An Experiment in Social Order
15th May 2020
In the last few weeks Ahmaud Arbery, like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, has been put to a predictable use: advancing the liberal narrative of black victims of white violence. Regardless of the facts of the case, the media has trotted out its standard story of an innocent black man being subjected, like so many others before him, to the racist violence that, we are to believe, defines life for blacks in the contemporary United States.
In reality, most violence in the U.S. is intra-racial, but when it comes to interracial violence, blacks are considerably overrepresented, as they are in regard to violent crime generally. Still, the constant media hype obscures these simple truths, which people nevertheless know to be true from their own experience. Whenever, for example, people speak of “a bad neighborhood” in an inner city, it’s taken for granted that the neighborhood is a black one.