Brittany Covington, Jordan Hill, Tanishia Covington, Tesfaye Cooper

Source: Photo courtesy of Cook County Sheriff's Department

Apparently panicking in the face of such rapid narrative collapse, the Chicago Tribune quickly belched out an article about how, according to FBI statistics, white-on-black “€œhate crimes”€ are still more common than the inverse.

But the problem with such stats is a firm cultural and apparently legal reluctance to call any black-on-white violence a “€œhate crime,”€ no matter how strong the evidence is that racial animus was at least partial motivation. Americans know who Dylann Roof is but not Omar Thornton. They remember Rodney King but not Reginald Denny. They”€™re familiar with the murder of Emmett Till”€”which happened in 1955″€”but not the much more gruesome murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, which happened in 2007.

If you remove the very notion of “€œhate crime”€ from interracial violence in America and examine the actual stats, an entirely different picture emerges.

According to Department of Justice statistics analyzed by Heather Mac Donald regarding the years 2012 and 2013, blacks are the attackers in 84.9% of violent crimes between blacks and whites. Given differences in population sizes, a black is 27 times more likely to violently attack a white than the inverse. And I”€™ve already documented how ludicrously lopsided the interracial rape stats are.

So I suspect that the very notion of “€œhate crimes,”€ especially as funneled through an egregious double standard that dictates nonwhites are incapable of even committing them, may be a very sneaky and cynical deflection from stark statistical realities about interracial violence.

The videotaped evidence of the Chicago kidnapping/torture reveals beyond a whisper of a doubt that the perps were, if not exactly “€œkids,”€ extremely stupid. Droolingly stupid. So stupid it seems miraculous that they even knew how to use Facebook for long enough to incriminate themselves. They appear to be possibly even dumber than the bricks that were apparently smashed into their heads and made them this dumb in the first place.

But how dumb was Austin Hillbourn to idolize a black thug who clearly didn”€™t idolize him? How severely naïve was he to get in the stolen van that night? Kids make stupid decisions, and on New Year’s Eve at that McDonald’s in the Chicago burbs, Austin Hillbourn made the dumbest decision of his life.

Fear has its place. A little bit of fear would have served Austin Hillbourn well. Perhaps his childlike acceptance of someone who wished him harm was part of his mental condition.

But what’s clear is that his attackers had no fear. And that may be part of a much bigger problem”€”the fact that no one seems afraid of white people anymore.