The roots of American violence
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Once more, American cities have erupted into violence and anarchy. Time and time again we have witnessed this instinctive reaction to the killing of a (usually unarmed) black man by a white cop. These killings are sickening, but it is equally sickening to see the mindless trashing by rioters of the very businesses on which their communities depend — the arson, the looting, the destruction of the livelihoods of decent and industrious black people who always pay the price for this mayhem.
And I am always struck by the failure to look at the bigger picture, and to the tragic fact that vastly more black Americans are murdered by other black Americans than are killed by white cops. If the mantra “black lives matter” means anything to the protesters now on the rampage, shouldn’t they also be angry about that? Shouldn’t the issue of black-on-black violence be addressed a little more urgently?
One person who addressed this question, in National Review magazine last December, was Barry Latzer, emeritus professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Latzer is a historian of violent crime in America and has written authoritative studies on the subject. His piece was a critique of a book published last year called Bleeding Out by Thomas Abt, who served as a Justice Department policymaker during Barack Obama’s administration.
Abt wrote that homicide rates for black men in the US were 3.9 times the national average and that 52 per cent of all known homicide victims were black (2017 data). He failed to add that the perpetrators of those crimes were overwhelmingly also black. As Latzer explains: “In 2018, where the homicide victim was black, the suspected killer also was 88 per cent of the time. And this is not an exceptional situation. From 1976 to 2005, 94 per cent of black victims were killed by other African Americans.” He goes on to show that high rates of black-on-black killing had been the norm for well over a century. But in keeping with scholarly trends, even the term “black-on-black” is abjured, as it is considered to “perpetuate harmful stereotypes about black Americans.”
Hispanic Americans, by comparison, have a poverty rate roughly the same as that for African Americans, yet have only a third of the homicide rate. Latzer also makes a comparison with low-income black immigrants to the US, such as Haitians who immigrated into Florida in the 1980s: “They 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.”
Why the disparity? He identifies the “no-snitching ethos” so prevalent in black neighbourhoods as deeply problematic. Mistrust of the police, coupled with fear of reprisals by black criminals, result in a refusal to cooperate with the authorities investigating crimes. “Such non-cooperation only worsens the black-crime problem by providing impunity for the most violent,” states Latzer. One example of this was when the rapper Lil’ Kim lied to police about her friends’ involvement in a shooting. As well as a year in jail for perjury, it earned her a reputation for being a “hero” within black communities. On this point, Abt concurs: “The stop-snitching ethos perpetuates itself by preventing criminals who victimize communities from being brought to justice.”
Latzer’s other explanation for the high incidence of black-on-black violence is surprising: “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 [black American economist] 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… 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 takes courage to assert that the problems that exist in black communities stem in significant part from culturally ingrained factors such as these. Police brutality is a hideous part of modern life in the US — but it is only a part. The roots of the violence go much deeper.
