Adelphia University, a “private university in New York, told students, faculty and staff to not discriminate against someone based on a history of sexual offenses,” reports the College Fix:
University urges non-discrimination against racial minorities, people with disabilities and sex offenders
A poster at the university, obtained by The College Fix, has a list of categories and a statement that “I will not discriminate.” The poster has the university’s name on it.
People should “not discriminate” against someone based on sex, race, disability or religion according to the poster, nor someone’s “sexual offender status.”
The Fix reached out to the student affairs division, whose name and phone number appears to be on the bottom of the bulletin board, but did not receive a response to a June 1 email.
Neither New York state law, nor federal law, defines sex offenders as a protected minority group, the way racial minorities are. But some academics have argued that it is racist to discriminate against sex offenders, because convicted sex offenders are disproportionately from communities of color.
For example, 43.7% of all rapists in state prisons were black, according to a 1997 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though only 13% of all Americans are black. [See Lawrence Greenfeld, Statistician, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (Feb. 1997)].
This higher incarceration rate for rape is not due to racism in the criminal justice system. As a lawyer noted in 2017, black rapists are arrested mostly in response to criminal complaints by black rape victims, and “The people they raped were disproportionately other black people who reported the offense, eliminating racial bias as a factor in reporting.”
Crime is heavily black-on-black, and black victims of violence crimes disproportionately identify their assailant as black. As the Bureau of Justice Statistics has found in its surveys, violent crimes are committed mostly against members of the offender’s own race, and this is true for “rape or sexual assault,” “simple assault,” “aggravated assault,” and indeed, “all types of violent crime except robbery,” which is disproportionately committed by blacks against non-blacks. (See, e.g., Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012-2015).
Criminal-justice “reform” activists such as The Appeal claim that blacks are convicted for rape at higher rates than whites due to racism, not the higher black crime rate. “Even though it’s unlikely that they commit sexual assault at higher rates than other ethnic or racial groups,” claims The Appeal, “nearly one of every 100 Black men is on a sex offender registry, a rate double that of white men.” Many criminal-justice “reformers” believe that the black crime rate is the same as the white crime rate, and blacks are only arrested at a higher rate due to police racism.
But that’s not true: the crime rate really does differ by race, according to statisticians. For example, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that for murder and homicide crimes, “the offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005. (See BJS, Homicide Trends in the United States).
Blacks are actually arrested less often than similarly-situated whites when they commit homicide, because black murder victims are usually killed by other blacks, and there is less cooperation with the police in heavily-black areas than other areas. In the inner city, some blacks view cooperating with police as “snitching,” making it harder to identify and track down murder suspects in black-on-black killings, which account for most murders of black people. This results in lower clearance rates when victims are black: Chicago, which has a black mayor, solves 47 percent of cases when a murder victim is white, but only 22 percent of cases when the victim is black, according to NPR.
Crime victims themselves indicate that violent criminals are disproportionately people of color. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey reveals that in 2018, 28.9% of offenders who committed nonfatal violent crimes are black, even though only 13% of Americans are black; and that only 52.2% of offenders are white, even though about 60% of Americans are non-Hispanic whites. Surveys of crime victims are not tainted by racism. That’s because crime victims are overwhelmingly of the same race as their attacker, as they themselves report.
