Of journalism, thy name is innumeracy

An intriguing opinion piece from an editor of USA Today.  It has the usual anti-American cliches but it has something more.  Data.  

The piece is Caron Nazario case shows hate is an American disease, not just a white one by David Mastio. A nonsense headline as anyone who has lived internationally can attest.  Outgroup aversion is a universal human attribute and always far more prevalent and violent internationally than here in the US.  

The piece is in response to another instance of a pulled over driver refusing to comply with officer instructions.  The twist is that the driver is a US Army Lieutenant.  And Black.  And Hispanic.  And the arresting officer is Hispanic.

As David Mastio acknowledges

Having a minority officer on the scene in Nazario's case didn't change the outcome. That same reality is on display in the Derek Chauvin trial in Minneapolis. Of the three other officers facing charges related to the killing of George Floyd, two are minorities: Alexander Kueng is Black, and Tou Thao is Asian. 

 Hiring diverse officers obviously didn't end the abusive police culture.

The fact that diversity isn't a solution to hate isn't limited to police abuse cases. Diversity is at the core of our national hate-crime statistics as tracked by the FBI. In 2019, the latest year for which the FBI has released statistics, 10% of hate crimes were committed by Hispanics, 24% were by Blacks and about 7% by groups with multiple ethnicities. 

The FBI statistics are no aberration. "In New York City, where anti-Asian hate crime soared nearly nine-fold in 2020 over the year before, only two of the 20 people arrested last year in connection with these attacks were white, according to New York Police Department data analyzed by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Eleven were African Americans, six were white Hispanics and one was a Black Hispanic," reported Masood Farivar for Voice of America. 

This is the central argument of most Classical Liberals.  White supremacists are not the problem.  Race, narrowly defined, is rarely the problem.  If you want to tackle putative hate crimes, go ahead, but the burden is going to fall disproportionately on Blacks as disproportionate committers of such crimes.  Far better to focus on better policing and training and public communication (such as obeying lawful orders), etc.

I do not know how Mastio came up with the courage to acknowledge that much of the Asian Hate crime wave originates in deep blue cities among black residents.  I can only imagine how hard his life is about to become due to his fellow leftists. 

Regrettably, Mastio ends his column with the same innumeracy which so plagues most his journalistic brethren.  Strikingly, he provides the data which proves his words wrong.

If we're going to reform the police and defeat hate in America, Americans of all races and ethnicities are going to have to do better.

That, of course, does not absolve whites of a particular responsibility to change. 

Back during 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, whites accounted for the plurality of hate crimes, 46.3%, according to the FBI, but not a majority. That changed over the course of the Trump administration. White hate crimes jumped by more than 6 percentage points by 2019, to 52.5%. That trend is an embarrassment in a nation where we should be getting better.

The USA is handicapped by poor data collection, including Hispanics, a non-race category as if it were a race.  The best estimates seem to be that the US is 68-75% white, depending on how you resolve the category definition.   

Either way, whether 68% or 75%, whites are committing only 53% of hate crimes.  Fewer than one would anticipate and many fewer than the supposed prevalence of institutional racism, systemic racism and white supremacy.  One should not be glib about a serious issue but it is hard not to notice that if whites are 75% of Americans and are only committing 53% of hate crimes, they aren't very good white supremacists.  

Mastio's innumeracy seems to blind him from the reality that Whites are getting better at controlling hate crimes.  If you want to subscribe to that bankrupt and racist view of society.  Instead of acknowledging that the world is complex and race on its own has relatively low predictive strength.