I’ve been to too many funerals.
Not in a war zone.
Not in Amman or Ramallaåh.
Right here, in America.
On the South Side of Chicago, I’ve stood over the caskets of young men who looked like me, talked like me, called me Amo (uncle) or “Professor.” Sons of Jordanian and Palestinian immigrants, like my own family. Men whose parents left conflict zones in the Middle East only to have their children killed a few miles from downtown Chicago.
When you’ve watched a mother fall onto her son’s coffin, screaming a prayer that sounds more like a wound than a word, the slogans about race and crime start to feel cheap. Too neat. Too ideological. Too safe.
So let’s do something dangerous:
Let’s tell the truth, all of it.
Truth #1: Profiling Innocent People Because of Race Is Wrong
First truth, no hedging, no “but” or butts!:
It is morally wrong to stop, search, or harass someone simply because of their race.
Individuals are not statistics.
Every human being is an image-bearer of God, not a demographic.
And this isn’t just a theoretical problem. Consider one real, documented case:
In Beverly Hills, a major racial profiling lawsuit alleges that, from 2019 to 2021, police arrested 1,088 Black people, while Black residents make up about 1.5% of the city’s population. Only two of those arrests led to convictions. ABC7 Chicago+3NY1+3beverlyhillscourier.com+3
That’s not “hard policing.” That’s a dragnet with melanin filters.
Broader research confirms this isn’t an isolated anomaly:
The Stanford Open Policing Project found that, across many jurisdictions, police stop Black drivers at higher rates than white drivers, even after controlling for age and gender. openpolicing.stanford.edu
In Illinois, state data show Black drivers are stopped at 1.7 times the rate of whites, with higher search and arrest rates. ACLU of Illinois
National work finds Black drivers are searched or arrested during stops at about double the rate of other groups. Prison Policy Initiative+2Public Policy Institute of California+2
In other words, yes: innocent people are disproportionately treated as suspects because of race. That’s a real injustice.
If you’re Black, Latino, Arab, or visibly Muslim in the West, you don’t need a regression analysis to tell you that. You can feel the eyes. You can feel the suspicion. Sometimes you can feel the hand on the holster.
Profiling innocent people is wrong. Full stop.
My Countrymen, Killed in America
But my community doesn’t only experience profiling; we experience blood.
I think of the funerals I’ve attended for young Arab men on the South Side—some killed over stupid disputes, some killed by people who looked like them, some killed in random violence. These are not all in the papers; they don’t all trend on social media. But they are real.
And then there are the cases that do hit the news.
In 2023, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy, Wadee Al-Fayoume, was stabbed to death in a Chicago-area suburb, and his mother seriously wounded, in an attack authorities called a hate crime motivated by anger over the Israel–Hamas war. FOX 32 Chicago+1 The attacker was convicted of murder and hate-crime charges. The case shocked Chicago’s large Palestinian community: a child murdered because of what he represented.
That’s my broader community.
So yes, we know what it is to be profiled. We also know what it is to be killed.
If you want to talk about justice and “equality,” you have to talk about both:
– minorities treated as criminals when they are innocent, and
– minorities killed by other minorities, in neighborhoods where gunshots are more regular than job offers.
Truth #2: Crime Patterns Are Real, and Denying Them Is Not Compassion
Now comes the tricky part, the part polite people whisper.
👉 Serious violence is not evenly distributed across groups or neighborhoods.
This is not about biology. It is about concentrated poverty, segregation, broken institutions, gangs, and trauma. But the patterns exist.
Here’s what the data actually show:
In 2023, the homicide victimization rate for Black persons was 21.3 per 100,000, more than six times the rate for white persons (3.2 per 100,000), according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and FBI. BJS+1
A Sentencing Project report found Black Americans were about 9.3 times as likely as whites to be homicide victims in 2020. The Sentencing Project
FBI expanded homicide data show that, when race is known, over half of murder victims and over half of known offenders are Black, despite Black Americans being around 14% of the population. Federal Bureau of Investigation+2Federal Bureau of Investigation+2
In Chicago, Black residents have been about 20 times more likely than white residents to be murdered, and roughly 9 in 10 homicides happen on the South and West Sides. Illinois Policy+1
These are not right-wing talking points. These are sober facts coming from BJS, FBI, public-policy centers, and urban research institutes. greatcities.uic.edu+3BJS+3Violence Policy Center+3
If you say you care about Black lives, Latino lives, immigrant lives, you must care about these numbers. Because behind each number is a funeral.
Denying crime patterns doesn’t protect anyone. It just makes it easier to ignore the neighborhoods where the body count is highest.
The Steel-Man: Systemic Racism and Structural Causes
Let’s give the strongest version of the critique, not a caricature.
A thoughtful scholar say something like this:
“Yes, violent crime is higher in some Black and Latino communities. But that’s downstream of structural racism—redlining, disinvestment, segregated schooling, environmental hazards, discriminatory policing and sentencing, and a labor market that shuts people out. If you only point to crime statistics without foregrounding these systems, you reinforce stereotypes and shift blame to individuals who are actually trapped inside structures they did not create.”
This argument has serious weight.
Chicago’s own health department reported that Black Chicagoans die nearly nine years sooner than white Chicagoans, largely due to systemic racism affecting housing, healthcare, education, and employment. WTTW News
Academic work in journals like Race and Justice and JAMA Network Open has linked higher homicide rates to structural racism and concentrated disadvantage. JAMA Network+2PMC+2
Reports like One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing explicitly argue that higher homicide victimization among Black Americans is rooted in spatially concentrated urban poverty produced by segregation and discrimination. The Sentencing Project
So a serious scholar says:
“If we only shout ‘personal responsibility’ and ignore the machine producing despair, we are morally blind.”
And I agree — partly.
Explanation vs Excuse: Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Temptation to Overcorrect
Aristotle taught us to distinguish between different types of causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Poverty, segregation, and broken institutions are background (material and efficient) causes of crime; they shape the conditions under which actions occur. But they are not the final cause—the purpose, will, or choice of an individual who pulls a trigger.
Aquinas takes this further: sin is an act of the will. Circumstances may incline us, pressure us, or tempt us—but they do not force us. If poverty alone caused murder, every poor person would be a killer. They aren’t.
Philosophically, the crucial distinction is this:
Explanation: “Here are factors that help us understand why this pattern exists.”
Excuse: “Because those factors exist, the perpetrators are not truly responsible.”
Modern discourse tends to slide from explanation into excuse.
So:
When we talk about minority crime, some people say, “It’s all systemic.”
When we talk about white racism, the same people suddenly rediscover personal responsibility.
You cannot have it both ways.
If Structure Causes Minority Crime, It Also Causes White Racism
Let’s push the logic to its uncomfortable conclusion.
If you say:
“Minority crime is largely produced by structural injustice: poverty, segregation, trauma, underfunded schools…”
then intellectual honesty demands you also admit:
“White racism can be produced by structural forces: economic dislocation of poor whites, cultural humiliation, constant messaging that they are uniquely privileged and guilty, online radicalization, and identity crises in post-industrial towns.”
In other words, if “the system made him do it” works for a 19-year-old Black gang recruit, it also works for a 45-year-old white guy mainlining resentment on Telegram.
But liberals rightly refuse to absolve racists. And they should refuse. Because racism is still a choice.
So we stand at a crossroads:
Either structure explains but does not excuse — for everybody
Or structure excuses — for everybody
The first option is morally serious.
The second is moral collapse.
I take the first:
👉 Structural injustice helps explain crime and racism but does not erase individual guilt in either case.
“But Aren’t Whites Disproportional Victims?” – A Needed Correction
On the other side, some conservatives insist that whites are the new oppressed class: poor whites marginalized by DEI, “white guilt” propaganda, attacks on masculinity, and online shaming. They’ll point to high-profile Black-on-white crimes and say, “Look, we’re the real victims now.”
The data DO NOT support that story either.
Most violent crime in America is intra-racial—people victimize those they live around. The Sentencing Project+1
A recent AP analysis, after a heavily politicized Black-on-white killing, reminded the public that only about 15% of violent crimes against whites involve Black offenders, and most violence remains within the same racial group. AP News
So no, whites are not secretly the main targets of interracial violence. That narrative is as selective and misleading as any “all crime is white supremacy” narrative.
Again:
We need a moral and intellectual framework strong enough to say no to both oversimplifications.
Western Racial Sensitivity: Why We’re Afraid of Certain Facts
Western societies—especially the U.S. and parts of Europe—are haunted by their past: slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, apartheid-style segregation. The guilt is real. But the cultural response has mutated into something fragile and counterproductive.
We’ve created a climate where certain truths are socially radioactive:
Say “police stop Black drivers at higher rates” and you’re fine. Prison Policy Initiative+4openpolicing.stanford.edu+4ACLU of Illinois+4
Say “homicide is disproportionately concentrated among Black males in certain neighborhoods,” and people start backing toward the exits. Violence Policy Center+4BJS+4LEB+4
The result?
Journalists self-censor.
Academics hedge their conclusions.
Policymakers avoid targeted interventions for fear of being called racist.
We end up with a bizarre ethic:
“It is better to let people die than to say something that could be misused by racists.”
That is not morality. That is cowardice dressed in sensitivity.
How to Talk About This Like Grown-Ups
Here’s the adult way forward:
Separate description from condemnation.
Saying, “Group X has higher rates of offense Y” is a description. Saying, “Group X is inferior” is a condemnation. We must reject the second while courageously using the first to design interventions.Use data as a medical scan, not as a weapon.
A CT scan isn’t “stigmatizing” your tumor. It’s revealing it so it can be treated. Crime data, properly used, should function the same way: to protect, not to shame.Hold system and self together.
Structural racism and disinvestment are real. greatcities.uic.edu+2WTTW News+2
Personal agency is also real.
We must neither romanticize the poor as pure victims nor demonize them as pure villains. The image of God exists in both the kid carrying the gun and the kid in the casket. Accountability and compassion are not opposites; they are twins.Be consistent about responsibility.
If you insist that racist violence is morally blameworthy despite systemic influences, do the same with gang violence. If you insist that structural disadvantage matters for Black communities, acknowledge that some structural and cultural forces may also fuel resentment in poor white communities—without excusing their racism.
Why I’m Done Pretending
As a Jordanian-Arab American, I have seen my community profiled, ignored, exoticized, and occasionally murdered. I’ve buried my own countrymen in American soil. I’ve also watched some of the same communities produce shooters, not just victims.
So I refuse the childish choice between:
“Everything is racism and structure,” and
“Everything is personal responsibility and culture.”
The truth is harder and holier:
Racial profiling of innocent individuals is wrong.
Real crime patterns exist and must be faced.
Structures powerfully shape behavior.
Individuals remain morally responsible for what they do.
If your version of “equality” cannot handle all four of those truths at once, it isn’t equality. It’s an ideology with a fragile ego and you are being a coward.
And I, for one, am done pretending.