An Aside on Raymond
Razib mentioned Eric Raymond's
post on gays and homosexuality earlier. I wanted to comment on a statement made by Raymond in passing:
Continuing our civil-rights analogy, the correct parallel would have been with an epidemic of interracial rape, rather than cohabitation. Had there in fact been such an epidemic, civil-rights proponents would have faced the question of whether black men had a particular propensity to rape white women. The analogous question, whether homosexual men have a particular propensity to rape boys, is precisely the one that homosexuals and their sympathizers in the media don't want anyone to examine -- and precisely the question that the priestly-abuse scandal demands that we ask.
Since the
US Census indicates that approximately 72% of black/white marriages are black men/white women couplings, it's clear that there is a great deal of consensual sex going on between these two populations. However, the
National Criminal Victimisation Survey reveals that in 1994, more than 30000 white women were raped by black men, and approximately 5400 black women were raped by white men in the same year.
Thus, the black interracial rape rate was more than 38 times the white rate. Under a "random raping" model in which blacks and whites offended at equal rates and had no racial preference, we'd expect a black interracial rape rate to be only 6 times the white rate. The difference between the observed rate and the random raping model indicates that blacks rape at higher rates than whites. [
Thanks to Razib for reminding me to include the control - see the comments section ]
In other words, though there are approximately 6-7 white males for every black male, black males committed approximately 6 times as many rapes as white males as a population.
Are black males targeting white females on purpose, or conversely? It's difficult to say without geographic data on the offense. After all, the population mixture mentioned above is fairly rare in the US - most black populations are isolated from whites, so that a black on white rape would involve travel and some degree of premeditation. Again, the converse may also hold (for white on black rape) and the statistics would be very interesting.
In any case, the NCVS indicates that
black males do in fact rape white females at much higher rates than the newspapers would have you believe. Whether this is an epidemic of interracial rape is a definitional question which hinges on whether black males actively target white females or whether they simply have higher basal crime rates.