Lying with the truth

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” – Mark Twain

I found this article by the Atlanta Blackstar and discovered it to be full of all three of the above: 9 Facts That Show White-on-White Crime Far Exceeds Black-on-Black Crime and How Media Outlets Conceal It.

I want to make this clear and up front, not buried in the bottom where you probably won’t read it. I believe the vast majority of people are good people. I don’t care what their skin color happens to be. There is a small subset of people who commit crimes. A small percent of the criminal population is actually responsible for the majority of crimes.

This article is about statistics, which looks at groups of people and makes generalizations based upon the group. It does not say or intend that any specific person is good or bad.

This is the author of this piece of trash:

Edward Wycoff Williams, an author, columnist and political analyst for MSNBC, conveyed a reality that many do not seem to know is real. Williams wrote for The Root…

Williams wrote that article for the Root linked to above in 2012 and it is heavily quoted in this article.

Statistics are cut-and-dry, and they do not lie. According to the FBI’s most recent homicide numbers available, from 2011, a staggering 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by fellow Caucasians.

The darkest kind of lie is the one that has enough truth in it so you take the false as true as well. Yes, 83 percent of Whites were killed by Whites.

Here’s where the lying comes in:

And because whites are the majority in the country — there are six times as many whites as there are Blacks — that means they commit the most murders.

Do you see it? You can’t because it’s actually a lie of omission, you aren’t given all of the numbers so you have a context of what those numbers mean. I got these numbers from the FBI’s 2011 Murder statistics Table 6 page.

Here’s the important part of the table:

So, according to the article, there are six White people for every Black person in the US. According to my calculator, that means the ratio between the races is 86% White, 14% Black. If we are to infer that Blacks are no more violent than Whites, we should see a similar ratio in the number of murders.

My calculator must be broken. It’s saying that blacks committed more murders than Whites in raw numbers, 2,958 to 2,904. If Blacks were equally as murderous as Whites, the Black Offender numbers should only total about 472. I can only deduce then the Black population is 6.25 times more violent as the White population.

So, here is reinforcement of the lie:

Williams wrote: “The term ‘black-on-black’ crime is a destructive, racialized colloquialism that perpetuates an idea that blacks are somehow more prone to violence. This is untrue and fully verifiable by FBI, DOJ and census data. Yet the fallacy is so fixed that even African Americans have come to believe it.”

Yet, a simple calculator will tell you the black-on-black murders alone are 40 percent of the total murders, showing that Blacks are killing Blacks 2.5 times more often than Whites are killing Whites.

Then, we start the cherry picking:

The truth, taking FBI data from 2010: Whites killed whites 3,252 times, which was 4.6 times more than the number of whites killed by Blacks.

Why change years? The author went from 2011 to 2010. Also, I haven’t found his numbers. Table 6 is single offender/single victim, he must be including when there were multiple offenders or victims involved. I do not see a table for that.

More obfuscation without context:

Whites are responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes, according to the FBI. With respect to aggravated assault, whites led Blacks 2-1 in arrests; in forcible-rape cases, whites led all racial and ethnic groups by more than 2-1. And in larceny theft, whites led Blacks, again, more than 2-1.

What is the ratio of Whites to Blacks as given on the first page of this article? 6-1. So, if Blacks were equally prone to be criminals, the numbers in that quote above should be 6-1, not 2-1. Which means a Black person is three times more likely to commit one of the aforementioned crimes than a White person.

The last three pages are invoking the specters of racism and how poor Blacks are.

Here’s more lying:

When gang-related killings are referred to on the news, they treat it as an almost exclusively Black problem. However, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period of 1980 to 2008, a majority (53.3 percent) of gang homicides were committed by white offenders, and the majority of gang homicide victims (56.5 percent) were white.

Obfuscation, let me count the ways: First of all, he has to invoke a 28 year span (1980-2008). Can’t he stick with his original 2011 numbers, or would that show a bad light on what he is saying? Remember that 6-1 ratio? If Whites and Blacks were proportionally as violent, shouldn’t those numbers (53.3% and 56.5%) be up around 86%? So, a raw majority of gang homicides were perpetrated by Whites, but barely over half. This means that again, Black gang activity was most likely 40% of the total, while comprising only 14% of the population.

So, there you go. How to lie while giving facts. Cherry pick the facts, don’t give enough facts so the reader has a context of what the facts mean and don’t be afraid to quote other statistics outside of your original data set to bolster your position.