https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-peculiar-reluctance/[According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
178,583 black Americans died by homicide from 2001 through 2020. Across all races, the United States saw 363,045 homicides over the same period. Black Americans make up only 14 percent of the U.S. population yet suffered 49 percent of homicides, even after the much-noted urban crime drop of the 1990s. Contrary to media hysteria, interracial homicide is relatively rareonly about 14 percent of the total, and about 69 percent of that 14 percent is black-on-white. In 2020, black homicide increased 30 percent in the wake of unrest over the death of George Floyd during arrest by Minneapolis police, and police shootings of Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor.
In
A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America (2020) Elliot Currie, a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine, adds startling perspective: Since 2000, the overall homicide rate for black Americans has averaged seven times that of white Americans; among men, the black-white disparity is more than nine to one. For young men fifteen to twenty-nine, that disparity is sixteen to one; a young black woman is four times likelier than a white woman to die of homicide; in Illinois, the homicide rate for young black men ages fifteen to twenty-nine averaged thirty-seven times the rate for white men the same age...
Whatever the causes, young
black Americans are murdering and maiming each other at staggering rates. Given the level of carnage, we might worry less about stigma or about who is noticing these patterns of violence or that People Less Virtuous Than Us might be insufficiently uncomfortable over their role in perpetuating white supremacy, and instead focus on stopping the killing.
...in August 2022, The Caucus of African American Leaders, based in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, announced the creation of the Emmett Till Alert System. Modeled after the nationwide Amber Alert, the new system will notify black leaders and clergy about possible hate crimes. The 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till cut a deep wound in the American psyche, a gash now constantly freshened by news media and Hollywood. A hate crime alert system could not be better named. Meanwhile, some twenty-three miles north of the Caucus's headquarters, Baltimore has suffered some 2,000
homicides over the past six years.]