Part 3 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing
By William K. Black
July 31, 2016 Bloomington, MN
This is my third installment in my series of columns about race, crime, and policing. I chose as my initial example of dangerous blood libels a New York Times contributor’s op ed. I use also a NYT editorial about blood libels involving crime and race that demonstrates the editorial board’s hypocrisy and analytical failures.
The New York Times Spreads a Blood Libel Against LEOs and Whites
On July 11, 2016, the editorial board of the New York Times denounced a man for propagating “racial myths,” through a “garbled, fictional statistic,” “false equivalencies,” “defam[ation],” and “race-baiting.” There were only three problems with the editorial. First, the man they were denouncing made his unscripted remarks on an interview program, while the New York Times invited one of their editorial contributors to write an op ed dated July 7, 2016 that exemplified the characteristics that the editorial denounced. The writer of the op ed presented no data, so he did not present a fictional statistic. The racial myths, race-baiting, and false equivalencies of the op ed were so much worse than the talk show participant that his defamation degenerated into blood libels against LEOs and whites as a race.
