Is everybody a racist? - public perceptions about race and crime - Column

National Review, Dec 19, 1994 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Already her name is slipping away from the news stories, and it will probably be ten years before the Supreme Court authorizes her execution, but something should be said about the protests lodged against Susan Smith as evidencing Southern racism. We recall that her story to the police was that a young black drove away in her automobile with her two children. It was that statement that set in motion a five-state search for a young black driving a maroon Mazda with two small boys in tow. Well, the story broke down: our Medea had destroyed her own children, contributing one whole chapter to the book of American infamy. But there are those who paused to meditate on her having fancied the kidnapper to be black, insisting that this was, so to speak, a Freudian slip indicating bias against blacks and promoting racism, at least during the period when the whole of the South was looking for a maroon Mazda with a depraved black monster at the wheel.

The point, surely, is that the wretched woman chose to give a plausible story to the police. Surely it was easier simply to say "black" because blacks are widely accepted as given to crime at a heavier rate than whites. The figure that comes to mind is, five times the rate. If Mrs. Smith had said that the kidnapper was an albino, or a dwarf, or one-armed, heavier attention would have been given to his identifying characteristics. But the child-killer, straining for maximum plausibility, simply reaches into the pool of averages in search of a "typical" criminal. Americans who watch the television news and see occasional police lineups have a sense of it that blacks, though they make up only 12 per cent of the population, commit over one-half the violent crimes. If we are looking for additional animadversions on a mother who killed her children we should be prepared to let "racist" pass by.

It is all over the place, this looseness. Charles Ogletree is a professor of law at Harvard and served as an interrogator at a forum sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and broadcast on C-SPAN. I ordered a tape after receiving a few letters from indignant viewers, and yes, there was something there to be indignant about. Professor Ogletree asked the panel of journalists whether they could see any difference in the two situations which he proceeded to exhibit on the television screen, one of them featuring me, a second featuring Khalid Abdul Muhammad. Khalid was giving one of his white-people-and-especially-the-Jews are the devils of history speeches, of which we got a snippet that there is a little bit of Hitler in all white people. I was a panelist in Hartford observing that a woman walking in the streets of Harlem at night who spotted eleven 17-year-olds and felt fear could be perceived as reacting to the news story that in Harlem 25 per cent of young blacks of that age were in jail, another 25 per cent on probation, another 25 per cent on drugs. Professor Ogletree attempted to persuade the panelists that when you come right down to it there was no difference between the racism of Khalid Muhammad and my own. He tried this thesis out on two or three of the panelists who gently rejected it, to the manifest disappointment of the professor of law, who no doubt teaches Evidence.

And in New York City Governor Christine Whitman of New Jersey came on the Bob Grant show. This was a big event, because a week or so earlier she had said she would not again appear on his program given the charges leveled against him as a racist. These charges Mr. Grant vigorously denied, and the governor consented to go on the air and talk about the subject, which they did. And everybody agreed that nobody should be racist and everybody agreed that the First Amendment is a terrific Amendment and everybody agreed on free speech and on the need for tolerance and unity, and so it went.

Oh dear, it is hard to get out of the way of these things. Jesse Jackson discovered that when he inadvertently confessed that if, walking in inner-city shadows, he turned his head to find that it was white people walking behind him, he'd experience a certain relief. Lucky Jesse, he found an anfractuous way out of his problem (he meant, he said, that if they were whites, it was likelier that there would be policemen around to protect the area) before Professor Ogletree lynched him. It's tough out there, commenting on social problems and crime and ethnicity.