Exchange: Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn on the Hispanic Crime Rate

By Katha Pollitt & Alexander Cockburn

Editor's Note: Nation columnist Katha Pollitt took issue with Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn's recent assertion that Ron Unz had published groundbreaking research on Hispanic crime rates. Cockburn's response to Pollitt's criticisms can be read here; Pollitt's initial response to Cockburn is reposted below and can also be found on her blog, And Another Thing.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN writes:

Petrolia

A couple of weeks ago I did a Nation column on Hispanic crime rates, citing a big piece by Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative, going through the statistical data and concluding on the basis of age-weighting and other considerations that contrary to popular belief, Hispanic crimes rates are at least the same as whites and--given the unknown number of illegal Hispanic immigrants in the country--could be considerably lower.

Probably naĆ­vely, I thought it encouraging that a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan should devote its March cover and a substantial number of pages to a persuasive assault on right-wing hysteria about the supposedly astronomic crime rates of Hispanics in America. At the end of this column I had a couple of paragraphs in which I recorded Unz's surprise that liberal foundations had not exerted themselves more energetically in this area to refute ignorant prejudice, with a couple of thoughts of my own on liberal racism.

This little coda is what sent Katha Pollitt scurrying to her laptop. It's "annoying," she snapped, "when conservatives take credit for work liberals have been doing for much longer and far more seriously. It's even more irritating when a leftist [that's AC] is so eager to bash liberals, he joins the parade."

Read on...

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