Blacks are also subject in much greater proportions to the influences which foster crime (poverty, proximity to drugs and drug dealers, teen-aged mothers, lack of male role models, high-crime neighborhoods, etc.). That, too, is undeniable.

If you control for these influences, then blacks are no more likely to become criminals than whites are. It’s the influences which cause the high rate of crime, not the race of the people who are influenced. This is, incidentally, quite clearly documented in Freakonomics, the book to which Bennett inaccurately attributed a link between race and crime. The authors of that book in fact specifically denounce any effort to make such a link.

The “outrage,” as you put it, is over the fact that Bill Bennett, and now you, used race as a determining factor for something that has nothing to do with race.

As I said above, blaming high crime on race is nothing more than an attempt to disavow any responsibility for solving the problem by blaming its victims for it.

The typical conservative reaction to this chain of reasoning is, “Welll, it’s their own fault that they’re subject to all of those influences. They could escape from them if they really wanted to.” You, yourself, use this argument here. This, too, is nothing more than a facile attempt to blame the victims. The odds are so stacked against people who grow up under these conditions that the vast majority of them can’t escape. You can acknowledge that this is because the conditions are simply too overwhelming, or you can claim that black people are lazy. Somehow I suspect I know which you’d choose.