Obama's Racism By The Numbers

Randall Hoven puts the numbers to the test in regard to Obama's recent statement that it's just racist to fear a black person on the street more than a white person (this is also the point at which he essentially called his own grandmother a racist because she expressed the same fear that Jesse Jackson has previously expressed - funny how that only works in one direction). Check out the facts:

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.Senator Barack Obama in his Race Speech said his white grandmother "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street". In a follow-up interview he clarified that remark by saying,

"She is a typical white person who, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there is a reaction. That has been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way." He described such feelings as, "racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

It is true that Jesse Jackson confessed to the same fear . More importantly, that fear is a rational one, borne out by "reason and fact". The data are available.

The U.S. Justice Department provides a breakdown of homicides by the race of both the victim and offender. Looking at the data for 2005 (the latest year available), we find that whites committed 48.0% of all murders and blacks committed 51.2% of all murders.

However, whites outnumber blacks in the population. In fact, non-Hispanic whites are about 69% of the population and blacks are about 13% .

These statistics alone, that blacks are 13% of the population but commit 51.2% of the murders, indicate that blacks commit a seriously disproportionate number of murders.

What we would like to find specifically is the likelihood that a given person is a murderer. The Justice department also provides overall murder rates. In 2004 (last year of available data), 5.9 people were murdered out of every 100,000. Since some of those were multiple murders, let's assume that only 5 people of every 100,000 were murderers. That is, the chance that some person you see on the street will murder someone this year, knowing nothing else, is about 5 in 100,000.

From all this data, we can use either Bayes' theorem or a table of relative frequencies to answer our question of "What is the chance that a person is a murderer (or will murder someone this year), given we know that person's race?" I provide a table of relative frequencies below, since that is usually easier to understand than Bayes' theorem. (The table is based on a total population of 10 million for illustration purposes only; the total population does not matter for relative frequencies or computing likelihoods.)

	White	Black	Other	Total
Murderer	240	256	4	500
Not a murderer	6,899,655	1,299,935	1,799,910	9,999,500
Total	6,899,895	1,300,191	1,799,914	10,000,000

Feel free to satisfy yourself that the frequencies cited above are reflected in this table. That is, whites are about 69% of the population and 48% of the murderers, etc.

But now look only at columns of that table. Of 6,899,895 whites, for example, 240 of them are murderers. That is a rate of 3.5 per 100,000. (Without knowing a person's race, that rate was 5 per 100,000, which is borne out in the rightmost column of the table.) Now look at the column for Blacks. The rate there is 19.7 per 100,000.

That is, the chance of just any person you see on the street murdering someone this year is about 5 of 100,000 (assuming you see a random sample of people). The same chance of a white person is 3.5 of 100,000. And the same chance for a black person is 19.7 of 100,000. That means a black person is 5.6 times more likely than a white person to be a murderer.

It is totally rational for a any person (including Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama's grandmother) to fear a black person more than a white one. In fact, you should fear them 5.6 times more.

If you think I made any errors in assumptions or calculations, feel free contact me at randall.hoven@gmail.com.

Again, I think the question we need to answer is: why do these fact-based fears (supposedly) constitute racism? And why does it only work in one direction?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...outside of a few crackpots, the vast majority of racism still existing in this country is NOT found in the white community.

There's my two cents.