Responding to Bill O’Reilly’s recent comments about African Americans and crime in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes provided a different interpretation of statistics being used by the Fox Host.
On his show All In with Chris Hayes this Friday, Hayes attacked O’Reilly directly, characterizing his rants as implicitly racist with no interest in “helping the actual human beings” who are affected by violent crime.
For people like Bill O’Reilly, there is a zero sum of concern here. For him, this isn’t about his interest in helping the actual human beings being killed on Chicago’s South Side. No. It’s about making a point. A point about the propensity of black people to commit violence, and then tossing them aside as violent people with ‘little discipline’ who are ‘unsupervised’ and ‘prone to imitate bad behavior.’
Hayes went to attack what he believes is O’Reilly’s intellectually dishonest use of statistics.
There are about 200 million white people in America, making up about 63 percent of the population. In 2010, 1,179 white people were killed by black people, Compare that to the roughly 20,000 white people who died from accidental poisoning, 16,000 who died from accidental falls that year, or the 2,000 or so white people estimated who died from accidental drowning. In other words, Bill O’Reilly, you have more reason to be afraid of your own swimming pool than any young black man you see in a hoodie.
Driving home his point, Hayes played a clip from the 1998 movie about neo-Nazi skinheads “American History X,” in which the lead character played by actor Edward Norton says that white people “aren’t offing each other in record numbers all over America. Look at the statistics for Christ’s sake. One in every three black males is in some phase of the correctional system. Is that a coincidence or do these people have some sort of racial commitment to crime?”
Watch the “All In with Chris Hayes” segment in the video below.
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