How Data Literacy Can Keep America Safe

On May 9, 2023, two days after a white supremacist murdered eight people at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, Elon Musk condemned "the media" for disproportionately focusing on violence committed against people of color. This particular criticism took the form of a profoundly misleading graphic, which claimed to show that a huge majority of "interracial violent crimes" in the United States are conducted by Black people against white people, rather than the other way around. Among other problems, the chart depicted the total number of victims of crimes by race, without adjusting for the fact that there are around five and a half times as many white Americans as Black Americans. In other words, there are more white victims of "interracial crime" in America because there are more white people--period. Nevertheless, the tweet went viral, being viewed more than 14 million times and retweeted by tens of thousands of additional people.