Media’s ‘existing while black’ coverage of crime twists facts, worsens racial divide in US

The shooting of a teenager in Kansas City, Mo., has added “knocking on the door while black” and “existing while black” to the list of activities that allegedly put blacks at daily risk of their lives in white supremacist America. 

Meanwhile, the actual configuration of interracial violence is assiduously ignored.

On April 13, at around 10 p.m., 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address in a Kansas City residential neighborhood to pick up his younger brothers. Yarl rang the doorbell, summoning the 84-year-old homeowner, Andrew Lester, from his bed. 

Lester, who lived alone and who appears from photographs to be in the early stages of dementia, grabbed his handgun and went to the door. 

He became “scared to death,” he told the police, when he saw the larger Yarl pulling at the exterior storm-door handle. (Yarl denies trying to open the door.) Lester shot Yarl, once in the head and once in the arm, through the storm door. 

Thankfully, Yarl will likely survive the horrifying attack.

Every news outlet that covered the shooting led with the race of Yarl and of Lester. Yarl was inevitably identified as a “black” teenager and Lester as a “white” homeowner. 

The Kansas City district attorney validated the race narrative. The shooting had a “racial component,” the prosecutor said, without offering evidence. (The DA has charged Lester with assault in the first degree because the potential maximum sentence — life in prison — is higher than that for attempted murder.)

President Biden weighed in with his usual trope about black parents living in daily fear for their children’s lives in racist America. 

“Last night, I had a chance to call Ralph Yarl and his family,” Biden tweeted. “No parent should have to worry that their kid will be shot after ringing the wrong doorbell.” 

For once Biden left out “black,” but his formula by now is so routine “Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car,” as “brown and black parents” have to do, Biden asked in his 2023 State of the Union address. He doesn’t need the descriptor to get his racial message across. 

Biden also invited Yarl to visit the White House after the teen recovers.

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas made no effort to defuse the race angle that the press, the president, and his fellow Democrats had instantaneously imposed on the incident. Yarl was shot because he was black by someone who “clearly, clearly fears black people,” Lucas said. 

The incident shows why “black people and black parents” are concerned that merely “existing while black” can get you shot by a white person, Lucas said. 

The ubiquitous fomenter of racial resentment, attorney Benjamin Crump, demanded that “gun violence against unarmed black individuals must stop. Our children should feel safe, not as though they are being hunted.”

Tale of two shootings 

Two days after the Yarl shooting, on April 15, a 20-year-old woman was fatally shot when a car she was in entered the wrong driveway in upstate New York. 

Three days after that, on April 18, two cheerleaders were shot, one critically, in a Texas supermarket parking lot after one tried mistakenly to get into a stranger’s car. 

There were no protests around those shootings, invitations to the White House, or injunctions to say the victims’ names, because the decedent and the other victims were all white. But the fact that all three victims were white still did not dislodge the idea that “knocking on the door,” in mayor Lucas’s words, was a particular threat to black people. 

Press accounts of the incidents continued to mention Yarl’s race, while staying mum about the female victims’ race.

A front-page article in The New York Times on April 21 discussed other mistaken-house shootings that had come to light, also outside of the black-victim-white perpetrator paradigm. Only in the Yarl case did the Times continue to give the race of the victim and perpetrator. 

There was a black victim in one of the other mistaken-house shootings discussed in the April 21 Times article: Omarian Banks, killed in March 2019 after ringing the wrong doorbell in an Atlanta apartment complex. 

Banks’ girlfriend heard one shot and then heard Banks yell: “I’m sorry, bro. I’m at the wrong house.” The tenant allegedly responded: “Nah, n—-r, you’re not at the wrong house,” before firing two more times. 

The Times omitted the race of Banks and of his killer, Darryl Bynes, because Bynes was black. There was thus no possible “racial component” to the shooting, in the Times’ ideology. 

The initial contemporaneous reporting on the Banks shooting also omitted the race of the victim and perpetrator.

The NYT narrative 

Despite the numerous trespass shootings that have been reported on since the Yarl shooting, the Times remains staunchly committed to its racism narrative. On April 24, the paper ran an article on how the Yarl shooting revealed the persistence of racism in Kansas City. Never mind that the city’s majority-white population had thrice elected a black mayor and had sent a black representative to Congress. 

That cross-racial voting just shows how “like this veil of [white] nicety and smiles . . . kind of overlays microaggressions and all kinds of crazy stuff,” the founder of a nonprofit that seeks to empower black women told the paper.

The narrative that blacks are at elevated risk for “existing while black” is true, but not because whites are killing them. Their assailants are other blacks, which means that these black victims are of no interest to the race activists and to their media and political allies.

Kansas City’s black-white homicide disparity is typical. In 2022, blacks made up 60% of homicide victims, though they are 26.5% of the population. Whites were 22% of homicide victims, though they make up 60% of the Kansas City population. A black Kansas City resident was six times more likely to be killed in 2022 than a white Kansas City resident. So far this year, blacks make up 75% of homicide victims.

The toll on black children has been particularly acute. 

In the first nine months of 2020, 13 black children were killed in shootings in Kansas City. Those child victims included 1-year-old Tyron Patton, killed when someone riddled the car in which he was riding with bullets, and 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, fatally shot while sleeping in his father’s apartment. 

No Black Lives Matter activist showed up to “say their names.”

Their deaths were of no interest to the race advocates because their killers were black. In 2022, 10 children aged 17 and younger were killed in Kansas City, also without racial protest, because those children were not killed by whites and thus did not matter from a racial p.r. perspective. 

The maudlin dirge that blacks are victims of lethal white supremacy is ludicrous, in Kansas City and every other American metropolis.

In 2021, 87% of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the US were black-on-white — 480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence. 

In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative. “X-ing while white” is a more appropriate way of representing racial crime patterns. 

Recent examples would include: “accosting shoplifters while white” (California Home Depot employee fatally shot while trying to prevent a theft); “reporting on a crime while white” (Florida journalist fatally shot working the scene of a homicide investigation; his cameraman critically injured in same shooting); “jogging while white” (young Memphis mother abducted, raped, and killed); “walking downtown while white,” (Minneapolis man thrown to the ground, stomped on, stripped of pants, run over with a bicycle, hit with planters, and robbed by group of teens).

Double standard 

If any of these incidents had black victims and white perpetrators, there would have been a national, if not international, uproar. Every news outlet would be covering the emergency of white supremacy and Biden would have given another of his speeches about the stain of white racism on America’s soul.

Instead, the actual anarchy in American cities is carefully de-raced, whether the flash mobs that routinely maraud in shopping malls and down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile; the looters who plunder convenience stores and jewelry stores; or the Miami spring breakers who rape and kill. 

To name a suspect’s race when that suspect is black is virtually taboo, no matter the race of his victim. Let a white person assault or kill a black person, however, and the entire story will be about race.

This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good, least of all the victims of black crime. 

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that in the first 18 months of the coronavirus pandemic (read: the post-George Floyd era) black juveniles 17 and younger died of gun homicide at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. 

If that death rate were due to whites shooting blacks, we would have heard about every one of those shootings. In fact, almost none was widely reported because they were overwhelmingly committed by other blacks. 

The race activists were silent; Biden was silent; the media were silent; the Black Studies professors were silent. Merely mentioning black-on-black crime guarantees the accusation of racism, as if facts are racist.

Millions of blacks are walking around believing that whites hate and fear them so much that blacks are at daily risk of their lives from that hatred. 

This belief is the rankest fiction.

Yet it is embraced and amplified by almost every mainstream American institution. We exist mentally in a counterfactual, alternative reality when it comes to race and crime. 

That alternative reality further poisons race relations, incentivizing more anti-white violence. It creates fertile support for the dismantling of law enforcement and of the meritocratic standards that are said to prop up white supremacy. 

It is time to unflinchingly pierce that fiction with the truth.

From City Journal.