Survey, none of the approximately 10,000 black women surveyed from 2001 to 2003 reported being victims of a white gang rape. In contrast, black-on-white gang rape is, apparently according to the NCVS, a much more than daily occurrence in this country (although small sample sizes for gang-rapes make it hard to be definitive about the size of the ratios).
White-on-black single rapist crime, while not unknown, averages only 900 cases per year according to the FBI survey of victims.
In contrast, there are 15,400 black-on-white single rapist crimes per year, according to the NCVS.
Prison rapes are similarly skewed toward black on white, according to Human Rights Watch.
Everybody more or less knows these facts from daily living. That's a big reason why the mainstream media fell so hard for the Duke hoax -- it was a highly unusual man-bites-dog story about whites gang raping a black woman instead of another boring and depressing dog-bites-man story of the other way around.
Everybody more or less knows these facts from daily living.
The post would have been incomplete without this classic line.
Re: "White-on-black single rapist crime, while not unknown, averages only 900 cases per year according to the FBI survey of victims.
In contrast, there are 15,400 black-on-white single rapist crimes per year, according to the NCVS."
Are those numbers for real? That is a huge difference. To make sense of those numbers, it would help to know the numbers of black-on-black and white-on-white rape cases as well. I mean, you have to take into account the fact that whites are a much higher proportion of the population, and that blacks have higher crime rates. But still, those numbers are surprising.
Personally, my hope is that Matt has been paying enough attention lately that he will never again make the mistake of so much as mentioning Steve Sailer's name, let alone linking to him, in a blog post.
Balko's point is well taken. But to add perspective, try the following searches on Google News
"James Giles Al Sharpton"
"Duke lacrosse Al Sharpton"
"James Giles Jesse Jackson"
"Duke lacrosse Jesse Jackson"
You get one hit on the first, 274 on the second, one on the third (it's actually the same hit as for the first one) and 386 on the last.
And that one hit for both Sharpton and Jackson turns out to be a news roundup page that mentions the Giles story along with Sharpton's and Jackson's reactions to Imus. So it probably shouldn't count.
BTW, googling the prominent '08 candidates' names with James Giles produces zero hits. That includes Clinton and Obama. The only exception is John McCain, whose name shows up on that same news roundup page.
Debunking Sailer:
OK, so since it is Steve Sailer's wont to toss out racially-loaded statistics without providing a link, I decided to follow up on his claims from 9:02 AM.
A simple Google search showed that this particular claim has been limited to a very small number of sites, several of them explicitly racist. Similar claims have been circulating on various right-wing sites. But the primary source for most of these claims seems to be an article in the February 26, 2007 American Conservative by Richard Bertrand Spencer, which states the following: "According to the Department of Justice’s most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, 15.5 percent of white rape victims were attacked by blacks, while 0.0 percent of black victims were raped by white males." Spencer doesn't give a year, a link, or any hard numbers.
So I dug up the statistics from the 2003 NCVS, which (according to its methodology) draws its estimates from a large household survey, producing an estimate for a 3-year average. The data can be found here. The relevant data are in Tables 42 and 48. There are similar data available for other years available at the same site.
The NCVS estimated that 24,010 black women were raped from 2001-2003 by a single offender. 87.9% of these women were raped by a black assailant, and 12.1% by "other" race, and 0% by a white assailant. Meanwhile, 131,030 white women were raped, 57.9% by a white assailant, 15.5% by a black assailant, and the rest by "other" or "unknown". Damning numbers, to be sure. However, except for the total number of white women raped and the percentage of white-on-white rapes, an asterisk is placed next to each and every number. This means that the number is an estimate based on a survey size of "about 10 or fewer." Additional notes indicate that these numbers include all cases of rape, sexual assault, and "attempted or threatened" rape. Now, I don't disagree with Sailer's assertion that it's rare for white men to rape black women, but the raw numbers he's throwing around are utterly meaningless.
Since Sailer is citing this survey without actually reading it, it's interesting to note that this data set actually estimates that 17,435 black women were raped by multiple all-white assailants from 2001-2003. You can look it up in Table 48.
And no, I don't believe that number either.
Correction on the last paragraph of the previous post. The table actually estimates that 17,435 blacks were victimized by multiple all-white assailants from 2001-2003. That number is for all violent crimes, including robbery, assault, and rape. The data set shown here does not include a separate set of data on rapes.
In other words, never mind ...
If the sample size isn't big enough for you for one three year period, go aggregate the data across the last three decades since federal government started the NCVS in, I believe, 1976. You'll get very similar racial ratios for black on white vs. white on black rape over the last 30 years, with a huge sample size, as for the last three years.
Everybody _knows_ that there is a huge disproportion in interracial rape rates. That white men are frequently raped in prison by black men, for example, is a popular topic among comedians and screenwriters. The data all support the stereotypes.
Get used to it. We live in a reality-based world.
To be clear, Sailer is obviously correct that this story was seized upon because it had a certain man-bites-dog quality. Although, as Meg Ryan said, "Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario?"
What makes Sailer super-duper-extra-laughable is that the racial element made the accusation inherently IMPLAUSIBLE. In other words, observers were supposed to think, "this accusation probably isn't true... white men hardly ever rape black women."
That's what qualifies Sailer to sit with the special kids. The idea that racial statistics, standing alone, could ever make a specific accusation IMPLAUSIBLE, you can take that one to the Comedy Barn. You wonder what the cops would be like on Planet Sailer.
While I hate to even respond to such a asshat, and the fact that I don't want to pretend like this is even methodologically sound, you can actually look at some historic data (just change the number at the end). And if you look at some of these numbers thrown around you'll see how statistically insignificant they are. For instance the number of rapes committed by multiple white offenders (table 45/46) varies from 59.5 percent of all rapes committed by multiple offenders to 8.6 percent in 2005.
So yeah a lot of bullshit but then as SS says he lives in a reality based world where comedians know more about the human condition than anyone else.
Re: "Everybody _knows_ that there is a huge disproportion in interracial rape rates."
Well, I guess I must live a cloistered life, because I didn't know. I'm also not much of a comedian.
If these disparities are true, perhaps its a symptom of the same underlying causes that produce disparities in interracial dating, which trend in the same way (Matt had a post about this a few days ago).
As for Steve's comment above, I am a believer in using Bayesian reasoning. So, if in fact white-on-black rapes are historically rare, then an investigator should factor that in as a prior probability, such that his/her estimate of the posterior probability of guilt takes it into account. Its the rational thing to do.
Right. We're all intuitive Bayesian analysts when it comes to our daily lives.
Bayesianism -- using all the knowledge at your disposal to assess new hypotheses -- is not the right technique for criminal trials, but it's a crucial technique when reading the newspaper. You see an article, for instance, in which President Bush announces that we're starting to make progress in Iraq -- you use your past experience to judge how much trust to put into the article.
Similarly, you see dozens of articles about how a black stripper was gang raped by rich white college boys and you start thinking about all the previous college hate crime hoaxes and about how rare is white on black gang rape. And you know how desperate the media is for Great White Defendants -- you've watched "Law & Order" (which is just "Bonfire of the Vanities" without the irony) for the last 17 years! So you read more, check out some independent bloggers like KC Johnson, and find out that the stripper's story flunks basic tests of credibility and consistency. So, you do some more work and discover it's just another hate hoax.
That's how you keep from being snookered. But I guess some people like playing the sap ...
In other words, never mind ...Did you notice the part where you used extrapolations from a sample set of less than 10 to throw hard numbers around? Did you notice the part where you used a statistical category for rape, sexual assault, attempted rape, and verbal threats of rape and shortened this to "rape?" I'm sure that was an accidental oversight with no intent whatsoever to mislead. Did you also notice the part where the numbers you were throwing around didn't even match the 2001-2003 survey data you claimed you were using?
There's still an awful lot of bunk in your "reality-based" screed.
Hey, I initially misread one of those tables, too. I admit it. And there is certainly some truth lurking behind some of the stereotypes we have in our society. But there are real, accurate statistics on reported crimes in America. Actual social scientists use statistics. These aren't statistics. These are estimates that have been specifically labeled with an asterisk by the researchers because the margin of error is astronomical.
Blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, and I doubt there are five adult Americans who are unaware of this fact. You promote the household survey numbers, which are so inaccurate in their racial breakdowns as to be meaningless, not because they represent reality, but because they have shock value. The numbers vary widely from year to year in the household survey because they are estimates with an outrageously large margin of error. Sure, you can glimpse the real trend by reviewing 25 years of data. But to extract hard numbers from those percentages and bandy them around is indicative of the type of "science" you and your friends at the American Conservative subscribe to... cherry-picking numbers from obscure sources to reinforce your agenda.
And the irony, of course, is that Al Sharpton could use the exact same data set to weave a narrative about roving all-white gangs attacking 17,345 black people per year.
Re: "Bayesianism -- using all the knowledge at your disposal to assess new hypotheses -- is not the right technique for criminal trials, ..."
I disagree with this. I just think that, when you're a juror, the prior probabilities you have tend to get swamped by the huge amount of conditional probabilities you are exposed to during the trial, such that their effect on the posterior is (and should be) small.
Comments closed April 30, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Absolutely terrible. And I agree that there is a selective outrage on the part of some of the Duke defenders.
I don't see how anyone could disagree with the fact that the media jumped on this case for reasons that weren't what we would call good, and that anyone who feels outrage on behalf of the Duke players should feel ten-fold on behalf of this Texas man.
Posted by Jay J. | April 16, 2007 3:11 PM