Who Kills Black Men

The National Review published an opinion article on 5 December 2019 entitled, “The Need to Discuss Black on Black Crime.” Of course, that article preceded all the violent chaos that erupted in America (and, even in foreign nations) in early March 2020 stimulated by the killing of George Floyd. However, the article raised the question, again, about the incidence of Black on Black violence and the question of what is causing it and what should be done about it. Since then, multiple articles have appeared documenting the violence and chaos on the streets of our country. One of them prompted a reader to publish the following letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Letter to the Editor of WSJ by Dave Fortin 6-4-2020

As bad as we all feel about what happen to Mr. Floyd, and I think it was atrocious, there are other very recent atrocities that seem to never get anyone's attention. There were 16 people shot in Philly this past Sunday & Monday - 7 died. In Baltimore, 13 murders since last Thursday. In Chicago, an unbelievable 92 people shot and 27 dead, just last weekend.  The Country has been rampaged over the murder of Mr. Floyd but, as far as I know, not one protest was started, or store looted over the killers who murdered these 47 people. Why is that? Were their lives less valuable than Mr. Floyd's or is the nation's outrage reserved only for the acts of bad cops?

I responded to Mr. Fortin’s letter

This is a good point. I am under the impression that most murders of Black people are committed by other Blacks. The number of White on Black murders are much less. There is something wrong with a culture that seems to promote violence and murder. However, in thinking about this issue, it might be a good idea to think about the number of White on White murders. I wonder if these murders are really a racist issue at all.

No matter how often we are admonished to avoid ascribing bad social effects to racial/ethnic causes, it is impossible to deny that Black on Black murders are simply a fact of life in America, today. That kind of social effect is obvious from hard data on murder statistics. As will be noted below, the improved state of social conditions bought about in America for Blacks during the mid and late 20^th Century, have not altered the statistical facts that the predominant causers of Black murders are Black perpetrators.

In 2017, homicide-victimization rates for Black men were 3.9 times the national average and 52 percent of all known homicide victims were Black. The perpetrators of these crimes were overwhelmingly African Americans. In 2018, where the homicide victim was Black, the suspected killer was also Black 88 percent of the time. And this is not an exceptional situation. From 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of Black victims were killed by other African Americans. High rates of Black-on-Black killing have been the norm for well over a century.

Violent crime is commonly intraracial, i.e., Whites kill Whites, Hispanics kill Hispanics. After the 1960’s, America’s crime rate increased markedly, but that trend had begun to abate by the early 1990’s. Black violent crime was a major factor in the post-1960s crime tsunami, but it persisted even after the crime wave began to ebb in the 1990s. From 2000 to 2015, the mean African American homicide-victimization rate, adjusted for age, was 20.1 per 100,000. That is more than three times the Hispanic rate of 6.4 (despite disadvantages comparable to those of Blacks) and over seven times the average White rate, 2.7. Moreover, as already noted, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of the killers of Black murder victims were other African Americans. In short, this is about exceptionally high as well as overwhelmingly intraracial Black violent crime. White-on-White homicide is also intraracial, but, the rates do not approach the Black rate of Black on Black murders

African Americans are worried about and strongly disapprove of violence in their communities. But there is also a deep strain of mistrust of police in poor Black neighborhoods, and this, along with fear of reprisals by Black criminals, leads to a refusal to cooperate with the authorities. Such noncooperation only worsens the Black-crime problem by providing impunity for the most violent. I have experienced this, myself: When Nancy and I were working in inner-city Detroit, I was often mistaken for an agent of the police force; and I was thusly distrusted and treated with a lack of cooperation.

The “stop snitching ethos,” perpetuates itself by preventing criminals who victimize communities from being brought to justice. But if rates of Black violent-crime are excessive (which they are), if these high rates have persisted over a long term (which they have), and if the stop-snitching ethos aggravates the problem (which it does), then it can be rightly concluded that urban violence is deplored by the Black community, but at the same time it is enabled by a culture of noncooperation.

In the 1920’s, many Blacks migrated to the north and set up Black ghettos in various cities, e.g., Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and others. Blacks came to these cities to make a better living for themselves; and many of them were able to do just that. But…as some of them became more affluent, they moved out of the inner-cities and into the suburbs, leaving the unemployed and the violent in the ghettos.

Black-on-Black violent crime was excessive in the late 19th century even in the South and, despite ups and downs, persistent crime patterns have continued, even up to the present day. Rates of Black violent crime continued to grow during the great migration north and the “ghettos” that developed in the 1920s.

Despite the lynchings and other mistreatment by Whites in the late 19th century, Black homicide was overwhelmingly carried out by other African Americans. In Savannah, Ga., for example, from 1896 to 1903, researchers found 91 homicides in which the race of both the offender and the victim were known. Sixty-eight of the victims (75 percent of all those killed) were Black, and 61 African Americans, or 90 percent of the alleged perpetrators, were arrested for these murders.

In the 20th century, the number of Black victims escalated while the killers remained overwhelmingly African American. In Memphis from 1920 to 1925, where African Americans were 38 percent of the population, Black-on-Black killings were two-thirds of all murders in the city (in which race was known).

An examination of coroner’s files uncovered 500 homicide victims in Birmingham, Ala., between 1937 and 1944. The city’s population was roughly 40 percent Black, but 85 percent of both the killers (418) and the killed (427) were African American.

In the contemporary period, from 1976 to 2014, it is estimated that 198,288 African Americans died nationwide at the hands of Black killers. That is 5,218 deaths per year on average, roughly 19 times the annual number of deaths of African Americans in confrontations with police.

It has been posited by many progressive thinkers that the high crime/murder rates noted in the Black population has been caused by White oppression.  In thinking this way, one would expect higher levels of Black crime when the racial oppression was at its maximum, and lower levels when it was less so. But that has not been the case. Black homicide rates were about the same as White homicide rates during slavery. They frequently were higher in the North than in the more oppressive South throughout the 20th century. And they hit new peaks in the late 1960s, a time when Whites supported the most sweeping civil-rights legislation in American history.

Secondly, if White abuse were responsible for Black violence, if White people were the problem of downtrodden Blacks, why weren’t Whites targeted more often? Why were other African Americans overwhelmingly the victims? Why was Black-on-Black violence elevated even after lynching and Jim Crow were no longer powerful disincentives to Black-on-White crime?

Third, how do we explain levels of Black violence out of all proportion to African American disadvantage? Other groups suffer comparable adversities — Hispanics, for example — but have much lower rates of violence. Though the poverty rate for Hispanics is 92 percent of the rate for Blacks, African Americans have three times the homicide rate. Indeed, many of the low-income Black immigrants to the United States, such as the Haitians who flooded into southern Florida in the 1980s, had lower violent-crime rates than did the African American residents. This despite the fact that they too were Black and impoverished and had suffered a legacy of the most brutal slavery.

So, what explanation can we have for the high incidence of Black on Black murders? A compelling case can be made that African Americans, having spent centuries in the South, adopted the southern White penchant for violent responses to perceived insults and affronts, what Thomas Sowell once called the “Black redneck” phenomenon. On this view, Black criminal violence was the product of the southern-male honor culture that, among Black men of lower socioeconomic status, manifested as a violent response to petty insults, sexual rivalries, etc. Since African Americans interacted socially with other persons of color much more than with Whites, the victims of such honor-culture assaults were overwhelmingly Black. This violence continued when African Americans migrated to the North. Indeed, it escalated in the northern cities, where there was greater freedom and less oppression.

It is my opinion that American Blacks, living next door to affluent White citizens feel an overwhelming sense of inferiority, and that causes frustration and desperation that results finally in violence and chaotic behavior. I can think of no other reason why Black rioters could find any reason for destruction and looting of stores in Phoenix for a killing in Minneapolis.

Racism probably does play somewhat of a role here in explaining the cause for Black homicide rates. We can envision discrimination (for reasons of racism or some other reason) has kept large numbers of Blacks from rising to the middle class, and the middle class, Black or White, eschews violence. Had Blacks been permitted to advance socioeconomically, their story would have been more like the Irish and Italian immigrant narrative, with a rise from violence and poverty to affluence and law-abidingness.

The most extreme progressive thinking views the entire criminal-justice system as irredeemably racist and calls for its abolition. This is the theme song of anarchy and its disciples! Such extremism hurts, not helps, poor communities of color. Of course, this brings us right back to the realities of Black-on-Black crime and the dire need for effective law enforcement in African American communities.

The proposals, i.e., increased police patrols in Black neighborhoods, programs to defray the opposition to police protection, better schools for Black people, affirmative action, meaningful threats of punishment for crime, locking up known violent offenders, etc., may or may not work, but they probably are worth a try. After all, meaningful progress on fundamental socioeconomic conditions will take generations to achieve. People living with the reality of urban violence need relief right now.

  

For decades now, criminologists, especially those espousing or at least harboring leftist views, have insisted that harmful social conditions are the primary cause of violent crime in general and Black violent crime in particular. This has not gotten them very far as an explanation for the enormously high rates of Black-on-Black violence. Despite declines since the mid-1990s, relatively high rates have persisted even in the face of overall Black socioeconomic progress. The policy proposals in the preceding paragraph can succeed in reducing these rates where others have not, but the underlying cause of the problem is still elusive, and scholars, politicians, and citizens must continue to search for a good explanation.

At the end of this blog, I offer my own opinion for the cause of the problem. I believe that the general lack of a consensual opinion in favor of faith in Jesus Christ is the underlying problem. This lack of Christian faith is not unique to the Black culture (If anything, Blacks more likely trend toward biblical faith than Whites.) Our whole society misses the desired mark of social peace and rest caused by lack of a meaningful faith in Jesus.

Yes, lack of Christ is the underlying cause of the difficulty, but the agency that deals out the chaos and violence is the deterioration of the American family. Today, 75% of Black babies are born into families where there is no identifiable father. Good, God-fearing fathers are meant to socialize their children; and good fathers can do that in concert with good mothers. Both are needed.

Much of this blog post was excerpted from the National Review article of December 2019 referred to above.