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Take a look at the chart on page 27. Based on its latest crime victimization surveys, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that in 1993 alone blacks committed 1.29 million violent crimes against other blacks—80 percent of all violent crimes against blacks. Blacks also committed 1.54 million violent crimes against whites—18 percent of all violent crimes against whites.

As a number of analysts have begun to notice, blacks are about 50 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites are to commit violent crimes against blacks. Like the Sentencing Project’s “1 in 3” number, this “50 to 1” statistic is technically correct. If you divide the total number of black-on-white violent crimes in 1993 (1.29 million) by the number of black males age 20 to 29 in the population in 1993 (3.94 million), you get a ratio equal to 1,013 violent crimes against whites per 10,000 young black males. If you do the same calculation for the total number of white-on-black crimes (186,000) divided by the total number of twenty-something white males (22.9 million), you get a ratio of 17.6 violent crimes committed by whites against blacks for every 10,000 young white males. Thus, the incidence of interracial black-on-white violent crime by young black males (1,013) is 57.5 times the incidence of interracial white-on-black crime by young white males (17.6). Using different denominators (for example, white versus black males age 15 to 29) moves the statistic down a bit (in the example given, to 48 to 1). But it clusters around “50 to 1.”

In his recent essay in The New Republic, Glenn Loury explains that “there are roughly eight times as many whites as blacks; and there are about six times as many violent criminals per capita among blacks as among whites. So, if criminals chose their victims at random, without regard to race, one would expect the black-on-white victimization rate per black person to be 48 times as large as the white-on-black rate per white person. Thus, it does not appear that black criminals take affirmative action to find white victims.”

Loury is absolutely right, and he or I or any other competent analyst could fashion a half-dozen fancier ways of minimizing the “50 to 1” statistic. In the end, however, nothing we could produce would be other than cold comfort to white victims of black criminals. For every such “explanation” merely underlines the reality behind both “1 in 3” and “50 to 1”: namely, that young black males do commit serious crimes at a much higher rate than whites. Worse, where the growing problems of black juvenile and “wolf pack” crimes are concerned, it may well be that young black criminals really are targeting white victims. For example, as even OJJDP has noted, while about 95 percent of all violent crimes committed by white juveniles in 1991 were against whites, 57 percent of all violent crimes committed by black juveniles also were against whites.

The simple if unpalatable truth, therefore, is that even if we decriminalized black drug-dealing, there would still be racial “disproportionalities” in the justice system. Even if we also decriminalized all black crime save black-on-black violent crime, racial “disproportionalities” would persist.

Here’s a suggestive calculation. In 1991, 372,200 black men were in prison, along with 363,600 white men. About 60 percent of all prisoners in 1991 had committed one or more violent crimes in the past. Suppose that we released 40 percent of the black prisoners—the 40 percent, say, with either no official history of violence or the least severe records of it. That would leave 223,320 black men behind bars. Then, because slightly more than half of the violent crimes committed by blacks are committed against whites, let’s release, say, 55 percent of the remaining black violent male offenders. That would leave 100,494 black males in prison, 27 percent of 1991ís actual total. They would be doing time with 3.6 times as many white males. But since whites in the general population still would outnumber blacks by roughly 8 to 1, the racial “disproportionality” would persist. To make it disappear completely—to get an 8-to-1 white-black ratio in prison—we would have to release all but 45,450 of the 372,200 black men in prison in 1991.

Similarly, 605,062 black adults were on probation in 1993, compared with 1,132,092 white adults, and 240,767 black adults were on parole, compared with 236,083 white adults. Thus, the total black adult community-based corrections population (probation plus parole) numbered 845,829, compared with 1.36 million whites. Let’s say we believed that fully 70 percent of all black probationers and parolees, but none of the white ones, were innocent victims of a racist “war on drugs” and should never have been arrested. That would leave 253,749 black adults on probation and parole. We would still have only 5.3, not eight, times as many white adults as blacks “in custody” in the community. To eliminate entirely the racial “disproportionalities” in probation and parole, all but about 170,000 of the more than 800,000 black adults under community-based supervision in 1993 would have to be expunged from the rolls.

Even if, therefore, the justice system punished only those blacks who commit violent crimes—indeed, even if it punished only black violent criminals whose victims were themselves black—blacks would still be “overrepresented” in prison, in jail, on probation, and on parole. Thus, instead of all the ideological nonsense about “1 in 3” and the like, we should begin to focus in common on how revolving-door justice harms all Americans, most especially blacks. As the bipartisan Council on Crime in America has reported: “America’s violent crime problem, especially the rage of homicidal and near-homicidal violence, is extremely concentrated among young urban minority males. . . . A study of murders committed in the nation’s 75 most populous counties found that blacks were 52 percent of all murder victims and 62 percent of all murder defendants,” but “they were only 20 percent of the general population in these metropolitan jurisdictions. . . . Between 1985 and 1992 the rate at which males ages 14 through 17 committed murder increased by about 50 percent for whites and over 300 percent for blacks. Between 1973 and 1992 the rate of violent victimizations of black males ages 12 to 24 increased about 25 percent; for example, black males ages 16 to 19 sustained one violent crime for 11 persons in 1973 versus one for every six in 1992.”

For God’s sake, let’s be truthful. Especially in urban America, white fears of black crime—like black fears of black crime—are rational far more than reactionary or racist. If Americans are to learn how to deal in common with black crime as a problem of “sin, not skin,” as Glenn Loury puts it—as a correctable moral defect of individuals, not some ineradicable racial fate—then we must hear and heed those leaders, black and white, liberal and conservative, who are speaking and doing something about it.

Hear Robert L. Woodson Sr., leader of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. A veteran of the civil rights movement and an organizer of community- and faith-based groups that reach poor blacks and their children, Woodson speaks not of white racism but of “moral vagrants” in the black community who prey upon their disadvantaged neighbors.

Hear John W. Gillis, another prominent black, who heads California’s parole board and is a member of the Council on Crime in America. On the day the council’s first report was released to the press, Gillis stared into the cameras and implored responsible journalists to remember who normally puts black convicted criminals where they are, and why: black victims, black witnesses, and black communities—in order to do justice and to protect themselves from murder, mayhem, and deadly drug dealing.

Hear the grief-stricken family of Philadelphia police officer Lauretha Vaird, the city’s first female cop—and first black woman—to be killed in the line of duty. Officer Vaird was murdered in cold blood, execution-style. Two of her three alleged killers are 26-year-old local black “gangsta” rappers who apparently practice the hate they sing. Vaird’s family members are calling for justice—life in prison or the electric chair for the killers.

Hear Debra Dickerson, the self-described liberal black sister of a young black man paralyzed from the waist down in a drive-by shooting. Read her intensely gripping, highly personal essay published in The New Republic, “Who Shot Johnny?” Therein she rages at the black assailant who shot her brother and left him for dead. His “crime”? Waving hello at a car full of boys whom he mistakenly thought he knew. The assailant stood over his bleeding, barely conscious body and said, “Betch’ou won’t be doin’ nomo’ wavin’, motha’fucker.” The vicious attacker was never caught.

Hear Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who in a 1994 Wall Street Journal op-ed described as “dangerous” the response “that cries ‘racism’ as part of an all-out defense of any black accused of wrongdoing by ‘white’ authorities, regardless of the facts of the case,” and as “troubling” the “position of some blacks that they will refuse to help send any black person to prison.”