The Race War of Black Against White

By Paul Sheehan

Sydney Morning Herald

The longest war America has ever fought is the Dirty War, and it is not over. It has lasted 30 years so far and claimed more than 25 million victims. It has cost almost as many lives as the Vietnam War. It determined the result of last year's congressional election.

Yet the American news media do not want to talk about the Dirty War, which remains between the lines and unreported. In fact, to even suggest that the war exists is to be discredited. So let's start suggesting, immediately.

No matter how crime figures are massaged by those who want to acknowledge or dispute the existence of a Dirty War, there is nothing ambiguous about what the official statistics portray: for the past 30 years a large segment of black America has waged a war of violent retribution against white America. And the problem is getting worse, not better.

In the past 20 years, violent crime has increased more than four times faster than the population. Young blacks (under 18) are more violent than previous generations and are 12 times more likely to be arrested for murder than young whites.

Nearly all the following figures, which speak for themselves, have not been reported in America:

* According to the latest US Department of Justice survey of crime victims, more than 6.6 million violent crimes (murder, rape, assault and robbery) are committed in the US each year, of which about 20 per cent, or 1.3 million, are inter-racial crimes.

* Most victims of race crime - about 90 per cent - are white, according to the survey "Highlights From 20 Years of Surveying Crime Victims," published in 1993.

* Almost 1 million white Americans were murdered, robbed, assaulted or raped by black Americans in 1992, compared with about 132,000 blacks who were murdered, robbed, assaulted or raped by whites, according to the same survey.

* Blacks thus committed 7.5 times more violent inter-racial crimes than whites even though the black population is only one-seventh the size of the white population. When these figures are adjusted on a per capita basis, they reveal an extraordinary disparity: blacks are committing more than 50 times the violent racial crimes of whites.

* According to the latest annual report on murder by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, most inter-racial murders involve black assailants and white victims, with blacks murdering whites at 18 times the rate that whites murder blacks.

These breathtaking disparities began to emerge in the mid-1960s, when there was a sharp increase in black crime against whites, an upsurge which, not co-incidentally, corresponds exactly with the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

Over time, the cumulative effect has been staggering. Justice Department and FBI statistics indicate that between 1964 and 1994 more than 25 million violent inter-racial crimes were committed, overwhelmingly involving black offenders and white victims, and more than 45,000 people were killed in inter-racial murders. By comparison, 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and 34,000 were killed in the Korean War.

When non-violent crimes (burglary, larceny, car theft and personal theft) are included, the cumulative totals become prodigious. The Bureau of Justice Statistics says 27 million non-violent crimes were committed in the US in 1992, and the survey found that 31 per cent of the robberies involved black offenders and white victims (while only 2 per cent in the reverse).

When all the crime figures are calculated, it appears that black Americans have committed at least 170 million crimes against white Americans in the past 30 years. It is the great defining disaster of American life and American ideals since World War II.

All these are facts, yet by simply writing this story, by assembling the facts in this way, I would be deemed a racist by the American news media. It prefers to maintain a paternalistic double standard in its coverage of black America, a lower standard."