On at least two occasions, I’ve heard the following reply to my pointing out that a disproportionate amount of the violent crimes, such as murder, robbery and rape are committed by non-whites in the United States. (In other words, even though blacks make up about 14 percent of the population, in some years, about half of all murder and non-negligent manslaughter is committed by someone categorized racially as black.)
The retort I’ve heard, at least twice, is: “White people commit more white-collar crimes.”
I didn’t consider this to be a particularly great response because: (a) I was only talking about violent crime, so this is dropping the context of the discussion, and (b) I don’t consider “white collar” crime to be a major problem. That’s just money. I do consider people loosing their lives to violence to be a bigger problem.
I had always assumed that this assertion was correct. Now, I am not so sure. Looking at FBI crime statistics broken down by race for 2011, we can see the number of people arrested by race for various crimes. This includes rows for “Forgery and counterfeiting”, “Fraud”, and “Embezzlement”. All three of these I would characterize as “white collar crimes”. For Fraud, the percentage of whites arrested for fraud is 66.5 percent, while the percentage of blacks arrested for fraud is 31.8 percent. The percentage break-downs for forgery and counterfeiting and embezzlement are about the same. Again, since blacks only make up about 14 percent of the population, the percentage of total crime that this racial group “should” be committing is about 14 percent. The fact that it is running around 31 percent, means its about twice as high as what it would be if each racial group was committing the amount of crime “representative” of its portion of the population. (At least, this is how I see it, but I am not great at math.)
Now, maybe there are studies that define “white collar crime” differently, such that it is limited to a particular subset of fraud and embezzlement, where whites do in fact commit more “white collar crime”. I have a hypothesis on this that I’d like to see tested. I suspect this is more about access than inclination of blacks versus whites to commit such crime. When we think “white collar crime”, we think of people who are in positions of financial, legal, or corporate responsibility at a business. White collar criminals are probably more educated and have worked their way up the corporate ladder sufficiently to be in a position to commit a white collar crime. For instance, an accountant at a corporation is in a position to “cook the books” and embezzle money more easily than, say, a janitor. What racial group are most accountants? They are mostly white, with Asians probably in a close second. In fact, according to this article, fewer than one percent of all CPA’s employed by firms are black. If you gave all people, of all races, the same amount of opportunity to commit “white collar crime”, what would the results be?
I also think it’s entirely possible that a black person who has worked hard enough to become sufficiently educated to be a CPA is actually less likely than a white CPA to commit a crime. I could see the black CPA’s reasoning as follows:
“I’ve seen all the criminals and thugs around me as I’ve been growing up. I didn’t work this hard and put up with all those criminals through the inner-city schools to be like them. So, I will always be very honest and law-abiding.”
In other words, the black, educated professional may have more desire to separate himself from the disproportionate levels of violent crime, and, apparently, fraud, forgery, and embezzlement, that are being committed by other black people. This would be an interesting thing to see an honest study about. But, since most academics in the social sciences have a Marxist-mindset, with a left-wing ideological axe to grind, we may never know.