The Biggest Lie in the White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling the Truth About ‘Black-on-White Crime'
The idea that black people are wantonly attacking white people in some sort of quiet race war is an untruthful and damaging narrative with a very long history in America.
On a Wednesday night in June 2015, a 21-year-old white man walked into a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and gunned down nine black parishioners taking part in a weekly Bible study group. Dylann Storm Roof sat quietly with the group for about an hour before taking out his Glock pistol and firing 70 rounds, stopping five times to reload. Court testimony revealed that during the shooting Roof said, “Y’all are raping our white women. Y’all are taking over the world.”
How this horrific violence came to take place traces back to a particularly destructive idea, one as old as the United States itself and rooted in the country’s white supremacy: that black men are a physical threat to white people. The narrative that black men are inherently violent and prone to rape white women, as Roof said during his rampage, has been prevalent for centuries. This idea has served as the primary justification for the need to oppress black people to protect the common — meaning white — good.
Roof saw himself as a victim standing up for oppressed whites, not as an aggressor. He had a racist “awakening” spurred by online research he did about the 2012 murder of the black high-school student Trayvon Martin. As he wrote in his manifesto, the Martin killing “prompted me to type in the words ‘black on white crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”
Roof’s internet search quickly led him to the website of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that claims to document an ignored war against whites being waged by violent black people. Google led Roof down a rabbit hole of hate, leaping from one hate site to the next, many filled with “evidence” that black people are pillaging, raping and murdering white people.
“There were pages and pages of these brutal black on White murders,” Roof wrote in his manifesto. “I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored.”
It’s not surprising that a fragile-minded young man who swallowed hate material whole came to see this so-called problem of black-on-white crime as something he had to personally confront. But the resonance of these ideas goes much deeper, infecting the thinking of many prominent people, including public policymakers to this day.
Take then-Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, who in November 2015 tweeted an image that originated from a neo-Nazi account that made exactly the same point as the hate sites Roof was reading. Filled with bogus crime statistics, the graphic Trump tweeted supposedly showed that black people are uniquely violent. The Washington Post found that the data in Trump’s tweet to be false. One of the most exaggerated statistics was about the number of white people killed by other white people. Trump’s tweet claimed the number was 16 percent, while the FBI’s data shows it is 82 percent. The tweet also asserted that 81 percent of whites are killed by black people; the FBI number is 15 percent. As the Post concluded, “Trump cast blacks as the primary killers of whites, but the exact opposite is true. By overwhelming percentages, whites tend to kill other whites. Similarly, blacks tend to kill other blacks. These trends have been observed for decades.”
It’s not just Trump. The far-right ecosystem repeats versions of these ideas ad nauseum. Relying on “statistics” found in a white supremacist tract, the paleoconservative one-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote in 2007: “The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder — is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community.” Until very recently, Breitbart news used a “black crime” story tag.
Misrepresented crime statistics are a main propaganda point of America’s hate movement, and a pillar of white supremacist thinking in the United States. Stormfront, the oldest hate site on the internet, has thousands of pages devoted to the “issue” of black-on-white crime.
The idea that black people are wantonly attacking white people in some sort of quiet race war is an untruthful and damaging narrative with a very long history in America. White Americans’ unsubstantiated views about the potential of violence from black people was the number one excuse they used to justify slavery, lynching, Jim Crow and various forms of mass incarceration. Never was Klan violence or the lynching of black people by white people ascribed to an inherent white trait. Without the ability to claim oppression of black people as a form of self-defense, racial segregation and white supremacy would be seen for what they are: rank oppression of other people for financial or other benefit.
The maze of online white supremacist propaganda that Roof entered into is largely no more. Google cleaned up its search results after the Southern Poverty Law Center publicly exposed the problem in a January 2017 video. When black on white crime is typed into a Google search now, the results return legitimate sources of information, such as the FBI’s crime statistics, mainstream news and academic research.
But the idea of out-of-control black violence continues to motivate white supremacist propagandists and remains a main recruiting tool for the hate movement and its wish for a genetically pure white ethnostate. Because this narrative of black criminality is so central to American history — the foundation upon which discrimination has long been justified — it persists as white supremacy’s enduring siren song.
This report examines the origins and evolution of this propaganda from the mid-1800s to the current day.
Emancipation brought freedom to four million enslaved men and women, dismantling the codified racial hierarchy that much of white society believed to be natural. Most Southerners saw chattel slavery as rational, often drawing on the Old Testament to justify the institution. With its abolishment in 1865, white Americans had to adapt their ideas to the new legal regime and created new means of reinforcing the racial hierarchy where they sat at the top.
An early attempt to use “science” to preserve white supremacy
Attempting to address what came to be known as the “Negro Problem,” American scientists and other intellectuals created a new body of knowledge that they could use to justify white supremacy by scientifically “proving” black inferiority. Men like Samuel George Morton (1799 -1851), who is considered the originator of scientific racism, relied on anecdotal observations and physical measurements.
Morton built on a racial classification system first created by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, which placed people in one of four groups:
- Americanus,
- Asiaticus,
- Africanus and
- Europeaeus.
In Linnaeus’ original work, Americanus were “obstinate, merry, free” and “regulated by customs,” while Africanus were “crafty, indolent, negligent” and “governed by caprice.”[1] Rather than simply ascribing characteristics to each race, Morton added a physiological layer to this racial taxonomy by measuring cranial capacity — studies he conducted using his personal collection of skulls, which was reputedly the world’s largest.[2]
Using buckshot and peppercorns to measure the volume of the skulls in his possession, Morton argued that Caucasians had the largest skulls and were, therefore, the most intelligent race.[3] Other thinkers ran with Morton’s ideas, especially after Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection gained widespread attention with its publication in 1859. Alabama physician Josiah Nott (1804 -1873), for instance, drew on patient observations and religious theory to argue that blacks and whites were, in fact, different species.[4]
From pseudo-science to lying with statistics
Craniometry was eventually replaced by a different kind of “proof” of black inferiority: crime statistics. Whereas the idea of racial difference was once perpetuated by pseudo-biological evidence, by the late-1800s new forms of statistical data — including datasets with a nationwide scope and new sampling techniques – became widely available. This new statistically based brand of social science seemed to provide a way to objectively measure how well black people had adjusted to life outside of slavery. The numbers showing that African Americans committed a disproportionate number of crimes appeared to affirm what many social scientists already believed to be true.
In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argues that this “racial data revolution” created a permanent linkage between blackness and criminality.[5] The myth that black people possessed a unique proclivity for violence became the most enduring way of communicating black inferiority and justifying continued discrimination.
The influential German-born statistician Frederick L. Hoffman, who would go on to serve as president of the American Statistical Association in 1911, played a crucial role in embedding the narrative of black criminality when he published the first book-length study of racial crime statistics. Hoffman trained in the American South and thoroughly absorbed the deeply racist culture that surrounded him. His interest in statistics developed as he read literature on “black disappearance” — the idea that the black race, through their own self-destructive behavior, would eventually vanish.
The release of the 1890 census afforded him the opportunity to test his theory that black people’s violent proclivities were contributing to high rates of black mortality. The census data he used in Race Traits and the Tendencies of the American Negro came 25 years after the end of slavery — enough time, Hoffman believed, that the conditions under which black people lived reflected only on black people themselves.[6]
Of course, black people at the turn of the century did not live under the same conditions as people who were white. After the Civil War, southern states were able to perpetuate the racial hierarchy and coerced labor that existed under slavery by making them central features of their judicial systems. As Douglas Blackmon documents in Slavery by Another Name, statutes criminalizing minor and subjective crimes allowed law enforcement to easily arrest black men, who were then leased to farmers and private industry as laborers to the financial benefit of the state.
For example, among the county convicts working in the Pratt Mines of Birmingham, Alabama in 1890:
- 24 men were incarcerated for using “obscene language,”
- Another 24 for “false pretense” — a statute used to punish black men who changed employers before the end of the farming season, and
- Seven for vagrancy, another ill-defined charge that left any unemployed black person vulnerable to arrest.[7]
In Alabama, the convict-leasing system remained on the books until 1928.
This context mattered little to Hoffman, who took crime statistics at face value, insisting they showed “without exception that the criminality of the negro exceeds that of other races of any numerical importance in this country.”[8] Environmental factors — including access to the most low-paying and dangerous jobs, segregation, exclusion from unions, discriminatory policing and other social and economic factors that might influence crime rates — were brushed aside. “It is not at all ‘the conditions of life,’” he wrote.[9]
Additionally, the fact that Irish and Italian immigrants also had disproportionately high crime rates received little notice. Hoffman quoted an academic who praised these immigrants for their ability to “melt like sugar in a cup of tea” when they came to the United States, while criticizing black people for remaining “distinctly African in their physical and mental characteristics.”[10] Like the other social scientists of his day, he wrote off higher crime rates among immigrant groups as a passing consequence of adjusting to the industrial city. In other words, it was temporary and environmental — an interpretation not afforded to African Americans.
The power of Hoffman’s interpretation lay in the fact that he argued with “data and reason, rather than passion and emotion,” giving a scientific veneer to racist ideas. Relying on dry and seemingly objective government reports, rather than the usual racist tropes, helped obscure the fact that his narrative was crafted to discredit claims of black equality. Hoffman’s “innovative and enduring significance,” Muhammad argued, “was not only in presenting the data for the first time, but also in setting the terms and shaping the frame of analysis.”[11]
By the turn of the century, the “Negro Problem” was a crime problem.
The real threat at the time: White on black crime
If anything, white people represented a far larger threat to black people than the reverse, and whites frequently employed the myth of black criminality to justify their own violence. The Klan represented an especial threat, and in their campaign of terror against newly freed African Americans they beat, whipped, kidnapped, and even killed men and women they believed had transgressed racial boundaries.
Often, it was the supposed sexual threat that black men posed to white women that elicited a violent response. Whites, especially in the South, cited rape and an alleged need to protect white women as a chief justification for the thousands of lynchings perpetrated against African Americans between Reconstruction and the Second World War.
Alleged sexual violence also sparked outbreaks of mass violence against black communities, including the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot and the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma race riot. Even the most well-to-do whites rationalized their own violence as necessary in order to defend their own racial purity and protect themselves against black barbarism.
At the turn of the century, a cohort of black academics and activist journalists pushed back against the accusations that black people were uniquely criminal and their culture hopelessly dysfunctional. Most prominent among them were the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells.
In both his works The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and The Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906), Du Bois recontextualized statistical data to show that social and economic conditions were responsible for higher rates of black crime, disease and morbidity.
For her part, Wells disproved the widely accepted belief that lynching occurred in response to sexual violence committed by black men. Instead, she showed, lynching was a strategy for whites to maintain social control of black people through fear. She also cast white men as the perpetrators of sexual violence, describing the very real threat they posed to black women who had essentially no access to social or legal recourse.[12] The public failed to take the intellectual work of black men and women seriously, and it would be decades before their research reached the mainstream.
White supremacy is stubbornly resistant and adaptable. Indisputable racial progress was made during the mid-twentieth century, yet racists found new strategies to justify their ideology, defend racist policies and blame racial inequality on black pathology.
During the most active years of the Civil Rights Movement — as white supremacists watched their efforts to maintain segregation fail with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Acts in 1965 — they found a new way to demonstrate that black people were, in fact, inferior: the language of genetics.
“Advances in genetics, particularly the discovery of the double helix [structure of DNA] in 1953, confirmed the complexity of human heredity and continued to undercut the simplistic theories of eugenicists and other racial scientists who advanced the idea of a fixed racial taxonomy,” Michael Yudell, a scholar of bioethics and public health, explained in 2011. Yet, he continued, it also introduced language and methodology that could be “exploited and manipulated” by racists.[13]
Genetics provided white supremacists with a potent tool to argue that racial differences were scientifically based, inherited and thus immutable. Factors as far ranging as intelligence, health, impulsivity and criminality, racist academics argued, were based on genetic markers that varied by race.
The Pioneer Fund’s destructive enterprise
Academic racism in this vein was largely sustained by a single institution: The Pioneer Fund. According to William H. Tucker — whose 2002 book The Funding of Scientific Racism remains the definitive history of the organization — Pioneer bankrolled “almost every social scientist who has concluded that Blacks are genetically less intelligent than Whites.”[14]
The Fund’s overarching goal was to finance research that proved black genetic inferiority, which could then be cited as evidence that the low economic and social status of black Americans was “natural.” By extension, policy interventions — in the form of welfare or affirmative action, for example — could be written off as impotent and unnecessary.
These studies existed well outside of the scientific mainstream.
By 1972 leading genetic scholar Richard Lewontin concluded that race had “virtually no genetic…significance.”[15] Nevertheless, scientists funded by Pioneer — nearly all of whom were in fields other than the biological sciences — used the language of genetics to help maintain a biological argument for white supremacy, repackaging old white nationalist ideas in order to lend them a respectable and scholarly edge.
Founded in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a Massachusetts textile magnate who used his multimillion-dollar fortune to endow the project, the Pioneer Fund aimed to ensure “race betterment” through “study and research into the problems of heredity and genetics.”[16] It came into being when eugenic-thought was still prominent in American culture (the 1930s saw more legal sterilizations committed for eugenic purposes than any other decade), and when many Americans connected societal problems stemming from the Great Depression to genetic factors and cultural “disease.”[17]
The politics of the Pioneer Fund
Draper’s fervent belief in eugenics was matched by those of the Fund’s first president, Harry Laughlin, a legal scholar whose work inspired Nazi sterilization programs.[18]
Though Harry F. Weyher, Jr., a New York attorney who became the Pioneer Fund’s president in 1958, claimed the fund’s “sole activity” was to conduct disinterested scholarly research, it was a political project from the outset.[19]
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed school segregation, Draper began quietly funding efforts to fight subsequent civil rights legislation. By 1964, he anonymously donated nearly $215,000 (more than $1.7 million in 2018 dollars) to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state-run agency created to oppose federal civil rights legislation, counter the work of anti-racist activists and preserve segregation.[20]
