Dec. 30, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Duke Rape Case Premise Based on Myth
 
By Jim Kouri
Special to Huntington News Network
 
At one point, the Duke University rape case received more media attention than the war on Iraq, the Iran nuclear threat and even the baseball steroid scandal. It even got as much media attention as Rose O'Donnell-Donald Trump brouhaha.
 
It's a huge story not because it's about an alleged rape -- those stories occur daily throughout the United States; it's getting enormous media play because it's a case involving seemingly affluent, white male suspects and a poor black woman.
 
This is a case that's ripe for the race demagogues who never miss an opportunity to exaggerate, spin and divide for political reasons. This latest case of white-on-black violence is providing black activists, feminists and liberals the ammunition they need to push their agenda forward: more legislated protections for blacks and for women, two major "victim groups" in American society.
 
But the activists, politicians and members of the press are working from a false premise and crime statistics bear that out.
 
Dr. William Wilbanks, former professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, contends that the current perception of white-on-black violence including rape and gang violence is based on myths created by many with a political agenda.
 
(In the name of full disclosure, Dr. Wilbanks and this writer go back quite a few years. I first interviewed him for the now-defunct magazine Crime Beat regarding police racism. Later, I met up with Wilbanks at a police memorial banquet in Miami. While his detractors accuse him of being a right-wing racist, in fact Wilbanks is a liberal Democrat.)
 
A top criminologist, Wilbanks has studied interracial crime for more than 25 years and he's been quoted by some of the top journalists in the business -- including Pat Buchanan.
 
When it comes to interracial rape and sexual assault, the statistics contained in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and the Department of Justice's National Crime Survey during Wilbanks' study revealed that white rapists chose black victims 8,448 times.
 
However, black rapists chose white victims in 17,572 cases. In other words, according to Wilbanks, there were more than twice as many black-on-white rape cases as there were white-on-black cases. Overall white-on-black violence cases numbered 100,111, whereas black-on-white cases totaled 466,205. Therefore, blacks using violence against whites is over four times more likely than the reverse.
 
In New York, an incident occurred in 1988 that divided that city. A gang of white youths chased a black man onto a highway where he was struck and killed by an automobile. The prosecutors threw the book at the young men who were convicted and sentenced for manslaughter. The crime became known as The Howard Beach Incident and the case became a book and a TV movie-of-the-week. It was the case that pushed legislators to pass New York's hate crime law, as well.
 
On the other hand, earlier in 2006, a gang of black youths chased a white New York University student screaming, "Get the white boy!" The student ran into a city street and was struck and killed by an automobile. First, the police denied it was a hate crime. Then the prosecutors decided to try the case in Family Court, which means the worst these killers face is 3 years in a juvenile facility.
 
During the Howard Beach Incident, there were weeks and weeks of news stories, editorials and opinion columns about the case. In the case of the NYU student, there was perhaps one day's worth of coverage.
 
While the race-baiters would have Americans believe that a growing number of blacks are victimized by white gangs in the United States, the opposite is true.
 
The number of white-on-black gang attacks was 2,645, while the number of black-on-white gang attacks was 20,042. There were almost ten times as many black-on-white gang attacks as there were white-on-black attacks.
 
Interracial crime figures are even worse than they sound -- and not for the reasons Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will tell you. Since there are more than six times as many whites as blacks in America, it means that any given black person is more likely to commit a crime against a white than vice versa.