Senator Barack Obama said in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, "The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact." Yet he also claimed that to fear a black person on the street more than a white person is a racial "stereotype", "bred" into us.

To the contrary, such a fear is actually "grounded in reason and fact." When the numbers are crunched, a black person is almost six times more likely than a white person to be a murderer.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/...ed_reason.html

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“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” --Barack Obama

I'd have to do some math to be precise, but a flaw in that argument is that the vast majority of black crime is black-on-black, and the vast majority of white crime is white-on-white.

So a white person, acting rationally, should fear a white person more than a black person.

A black person, acting rationally, should fear a black person more than a white person.

Of course, that assumes that acting on a racial basis makes sense in the first place. Which it doesn't. As your link admits, murder rates among both blacks and whites are vanishingly low (5 murderers per 100,000 people). So it makes no sense to base your (re)actions on skin color, because murderers are not representative of their skin color.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Jesse Jackson apparently agrees with you:

"There is nothing more painful to me ... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." -JJ

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“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” --Barack Obama

Ironic, no?

It's not really rational in his case, either -- it's just *more* rational than a white person fearing black people.

Using the numbers from your link:

The chance of a random black person not being a murderer is 99.9998%.

The chance of a random white person not being a murderer is 99.9999%.

So skin color is simply a lousy predictor for threats.

__________________
Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Yet blacks commit nearly 6 times more murders in the US than whites [per capita].

That's a disturbing statistic!

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“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” --Barack Obama

It's disturbing, but it's mostly a commentary on how vanishingly low both rates are.

It's like lottery tickets.

A single Powerball ticket gives you a 1 in 146 million chance of winning the jackpot.

Buy a second ticket, and your chance of winning doubles! But it's still only 2 in 146 million.

With very small numbers, it's easy to get impressive percentage differences that aren't actually meaningful in real life.

So mostly, we should be grateful that the murder rate is so low for everyone, including blacks.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Yet, if blacks were removed from US society the murder rate would be cut in half.

The crime rate would similarly be diminished.

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“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” --Barack Obama

No it wouldn't. Because only part of the higher rate, at best, is attributable to race.* Most of it is explained by economics, education, family structure, etc. So if all the blacks simply disappeared, their crime niche, so to speak, would eventually be filled by others -- whites, hispanics, whomever.

And more to the point, the rate is so low in any case that if all the blacks were removed, you wouldn't notice any difference.

(*Technically speaking, what happens is there's a certain amount of the higher rate left over after controlling for obvious factors like economics and education. But that doesn't necessarily mean blacks are more violent; it just means the higher rate isn't fully explained by economics or education. It might be explained by any number of factors that simply haven't been controlled for).

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

I never said it was attributed to race.


Not necessarily. Blacks love to smoke crack, by removing them from the population you would eliminate a large portion of 'crack consumers'. There would be no 'crack supplier' niche to fill, for example.

But you said that most of the people blacks murder are other blacks. Therefor, by eliminating blacks from society, the murder rate would be cut in half both for murderers and for victims.

All children in the US have access to a free education and all US citizens have access to work. It seems that these are just excuses for black crime, not reasons.

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“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” --Barack Obama

If you're saying that "blacks do this" and skin color is the operative variable, then it's about race, whether you say so or not.

If it's just economics, then you'd say "poor people." If it's drug addicts, you'd say "drug addicts." If it's high-school dropouts, you'd say "high-school dropouts."

Oh, c'mon. Now you're just trolling.

From the 2003 federal drug use survey:
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/Nhsda/2k3t...6.htm#tab1.43a

Scroll down to table 1.42b, wherein we learn that among adults, a greater percentage of whites have tried crack. Identical percentages of white and black had used crack in the previous year. The only place blacks beat out whites was over usage in the previous month.

My point was that the murder rate is so mind-bogglingly low already that cutting it in half won't make a noticeable difference. Your chance of meeting a murderer on the street will go from 0.00015% to 0.0001%.

#1, education includes higher education, for which access is not equal. A high school diploma isn't worth much these days. Not because schools are failing, but because technology and society have grown complex enough that the good jobs require more education than that.

#2, not all access is equal. That's why some kids drop out and some don't. All things being equal, having a chaotic home life really stacks the decks against academic success. Feel free to blame the kids for being slackers. Me, I'd blame the parents; the kids are the victims.

But even blaming the parents only goes so far. Sometimes life just sucks, and it's not because someone is lazy, irresponsible or of flawed character. Lots of factors interrelate and tend to reinforce each other -- lack of education usually equals low pay. Low pay equals longer hours to make ends meet, which leaves less time for building a stable family life that encourages education. All that stress can lead to bad health, which can make it difficult to find and keep work. Which increases stress. And so on.

Some people can overcome those barriers, either through innate talent or determination. But that doesn't mean those barriers aren't real. Getting a poor start in life can stack the deck against you, and poor kids face a lot more barriers to success than middle-class or rich kids. One should not be surprised that, given higher barriers, fewer people succeed in overcoming them. Nor should one simply dismiss that fact as "laziness" or "excuses." Are some people lazy, or simply inveterate losers? Sure. But not all of them, by any means.

And saying everyone has access to work is simply wrong -- the fact that 5% unemployment is considered "full employment" shows that. Plus such a glib line ignores both the quality and pay of such work, and other factors -- like disabilities or educational limitations -- that can put many jobs out of reach.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.