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Notes -
Is that crime somehow out of the ordinary? If we assume that black and white people in MA were about as likely as their counterparts elsewhere in the U.S. to be criminals, I don't think the Bush team would have had to try very hard to select a murder with a black perpetrator in 1988.
Famously, between 1980 and 2008 52.5% of all murder offenders nation-wide were black. Thus, if the Bush team wanted to spotlight an American murder and picked one at random, the perpetrator would be black slightly more than half the time. As MA was only 5% black (pdf warning) compared to the national population's 12% (pdf warning), that would make appx. 22% of all MA murderers black unless either my math is wrong or there was some factor which made the population of MA murderers not representative of national trends.
Thus, Bush would have had to work harder than flipping a coin to find a MA murderer who was black, but 1-in-4.5 is still not particularly bad odds.
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