The BBC is essentially telling lies about the “persecution” of American blacks by white racists

Yesterday’s BBC News coverage of the anniversary of last year’s Ferguson riots cleaved to the false narrative that the BBC has always adhered to in its reporting of this and similar stories over the years. According to the BBC – and most UK broadcasters - Michael Brown, the 16-year old black boy shot to death following his arrest in Ferguson last year, was the innocent victim of a racist policeman. “Mike” rapidly became a symbol of the terrible oppression and prejudice still suffered by American blacks 150 years after slavery was abolished, and 51 years after the introduction of the Civil Rights Act. I presume the BBC’s news correspondents actually believe this horseshit, otherwise they wouldn’t keep shoveling it onto our screens.

Any reasonable observer (which is, after all, what a reporter ought to be) would conclude that Michael Brown was a large, powerful, criminal thug who got himself killed because, for some odd reason, he decided to attack a policeman after he’d been arrested and cuffed. Wipe away all the emotionalism, the race huckstering, the penchant of  low-income American blacks to turn protests into full-scale riots, the desperate desire of left-liberal white folk to cling to their cherished, anachronistic notions regarding the pervasiveness of white racism, police brutality and the causes of black failure in America, and you’re left with the simple fact that Michael Brown – whatever his age – was a criminal who pretty much engineered his own death. That leaves us with a depressing story – and it’s not one that white liberals (who are desperately anxious to blame The System and unenlightened white racists) want to hear. So they invent a new story to tell us – one that is just about factually correct, but which manages to ignore most of the relevant facts.

While trawling for the report from Ferguson I saw on BBC News yesterday, I followed a link on the BBC news website to an item headlined “US race relations: six surprising statistics”. Foolishly, I imagined this might present the truly shocking statistics which show that the vast majority of blacks killed in the US are killed by other blacks, that blacks are responsible for a grotesquely disproportionate amount of crime compared to white Americans, and that the amount of crime blacks commit isn’t reflected in the number of blacks killed by the police.  But no, naturally, those weren’t the statistics the BBC wanted to highlight. Here’s the irrelevant, contentious and ambiguous drivel they wanted us to guiltily crinkle our brows at and compassionately shake our heads over:

There are only 2 black billionaires compared to 500 white billionaires.

9.8% of blacks over the age of 25 have a degree, compared to 14.4% of whites.

 75% of whites only have white friends.

10.9% of blacks are out of work, compared to 4.8% of whites.

37% of prisoners are black, while only 32% are white.

The unspoken implication, of course, is that all these examples of comparative black failure (or, in the case of the one about friends, "exclusion") are the result of (yes, you guessed it) – RACISM! 

Here are some of the US statistics the BBC chose not to share with licence-payers:

In 2013, blacks committed 5,375 murders, while whites committed 4,396 murders – blacks are 13% of the population, whites are 63%.

Police killings of blacks are down 70% in the last 50 years.

In 2012, 123 blacks were killed by police with a gun, compared to 326 whites.

Between 1980 and 2008, 93% of blacks who were killed were killed by other blacks.

In 2012, excluding murder, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence against blacks.

If that last set of numbers seem unlikely, they were provided by the Department of Justice to Heather MacDonald, who reached this conclusion in an excellent article for the  conservative National Review – hardly a deranged far right race-baiting publication (they’re easy to spot, by the way, because, within the first couple of paragraphs of any article, they almost invariably blame everything that's wrong with the world on evil Jews):

In fact, white violence against blacks is dwarfed by black on white violence... Blacks...committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. Both the absolute number of incidents and the rate of black-on-white violence are therefore magnitudes higher than white-on-black violence. There is no white race war going on.

(The whole article can be read here.)

By never, EVER reporting these sorts of statistics in order to provide some context for their unremittingly Old School coverage of events such as the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson or the recent horrifying massacre of black church-goers in Charleston, the BBC – and all the other left-liberal media outlets in the West – are doing a terrible disservice to hard-working, law-abiding blacks (i.e. the majority) by providing the seemingly unemployable, ineducable, criminal section of the black community with a ready-made excuse: their depressing behaviour has nothing to do with, for instance, fathers deserting their families or providing a dreadful example to their kids by getting banged up or not being arsed to find work – no, it’s all the fault of Whitey!

As I said before – horseshit! Of course there are viciously racist whites out there – but the idea that there are enough of them or that they’re sufficiently powerful to somehow account for the violence, criminality and fecklessness of so many low-income blacks simply won’t wash: is racism the cause of the (proportionately lower) number of low-income whites indulging in the same self-defeating and socially ruinous behaviours?

Feeding a misguided sense of racial grievance by ignoring readily-available evidence and implying that blacks are simply incapable of displaying judgment or self-restraint (the same condescending attitude routinely displayed by the Left towards Palestinians, by the way) strikes me as the worst sort of racism. If they really want to help blacks, media leftists should stop burying the multitude of facts which plainly contradict their evidently mistaken view of reality.

When yesterday's anniverary Ferguson "protest" inevitably degenerated into violence, it was mainly down to black gangs fighting each other. True, the police shot one of the "protesters" - but that was after he shot at them. How blinkered do liberal reporters have to be not to draw some screamingly obvious conclusions from those two facts?