White observers hold innocence as the default for Whites and criminality for Blacks

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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: White criminals are mythologised as rogues where Black suspects are demonised as gangsters — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1751; Racial innocence ideology let white suburbanites fail to consider government culpability — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 42; Whiteness grants presumptive belonging that race-neutral legal status does not — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 906 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• White fear of black criminality persists despite vanishingly low odds of interracial homicide #exemplifies (0.92) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 194