No, White Men are Not Bigger Victims of Police Shootings....

The other day on Twitter, someone said that Black Lives Matter is a baseless movement because, and I quote, “White males are killed at over 2x the rate of Asian males.” The logic (if such a word can be used here) seemed to be that unless Black men are killed at the highest rate of any demographic group you can name, there is no reason to be concerned about police brutality and racism. It was such an appallingly stupid response that I didn’t even know where to begin to point out all its flaws, especially in a short-form medium like Twitter. So I invited the fellow to stop and give some more considered thought to the matter and see if he could possibly come up with a few things wrong on his own before I did it for him. I gave him a day. Since that has now passed and he still cannot seem to grasp the huge holes in his reasoning, it would appear that I am obligated to fulfill my commitment to do it for him.

Writing about racism is not new to me. Indeed, it was the subject of my most recent entry on this very blog. So I was already pretty familiar with the relevant statistics. But let’s look at the ones referenced directly by this tweet: if you look at all Asian, Black, and White men killed by the police for the last six whole calendar years (2013-2019), we see that 2% were Asian men, 36% per Black men, 61% were White men (doesn’t add to 100% due to rounding). So yes, based on share of population, White males were killed at roughly twice the rate of Asian men per capita (while Black men were killed at the rate of almost three times their share of the population). So, case closed, right? We should be starting a White Lives Matter movement to protest how much more often White men are killed compared to Asian men!

Not so fast.

This reminds me of those frustrating times when you try to discuss history with people who get all their knowledge of the past from Breitbart-inspired memes and factoids, such as that old chestnut about how Nazis were really liberals because Nazi is short for “National SOCIALISM!” (Take THAT libtards!) I could write an entire book about the stupidity and ignorance behind such statements, and it’s exactly the same sort of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” factor at work here. The point is that facts without context are meaningless. And just as pointing out that the Nazis used the word socialism in their name is useless because it had nothing to do with their espousal of any liberal beliefs (quite the opposite), so, too, is it a red herring to point out that White men are killed more often than Asian men.

So let’s deep-dive this.

First things first: the statistics cited by the tweeter are for all police shootings. But the Black Lives Matter movement’s primary concern is not simply police shootings, but police shootings of defenseless Black people. So the relevant statistic is this: of those shootings, in how many cases were the victims definitely unarmed? In that same time period, 711 undisputedly unarmed Asian, Black, and White men were killed by police. In those cases, the statistics become even more skewed: Black men were shot dead while unarmed at a rate almost 3.5 times their share of the population, while both Asian and White men are grossly underrepresented in this category (by 3.3x and 1.3x, respectively). (And that is just taking into account cases where there is no disputing the armed v unarmed status of the victims.) That means Black men are killed by the police while unarmed at a rate almost 12 times higher than Asian men and almost 5 times the rate for White men.

But what of the claim that we shouldn’t be worried about Black men because White men are targeted more than Asians? I am tempted to dismiss such nonsense out of hand, since the underlying victim complex is laughable. An argument that amounts to “Well, sure that group is targeted far more than any other group, but my group is slightly worse than a third, very small group, so shut up!” is not really worth a lot of mental effort. But let’s keep diving just for the sake of completeness. Let’s ask the question: why are Asian men shot so much less often than Whites? The answer is actually pretty simple: they are shot less often than Whites because police target them less often that Whites.

The meaningful question, therefore, is, “Are Asian men shot while unarmed at a significantly different rate after controlling for how often they are actually targeted to begin with?” Let’s look at the data. In 2014, the last year the DOJ has posted to their website, Asian/Pacific Islanders targeted for arrest were just under 1.6% of all cases involving Asians, Blacks, and Whites, and unarmed Asian men killed by the police made up just over 1.6% of all such cases involving Asian, Black, and White men. So in fact, there is very little difference there. In fact, if anything, Asian men are slightly over-represented, not under, compared with Whites. Meanwhile, of those three groups, Whites made up about 70% of all arrests (slightly lower than population share) but only 54% of all police shootings of unarmed victims, making them considerably under-represented among victims. Blacks were about 28% of the arrests, but 44% of all unarmed police shooting victims, making them grossly over-represented, by a factor of over 1.5.

So let’s cancel the pity party for White men. They are not, in fact, targeted disproportionately compared to Asian men. As we saw in the recent armed protests against quarantine and social distancing rules, simply being White in American works as an amazing shield against being targeted by the police. Had a large group of angry, armed-to-the-teeth Black men stormed a government building, the headline would have been “Large Group of Black Men Shot Dead by Riot Police.” To deny that simple fact of American life is to indulge in the most egregious White privilege of all: the comforting privilege of self-delusion and false victimhood.