Sorry To Jam Toure's Signal, But –

In response to Toure on Racial Score-Keeping:

Andrew Breitbart’s old friend, Tim Wise, king of the Straw Man argument, had some stats in that video showing that whites are more likely to be killed by other whites than be killed by blacks (who make up 13.6% of the population.) Has anyone argued otherwise? 

 The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that in 2010, there were about 320,082 black-on-white crimes of violence, as compared to some 62,593 of the white-on-black variety. Yet although black-perpetrated interracial crimes outnumbered white-perpetrated interracial crimes by a ratio of about 5.1-to-1, the official hate-crime statistics showed white offenders outnumbering black offenders by a 4.7-to-1 margin. Put another way, about 1 out of every 44.1 white-on-black attacks is classified as a hate crime, while the corresponding fraction for black-on-white attacks is an astounding 1 out of 1,056. 

Toure has probably already forgotten Chris Haye’s embarrassing faux pas from a couple of weeks ago when he reversed some crime statistics:

On the Monday, July 29, All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes had to make a retraction for incorrectly citing statistics on Friday suggesting that a higher percentage of black murder victims are murdered by whites than the percentage of white murder victims killed by blacks.

Hayes had used the incorrect numbers as he mocked FNC’s Bill O’Reilly for his recent commentary which dealt in part with black-on-black crime. On Friday’s show, the MSNBC host had erroneously declared:

Well, now, O’Reilly’s argument is that fear of black men is justified by the risk they pose. Well, here’s some data that prompts the question, who should be more scared of whom? In 2010, according to the FBI’s expanded homicide statistics, 8 percent of all white people murdered were murdered by black people. While 14 percent of all black people murdered that year were murdered by white people.

After recounting that many more white Americans die from various other causes than those who are murdered by black Americans, he mockingly concluded:

In other words, Bill O’Reilly, you have more reason to be afraid of your own swimming pool than any young black man you see in a hoodie.

It did not seem to occur to Hayes that the same logic could be applied to the likelihood of a black American being killed by a white American, thus undermining his disproportionate obsession with Trayvon Martin’s death.

The truth is, 14 percent of white victims were killed by black offenders in 2010, while 8 percent of black victims were killed by white offenders.

Some people might call what Chris Hayes did back there very clumsy racial score-keeping, but those people wouldn’t be Toure or Tim Wise.