Newest piece at National Review: "Obama’s Racial Imbalance: He professes outrage when there’s little evidence of bias against blacks, but ignores attacks on whites."

My newest piece starts this way:

Racism should make people pretty angry. But for that very reason charges of racism should only be leveled carefully. 

George Zimmerman wasn’t motivated by race in confronting Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was himself one-eighth black. The prosecution in his case produced no statements by Zimmerman showing any racial bias. 

Alas, most people didn’t have time to follow the trial’s day-to-day testimony, and obviously didn’t know that. They got summaries presented by the mainstream media. NBC selectively edited a 9-1-1 call to make Zimmerman sound racist. President Obama pronounced the killing as racially motivated, first personalizing the case by comparing Trayvon to a hypothetical son of his, then his younger self, and then suggesting Trayvon was followed because of his race. Naturally, Jesse Jackson claimed the case meant “blacks are under attack.” Martin’s parents surely believed the tragedy was about race. 

Now, race appears central in the recent murder of Australian Christopher Lane in Oklahoma, but the discussion seems to be about almost everything else, especially gun control. . . .

Racially motivated stress as an explanation for infant mortality rates?

OK, you have differences in "poor nutrition, inadequate prenatal care, teen pregnancy, heredity, high blood pressure, stress, obesity, low birth weights and prematurity," but some academics have a different theory:

"The pregnancy scares the life out of me because I am pregnant with a baby boy, and I know how black boys are treated in this society," one study participant told researchers from Spelman College and Emory University in Atlanta. . . .

Here is my question: how as the gap between black and white infant mortality rates changed over time? The 1950s and 1960s should have had really high relative infant mortality rages, but they weren't. Well, I looked up some numbers:

The infant mortality rate for Black Americans in 1999 was 2.5 times the rate of White Americans. In 1950 the mortality rate of black infants was only 1.5 times the rate of white infants. . . .