Pat Buchanan continued his long history of racially controversial statements by using the murder of an Australian student in Oklahoma to engage in a discussion of interracial violence that appeared to serve no purpose other than to perpetuate stereotypes of African Americans.
Last week, an Australian baseball player jogging in an Oklahoma neighborhood was shot and killed “by three 'bored' teenagers who decided to kill someone for fun.”
On the August 21 edition of Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, guest Pat Buchanan speculated that the shooting was “racial” (even though one of the alleged perpetrators is white). He blamed hip-hop, rap, and cable television for engendering a culture of violence among young African-Americans before claiming that “racial hate crimes” are “40 times more prevalent in the black community than the white community, and nobody talks about it.” He argued that African-Americans are disproportionately violent and pointed out that “interracial rape is almost exclusively black-on-white,” comments that echo century-old stereotypes of African-American men as innately brutish predators.
BUCHANAN: What are these kids getting from the culture? They listen to radio they get hip-hop and rap. This one kid on his twitter feed or whatever it is, he's talking about gangs and colors of gangs. What do they get out of Hollywood? They get movies that are, I mean, pornographic. Look I watch a lot of TV and cable. Some of these shows are triple x. They would never be on before. And this one kids puts out, he's interested in sex and violence. And the movies are extraordinarily violent. I mean, you get guys being shot, of course they're almost like cartoon characters being killed. And so where are these kids going to find something which says 'no that is wrong, you can't do that, and you shouldn't do something like that?' Where is the voice that says no?
[...]
BUCHANAN: Look, the most common form of interracial hate crime is black on white. Greta, when I did a book -- one of my recent books -- I went down to the FBI statistics because the post doesn't do it, found more than 400 -- one year, 2007 -- 433,000 attacks by blacks on whites, and one eighth of that by whites on black. At the same time, the black community was five times -- I mean one fifth the size of white community. Add it up. The idea of racial hate crimes is 40 times more prevalent in the black community than the white community. And nobody talks about it.
Buchanan has a long history of making bigoted comments. Recently, he argued that Hispanic immigrants exhibit “underclass behavior.” In 2011, he conceded that “minorities aren't bad for the country,” but included the caveat that America is “disintegrating” because “white America is an endangered species.”
Buchanan has been making controversial, racially reprehensible comments about African Americans for decades -- he once called civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. “one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.” But that controversy hasn't stopped him. He recently complained that with the addition of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court would have too many “Jews,” called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor an “affirmative action pick,” and argued that the United States was “built, basically, by white folks.”