A woman named Holly from Cincinnati was recently knocked unconscious by a sucker punch at a jazz festival. The attack was caught on video. I had the misfortune of watching it. Perhaps you did too. The video went viral
And for once, maybe the first time in decades, a white victim of black violence spoke honestly about what happened to her. She called it racially motivated. She didn’t apologize for existing. She didn’t beg people not to notice patterns. This represents a seismic shift in American discourse. For 60 years, we’ve been trapped in a suffocating ritual where white victims must immediately genuflect before the altar of racial sensitivity, even as they’re being wheeled into ambulances. They apologize for their attackers. They beg the media not to mention race. They perform elaborate acts of contrition for crimes committed against them.
Real solutions require honest diagnosis. If crime is disproportionately high in certain communities, we need to ask why.
The script is always identical: “I don’t want this to become about race.” “They were probably just having a bad day.” “This could have happened to anyone.” What look like organic responses from trauma victims are often coached performances designed to protect a narrative that’s destroying lives.
It’s time to face a simple truth: discussing black-on-white crime isn’t racism. It’s reality, and reality doesn’t bend to our feelings or our carefully crafted fairytales. Black-on-white crime exists. In fact, according to National Crime Victimization Survey, blacks commit 85 percent of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites.
Let me be absolutely clear. This isn’t about defending one race or condemning another. It’s about the lives of Americans — black, white, and every shade between — who are left to live with the consequences. Crime that cuts across every racial line exists. If we treat the problem as taboo, we stay silent while the damage spreads.
The numbers tell a story that makes many people deeply uncomfortable. Violent crime is not evenly distributed across America. Certain communities commit violent offenses at rates dramatically higher than others. The standard deflections don’t hold water anymore. “It’s about poverty,” we’re told. But poverty alone can’t explain why some of the poorest regions in the United States aren’t the most violent. Appalachia, for instance, is home to some of the most economically deprived white communities in the country. Yet violent crime rates there remain far lower than in cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, or Detroit. Poor whites, poor Asians, and poor Hispanics live with the same lack of money. They live with the same struggles with addiction, the same crumbling schools. But they don’t commit violent crimes at anywhere near the same rates.
“It’s about inequality,” we’re told. Yet America is filled with ethnic groups who arrived with nothing and endured discrimination without turning to thuggery. One needn’t discount blacks’ unique history of subjugation in the U.S. to recognize that immigrants from East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe all faced bigotry and barriers. Many began in low-wage jobs, struggling with broken English, packed into unsafe neighborhoods where survival itself was a daily battle. But these communities didn’t become epicenters of violent crime. They endured, they built. They climbed, without turning their streets into warzones.
The reality is inescapable. Some of America’s most violent cities — Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Philadelphia — aren’t just poor. These are cities with high concentrations of black residents. That doesn’t mean blackness equals criminality, and it doesn’t excuse crude stereotypes. But it does expose the flaw in the narrative that poverty or inequality alone explains crime. Something deeper, something cultural, institutional, and uncomfortable, is at play. Until we admit this, we’ll keep watching the same cycle of violence repeat.
We’ve created an intellectual straitjacket where acknowledging statistical reality is treated as morally equivalent to endorsing segregation. That is madness. Recognizing patterns in crime data doesn’t make you Bull Connor. It makes you someone who can read.
Over the years, the excuses have grown more desperate as the evidence mounts. We’re told that centuries of historical grievance justify twenty-first-century violence against people who had nothing to do with those wrongs. But vengeance doesn’t explain why the majority of victims are not “the oppressor class” but members of the same community. Black-on-black crime, by sheer volume, dwarfs interracial violence. To point this out is not racism; it’s compassion for the thousands of black families burying their sons and daughters every year. Violence doesn’t respect skin color. It claims whoever is closest, whoever is vulnerable. It impacts all Americans because every homicide erodes the country’s stability. Every act of violence deepens mistrust. Every victim is someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s neighbor.
Consider the psychological torture we inflict on victims’ families. When a crime breaks through the media filter, families are often expected to perform public acts of reconciliation before the body is even buried. They must assure the cameras that they don’t want the tragedy “to spread hate,” as if demanding justice were itself an act of bigotry. This pitiful ritual doesn’t comfort the grieving. It protects a narrative that places ideology above human decency.
The Holly incident matters because it broke the script. She refused to minimize her own assault. She didn’t agree to play her part in the pageant of reconciliation. She told the truth about what happened to her, and suddenly people remembered what honest conversation sounds like.
This doesn’t mean every crime is racially motivated. It doesn’t mean every member of a group is violent. It doesn’t mean we abandon fairness or equal rights. What it does mean is that we can discuss observable patterns without losing our minds — or our moral standing.
Real solutions require honest diagnosis. If crime is disproportionately high in certain communities, we need to ask why. What cultural, institutional, or policy failures allowed this to fester? How can we best protect the innocent? We can’t answer while clinging to the fiction that crime is only about income or inequality. Problems we can’t name are problems we can’t solve.
Silence doesn’t protect victims. It protects the academics, politicians, and nonprofits whose careers depend on keeping these conversations off-limits. They’ve convinced well-meaning Americans that citing crime statistics is itself a form of hatred.
But truth and justice aren’t opposites. You can oppose racism while acknowledging crime patterns. You can support equal rights while demanding equal accountability. You can condemn historical injustice while still protecting today’s innocent victims.
Holly’s refusal to play along shattered the wall of silence. We can step through — not toward division, but toward clarity. Clarity that could prevent the next assault, the next grieving family forced to mouth platitudes for the cameras.
We owe it to every victim, in every community, to stop pretending reality doesn’t exist. Truth isn’t racist. Statistics aren’t bigoted. And victims shouldn’t have to apologize for violence done to them just to preserve someone else’s illusion of comfort. Until we face this head-on, crime will keep rising, families will keep burying children, and America will keep suffering.
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