(This is part of an ongoing series. To find previous editions, copy and paste “Is American Urban Culture Beyond Repair?” into the search function at the top of your screen.)
Examining the deleterious impacts of modern urban culture on the American social fabric and its future prognosis.
As we’ve covered in previous editions of “Is American Urban Culture Beyond Repair?” according to the 2019 FBI Uniform Crime Report, American black people, who comprise 13% of the total population, account for 51.2% of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter arrests — meaning they’re four times more murderous than you would expect if they were represented in crime statistics proportionate to their share of the population.
This is obviously an inconvenient fact for adherents to Social Justice™ ideology, whose faith teaches them that the white man (literal Satan) is the primary purveyor of violence under White Supremacy™.
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Other stats regarding black criminality, particularly black violent criminality, are even starker.
For instance, per Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy, black people are “roughly 35 times more likely to commit violent offenses against White people than White people are to commit violent offenses against Black people.”
Which begs the question: if poverty-to-crime is a 1:1 causal relationship, as conventional Social Justice™ wisdom posits, then are black people 35 times more impoverished than white people?
(They aren’t.)
Obviously, the exact relative rate of black-on-white to white-on-black crime is going to vary somewhat based on whatever data set one is working off of, but the data consistently shows a wildly higher rate of the former compared to the latter.
It also, of course, indicates much higher rates of intra-racial violence committed by black people (“black-on-black” crime) than committed by, for instance, whites against whites.
So what is a Social Justice™ evangelist to do with this information?
Unless you’re willing to be radically dishonest — which a lot, but not all, academics are, of course — you can’t just blame it on the usual scapegoat of poverty.
They’d like to rig the stats, obviously, to refute the obvious reality that black people are significantly more prone to criminality than other racial groups; unfortunately for them, the disparity is simply “too big to rig.”
So they’ve got to find some other explanation — one that, obviously, absolves black people of any responsibility themselves, as they are constantly framed as lacking any human agency, a curiously ironic racist view to hold among people who claim to subscribe to anti-racism.
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Some opt, curiously, to claim that black homicide perpetrators are “psychologically impaired,” an ailment caused by, among other abuses, a social milieu created by the white man (literal Satan) that “that places higher value on a white life than on a black life.”
Black-on-Black homicide: A psychological-political perspective. (emphasis added):
Black homicide rates are 7–8 times those of Whites and… Blacks have a rate of poverty only 4–5 times that of Whites. Homicide is the leading cause of death among young Black men and contributes significantly to the shortened life span of the Black male. In about 80–90% of the cases, the Black victim was killed by another Black, and about 52% of the murder victims were acquainted with their assailant. It is suggested that just as suicide victims are considered to be psychologically impaired, so must society acknowledge that a murderer is similarly impaired. Blacks—for both environmental and political reasons—are likely to reflect emotional predispositions that allow them to more readily become a homicide statistic. Projected self-hatred facilitates blind rage and gives the perpetrator of the violent attack a sense of legitimacy and justification. In addition, Blacks have been indoctrinated by a criminal justice system that places higher value on a White life than on a Black life. The need for crime and violence prevention programs that pay attention to negative psychological dynamics in the Black experience that contribute to internecine victimization is discussed.
Kevin Cokley, Ph.D., Associate Chair of Diversity Initiatives and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, alternately, blames “American individualism,” a feature of American culture going back to the frontier days that ostensibly permeates all racial groups — meaning it’s not unique to the Afro-diaspora — yet somehow only triggers black people to commit substantially disproportionate rates of violent crime.
Via Psychology Today (emphasis added):
In 1990, Amos Wilson, a Black psychology professor, wrote a book called “Black-on-Black Violence.” A revolutionary and provocative thinker, Wilson argued that Black on Black violence was the result of socio-psychological, political, and economic causes that serve to perpetuate White domination….
In 1991 Na’im Akbar, a well-known Black psychologist and proponent of Afrocentric psychology, wrote an article called “Mental Disorder Among African Americans.” In this article, he identified four categories of mental illness among African Americans, one of which he called “Self-Destructive Disorders.” He described self-destructive disorders as destructive attempts to cope with the unnatural condition of White supremacy, where individuals exhibit a survival at any cost mentality that was directed at themselves or other Black/African people…
As a doctoral student in the mid to late '90s, I was concerned about violence in Black communities, along with many other academics. In 1996, I published my first article in the Journal of African American Men called “The psychological and socio-historical antecedents of violence: An africentric analysis.” I argued that the cycle of violence in Black communities was the result of American values (e.g., individualism that privileges individual rights over concerns for the group) and social inequities.
