Gregory Rodriguez asks why the press gets so excited about violence between black and Latino residents of Los Angeles:
Last January, a CNN anchorwoman asked a visibly perturbed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosawhether Los Angeles was "in the middle of a race war." That same month, this newspaper published an opinion piece claiming that "Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods" was an "increasingly common trend."
Yes, there have been high-profile incidents of Latino-black violence (mostly involving gang members in and outside of prison), but, as the new study's authors suggest, those stories tend to be sensationalized in the media to make those crimes seem like the rule rather than the exception. Furthermore, whereas the antics of white thugs are generally treated as unreflective of the opinions of whites at large, the media often interpret the actions of black and Latino criminals as the logical extension of the sentiments of the majority of their law-abiding ethnic brethren.
In reality, there hasn't actually been a notable increase in interracial crime. Recent studies find that blacks are 500 percent more likely to assault and 650 percent more likely to murder another black person than they are to assault/murder a Latino. The same is true of Latinos. As Rodriguez notes, part of the hype is probably about selling newspapers, but for the most part, it's about white America's preconceived notions about other races. Case in point: when asked about black-white relations, three-quarters of whites ranked them as "very good" or "somewhat good," but when they were asked about their perceptions of relations between blacks and Latinos, less than half thought they were positive. But 68 percent of blacks and 59 percent of thought relations between the groups were good.
Rodriguez is hesitant to call the discrepancy evidence of racism. He posits that "Anglo race fatigue" is behind the disparity – that whites are tired of being the only racists on the block and therefore eager to call out tensions between other races, and that they are convinced that race relations will always be rife with tensions. While I think that's true, there also must be an element of selection bias at play when it comes to police wringing their hands about a potential race war and news media rushing to find trends in crime statistics. Whites assume that brown and black people are more violent, thereby making them more inclined to put forward any evidence that supports that assumption. Which seems like the same-old, same-old school of racism, with just some new players added into the mix.
--Kate Sheppard
