Remember Rudy Giuliani? He decided to share some of his thoughts on the recent discussions of racial politics and violence regarding events in Ferguson:
The fact is that I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We are talking about the significant exception here [in the Brown case]. I'd like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.I think Giuliani is wrong here, though I think people often do a bad job of explaining why he is wrong. For example, the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in response to Giuliani:
It's almost as if killers tend to murder people who live near them. Moreover, it seems that people actually hold officers operating under the color of law to a different standard.The first point is of course completely apt, and as the Washington Post acknowledges, most murder is intra-racial. But that doesn't really weaken the force of Giuliani's critique; his point is that, if you want to prevent black people from getting murdered, it's best to protect them from black murderers. The claim that the best way to protect white people is to protect them from white murderers doesn't change this claim. (Of course, neither of these is actually a strategy, but a general point about the focus such strategies ought to have).
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From the "National Review": Kevin D. Williamson - Black Lives Matter And so, therefore, must black perpetrators.The reality is this: Black men, especially young black men, die violent deaths at appalling rates in these United States. But they do not die very often at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, thugs reminiscent of characters from American History X, police officers of any race or motivation, lynch mobs, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Walmart, the Tea Party, Goldman Sachs, carbon dioxide, or any other bogeyman currently in vogue among so-called progressives. As Giuliani noted, blacks die violent deaths almost exclusively at the hands of black criminals. But attempting to accommodate that reality in any serious way does not pay any political dividends for the Left. It does not put any money in Jesse Jackson’s pockets or create any full-time jobs for graduates of grievance-studies programs.
And thus we have the very peculiar situation in which “Black Lives Matter!” but black perpetrators don’t. Only white perpetrators matter. And if, as in the case of George Zimmerman, they are not exactly white, then they can be declared white by the New York Times. Only white perpetrators matter to the people behind the Ferguson protests because only white perpetrators are politically useful.
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