Time Guest Columnist Uses Falsehood From Racist Group to Support Thesis in Article About Oklahoma Killing
Why would you trust anything from the Council of Conservative Citizens?
John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and the author of several well-regarded books, often appears on cable television news shows as the black, clear-eyed centrist on issues of race.
But in an essay that appeared on the Time magazine website Thursday about young black men, violence and the senseless killing of a white college baseball player, Christopher Lane, in Oklahoma, McWhorter veered way to the radical racist right.
To support his assertion that “young black men murder 14 times more than young white men,” McWhorter linked directly to an article saying the same thing on the website of the white nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The CCC, founded in 1985, is the linear descendent of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South, and it has evolved into a crudely racist organization. It’s website, for example, has referred to black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.”
On top of that ugly history, the CCC article McWhorter linked to - “Young blacks committed homicides at nearly 14 times the rate young whites did in 2010” - is unquestionably wrong.
The CCC based its blog post on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report titled “Homicide Rates Among Persons Aged 10-24 Years - United States, 1981-2010.” Contrary to the assertion of the CCC, the report actually quantifies the rate at which various racial and age groups are victims of homicide, not the rate at which various groups kill.
“You won’t find that in the report,” someone who worked on the report told Hatewatch. “It’s about victims.”