You might be a Racist if...

Bill Bennet is still receiving flak for his off color (pun intended) remarks about crime and race in our country, as he well should be. For those of you who didn't here about it, during his weekly radio show, he said

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

Obviously, groups such as the NAACP were up in arms, and demanding of an apology. While Bennet admitted it was an "argument absurdum", he refuses to back down and is accusing the media of taking his quote out of context. Apparently, if you had heard whatever sentence he said earlier, it wouldn't have been offensive.

While it's true blacks make up a disproportionately large number of prison inmates, according to the FBI, they certainly don't commit more arrestable crimes than their white counterparts. How can that be, you ask? Well, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, more than twice as many whites as blacks were arrested for commiting a crime in 2003 (6.7 million whites vs. 2.6 million blacks), and this has been a trend since 1999. In fact, white people were 70.6% of the arestees that year. This means one of two things. Either there's a widespread conspiracy arrest the white man, or blacks and whites face a different universe in our legal system. Doesn't take a genius to decide which is the case...

With that said, if you look at other demographic differences, Bennett could have used "males" instead of "blacks", which would have been a much more illustrative example, since men reprisent almost 90% of our prison population. Oh wait... he's male. Or, he could have said to abort all babies of single mothers. At least then, the numbers would support his case without cries of discrimination since human police officers can't pick out the criminals from single parent households. Anyway, he should be getting flak. Maybe he's racist. Maybe he's just insensitive. Either way, his example is flawed. A-hole.

-DV