Re: Steve Sailer’s blog post Conspiracy Theorizing About Crime Stats

From Professor Of Mystery [Email him]

I read this in Steve Sailer's recent post, it's a quote from black NYT pundit Charles Blow (right):

[Suspicion Nation author Lisa Bloom ] further says: “The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American. When we think about crime, we ‘see black,’ even when it’s not present at all.”[Crime, Bias and Statistics September 7, 2014]

Did Charles or the study think to see if these perps actually were black? It's certainly possible to hear about categories of crime and do a quick and dirty assessment about the race of the perp based on location, ID of victim and other telltale details. Most of the viewers can quickly figure out the back story and ID. It's not the viewer's imagination when a KFC on MLK gets crashed into by an African-American who is driving a BMW. Yes, that actually happened in real life and race wasn't mentioned in the coverage.

See earlier letters from the same reader.