So, first we have this:

Toni Morrison: ‘I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman’

Ms. Morrison is apparently an author of some kind (not science fiction, so who cares). According to the article, she thinks that America remains a terribly racist place, and that our racial problems won’t be over until two things happen:

1) “I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.”

And…

2) “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”

As for #1, the tale of Dillon Taylor comes close to fitting.

I figured #2 would be easy enough to counter. Surely white rapists of black women get convicted on a regular basis. But as it turns out, finding such a conviction is kinda difficult. According to the US FedGuvs Bureau of Justice Statistics:

Table 42. Personal crimes of violence, 2008:
Percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, by type of crime,
race of victim, and perceived race of offender

In short, whites were the victims of rape/sexual assault 117,640 times in 2008, while blacks were the victims 46,580 times. Whites were raped by other whites 74.9% of the time, and by blacks 16.4% of the time, and by other/unknown 8.7% of the time. These percentages kinda-sorta match up with the racial breakdown of US society as a whole. But where it gets interesting… blacks were raped by other blacks 74.8% of the time, by other/unknown 25.2% of the time and by whites 0.0% of the time. Once again: zero reported rapes of black people by white people. Granted, in the 25.2% of the time that’s “unknown” there could well be white rapists, but you’d generally expect that the breakdown of the “unknowns” to be more or less similar to the breakdown of the “knowns.”

What’s the lesson here? It’s pretty simple. For Toni Morrison to finally start feeling good about America… black people would need to start getting raped by white people at vastly higher levels than what’s currently happening.

This might not be what Toni Morrison actually wants. But then again, she’s  a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and if the Peace Prize is anything to go off of, the non-science Nobels are markers of incompetent dumbassery more than anything else.