White fear of black criminality persists despite vanishingly low odds of interracial homicide

Evidence

Cohen’s op-ed set off a firestorm. Daily Kos offered one of the more imaginative responses, listing data that contradicted the idea that white people should be afraid of young black men. The odds of a black person killing a white person are about 0.0000212. With those numbers, “[y]ou really have far more reason to be scared of say, getting on a ladder, than you do of getting murdered by the hoodie wearing teenager you see on the street. The fear is irrational.” But that doesn’t matter. Cohen believes this stuff, and he is not alone. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 194

Categorization

• QUESTION: The stubborn persistence of statistically baseless fear suggests that for Glaude the fear is not about actual crime statistics at all but about something else—likely the value gap and racial habits.