Washington Post writer Philip Bump's excellent newsletter "How to Read This Chart" examined the white-grievance chart in a meme Elon Musk recently approvingly tweeted about.
Elon used his galaxy brain to slyly suggest that white people rarely commit crimes against black people, but the media unfairly focuses on those cases because it hates Whites so much.
Charts are Bump's beat, so he was right on the case. Leaving aside the very questionable assumption that the media actually does focus disproportionately on white-on-black crime, Bump points to data scientist Kareem Carr, who included in another chart white-on-white violent crime, which cast the issue in a very different light.
Bump created another visualization of the data:
"I couldn't resist taking the same data and depicting it differently. On the chart below, each section of the square represents the number of victims of violent crime of each identified race in 2018 (Asian, White, etc.). The colored blobs indicate the distribution of those crimes committed by perpetrators of each race. In total, the square (broken apart for clarity) contains every violent crime included in the BJS data."
(Image published with the permission of Philip Bump)
Bump says:
"To Carr's point, there were about 4.1 times as many violent crimes against Whites committed by Whites than by Blacks. There are about 4.8 times as many White Americans as Black Americans. There were about 2.3 times as many violent crimes committed by White perpetrators overall (usually against White people) as by Black perpetrators, in part because of confounding, hard-to-extricate factors like age, race and wealth.
"Not that Musk tries. He simply takes the image at face value — including the utterly baseless overlay of the little camera dude focusing on White-on-Black crime. Because, you know, that's all the media covers? According to [mumbles, shuffles papers]?
""Why would the media misrepresent the real situation to such an extreme degree?" says one of the richest men in the world, taking the shoddily drawn meme at face value."
