The unobservant race hustlers

Jonah Goldberg:
White Hispanic.” That’s how the New York Times, Reuters, and other media outlets have opted to describe George Zimmerman, a man who would simply be Hispanic if he hadn’t shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The term, rarely if ever used before this tragedy, is necessary in telling the Martin story in a more comfortable way. 
What’s the comfortable way? It’s the way the blame for Martin’s death belongs squarely at the feet of “the system.” And “the system” is a white thing, don’t you know? 
For instance, in a remarkably uncritical interview with the Los Angeles Times, the Reverend Jesse Jackson explained that with the election of President Obama, “there was this feeling that we were kind of beyond racism.” He continued: “That’s not true. His victory has triggered tremendous backlash.” Indeed, “blacks are under attack.” 
Jackson apparently includes in this racist Obama “backlash” record home foreclosures for African Americans and black unemployment. It would have been nice if the L.A. Times had asked Jackson to work a little harder to connect those dots.
Jackson also laments that “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business” in America.
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 Yes, absolutely, there are pockets of racism in America. But among the myriad problems with a “blame the system” narrative is that it obscures and often silences far greater problems than white-on-black racist violence. 
Martin’s tragic death is a statistical outlier. More whites are killed by blacks than blacks killed by whites (or “white Hispanics”). And far, far more blacks are killed by other blacks. Indeed, if we’re going to use the prism of race to analyze murder rates, then the real epidemic is that of black murderers. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute notes that recent data show black males age 14 to 24 commit homicides at a rate nearly ten times higher than that of young white and Latino males combined. Surely that’s worthy of some soul-searching, too.
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I think that about 98 percent of young black men who are murdered are murdered by other young black men.  It is a tragedy that the race hustlers seek to ignore so they can shift the blame and avoid responsibility for their own failure of leadership.  Young black men have more to fear in their own neighborhoods than they do from some random white guy killing them.  That ought to be a subject of conservation, but the race hustlers are too emotionally attached to their narrative to even consider it.

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