Thanks to Destructure for pointing me to the Afro-centric blog called “Abagond“. In response to one of my replies there, I was directed to the following post:
reading while white: black rape statistics
Wed 23 Nov 2011 by abagond
Some white people have trouble reading American rape statistics.
White commenters will say stuff like this:
Fact – blacks rape white women 2000 (yes 2000) times more than whites rape black women.
or this:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
They back this up with the infamous Table 40 or 42 of the US Department of Justice’s yearly “Criminal Victimization in the United States, Statistical Tables”.
Here are the latest numbers for black-and-white rapes from Table 42:
Table 42. Personal crimes of violence, 2008:
Percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, by type of crime, race of victim, and perceived race of offender
…
Rape/sexual assault (a), Race of victim:
- White only 117,640: perceived race of offender: 74.9% white, 16.4%* black
- Black only 46,580: perceived race of offender: 0.0%* white, 74.8%* black
The star means “Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases.”
So if you take 16.4% of the 117,640 white women raped in 2008 that gives you 19,286 white women raped by black men! That means that even if as many as ten white men raped black women that year, the highest number allowed by the table, blacks rape white women 1,927 (yes 1,927) times more than whites rape black women.
So our commenters seem to be pretty much right.
Well, no:
Misreading #1: The numbers are not about “rape” but “rape and sexual assault (a)”. Sexual assault means any kind of unwanted sexual touching, like groping or kissing. And the “(a)” means “Includes verbal threats of rape and threats of sexual assault”. So it is way more than just rape. Rape is probably just a small part of it.
Misreading #2: Notice that the star meaning “ten or fewer” applies not just to white-on-black “rape and sexual assault (a)” but to black-on-white cases too! So if we claim that ten or fewer black women were raped by white men then we should also say that ten or fewer white women were raped by black men!
Misreading #3: The star means “Estimate is based on 10 or fewer sample cases”, the key word here being “sample”. They did not ask everyone in the country but a sample of 77,852 people, about one in 4,000. So there could have been as many as 40,000 black women raped by white men that year!
Misreading #4: The reason for the star is because ten or fewer sample cases are way too few to draw any firm statistical conclusions. Mere chance could throw the numbers way off.
As it turns out, of the 77,852 people surveyed, only 56 people reported “rape and sexual assault (a)”. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) only 7.5% of sexual assaults are rapes and of those only 6.7% are between whites and blacks. So out of the 56 sample cases, maybe only 4 were rape and of those probably none were interracial.
So this is a case of white people seeing what they want to see, of misreading facts to fit racist stereotypes.
Destructure says that Abagond is an intelligent man. This may be so; plenty of white liberals are intelligent too – and, as Jared Taylor has pointed out, this is how they manage to perform the mental gymnastics they do.
Most of the comments on that thread seem to be based on the belief that government statistics are skewed in favor of whites, and that the powers that be wish to show blacks in a bad light. If this were the case, then why would the government count Hispanics as “white” when they are perpetrators, but as “Hispanic” when they are victims? Clearly, they are trying to make whites look worse.
I won’t waste time debunking Abagond’s claims above. It’s enough to point out his claim that a sample size of over 77,000 is not enough. That every single case would have to be analyzed in order to achieve reliable statistics. The flaws in his argument are obvious, and what we have here is bitterness, not objectivity.
There was one comment, by a woman called Stacy, that caught my eye:
one thing i will say is that bw may be a little too street smart to be raped by wm. i remember as young girl growing up from about nine to seventeen, while walking to the store, white men always summoning me to get into their car. of course, we black girls already knew that wm were perverts and we would never even dream about getting into a car with one of them.
Would a rapist summon his victims into his car like that? More likely the white men in question were looking for prostitutes and they figured, correctly or not, that black girls would be more likely to accommodate them. Commercial sex was probably what they were after, not rape. I also wonder if Stacy never had black men summoning her to get in their cars. Perhaps this was so common she didn’t even take notice; it was the white ones who stuck out in her mind. Since she had no interest in them, they would have been “perverts” in her eyes. It seems to be the rule among women that the advances of an attractive man are “flattering”, while the advances of an unattractive man are “perverse”.
