As a number of right-wing activists—and presidential candidates—have pounced upon a tragic multiple-homicide in Newark as a rallying point for mobilizing anti-immigrant sentiment and pushing a mandate for local police to vigorously enforce immigration status violations, it’s no surprise to see Pat Buchanan join in denouncing so-called “sanctuary cities.” Buchanan, a host and frequent commentator on MSNBC, writes that the incident “has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008”—a reference to an infamous racially-tinged attack ad used against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election.
At this point, one would expect Buchanan to launch into a diatribe against Hispanic immigration, which he has blamed in part for “The Death of the West,” the title of his most recent book. But surprisingly, Buchanan takes a different turn: Jumping to a Washington Post article on a study showing that nearly half of murder victims are black, he complains that “[u]tterly absent” are “white victims.”
The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder — is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.
Buchanan’s source is a pamphlet called “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America,” published by the New Century Foundation, a group he characterizes as “‘right-leaning.’” As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog points out, the pamphlet’s purported research is “fundamentally flawed” and the New Century Foundation is itself a white supremacist group, which
… holds biannual conferences that attract such white supremacists as former Klan boss David Duke and tackle topics like “The Biological Reality of Race.” The organization also publishes American Renaissance, a journal filled with racist articles about blacks and Latinos. A 2002 article, for instance, argued that blacks are inherently pathological, suffering from a “personality disorder of which the central feature is lack of a moral sense.” Among a host of other things, the article alleges that blacks can’t form long-term relationships, stay employed, achieve long-term goals, or restrain their emotions and violent behavior.
