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Monday, February 14, 2005
 
Either the American justice system treats black people fairly or the liberal states are the most racist of all

"If you've seen anything of their conviction statistics for black people ..." one fellow student once began, as he explained to me that one could feel sure of America's inherent corruption and racism. It's difficult to be sure, but it's probably safe to assume he wasn't suggesting that if black people commit crimes it is racist that they be convicted of them. What he meant was that racism ensures a fantastically disproportionate number of black people are falsely blamed and wrongly imprisoned in the first place. You don't have to stray far to find examples of the same attitude across liberal opinion.

Well, numbers whizz Steve Sailer may thankfully have found one way of identifying who is to blame for this racism. Because different states vary in how strictly they sentence, and in the numbers and proportions of every ethnic group, one fair way to compare like with like is to compare the probability that a black person and a white person in that state will be in jail, and then use that ratio to compare to every other state. Most conveniently, Sailer has mapped the ratio of black to white imprisonment per capita against each of the American states.

Here is the result, ranging from light green, with a black man five times as likely - or less - to be imprisoned as a white man, to bright red, which means twenty times as likely or more. So in terms of liberal thinking, the greener the state, the less racist; the redder the state, the more racist.

Notice anything? It's not difficult to miss the fact that the blue states on America's electoral map are the reddest of states here. Every one of the seven unambigiously red states here went for Al Gore. Every one of them but Iowa went for John Kerry. The eighth piece of red, the District of Columbia, also went Democrat both times, giving Bush 9% of its vote in November. Notice by contrast how green so many of the Republican strongholds are.

Steve Sailer explains the overall national picture:

States with relatively high black vs. white imprisonment rates tended to vote for Kerry - the correlation [on a scale of -1.00 to +1.00] was a strong r = 0.62

In other words, the racism liberal Americans denounce for ensuring a disproportionate number of black people are jailed is by far the most common of all in ... liberal America!

Either the United States is fair and just when it comes to convicting and sentencing black defendants, or it is an extremely racist society in which the liberal states that have stuck with the Democrats in recent years through thick and thin are the greatest offenders. There's simply no other way the explanation of racism can be correct.

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