Heather Mac Donald talks about crime and race
Most violent crime is intra-racial – that is, blacks mostly kill and/or violently attack blacks, whites mostly kill and/or violently attack whites. And the black-on-black violent crime rate is much much higher than the white-on-white violent crime rate. But the MSM and the left aren’t interested in those inconvenient truths.
But what of inter-racial crime, which is a much smaller percentage of the whole? Not only does the left and the MSM pretty much ignore black intra-racial crime, it concentrates instead on inter-racial crime. Regarding the latter, it would have people think that it mostly consists of white-on-black killings, much of it by authorities such as police. And to a large extent the left and MSM have been successful in this propaganda effort.
But Mac Donald tells some inconvenient truths:
If blacks kill at nine times the rate of whites in Kansas City but die of homicide at only six times the rate of whites in Kansas City, what makes up the difference? Blacks killing people outside their own race. That disparity applies to non-lethal as well as to lethal violence. In 2021, 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the U.S. were black-on-white—480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence. In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative…
To name a suspect’s race when that suspect is black is virtually taboo, no matter the race of his victim. Let a white person assault or kill a black person, however, and the entire story will be about race.
This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good, least of all the victims of black crime.
Whenever I write about the subject of black versus white crime, some commenters assert that black people are innately – genetically – more prone to violence. I do not agree. I think the problem is highly cultural. In this, I’m with Thomas Sowell (see also this). But that doesn’t make it any less of a problem.
So…Scott Adams was right?
Just for the sake of discussion… nature or nurture makes no difference if I want to raise my family in a more safe environment.
Obvious question…how does that change for the better?
John Guilfoyle:
It certainly doesn’t change the immediate situation.
However, longer-term, nurture is at least arguably more amenable to change than nature.
The sad fact, known to all rational and well-informed persons (truly an “‘inconvenient truth”), is, of course, that almost all interracial crime (an obsession of the MSM) consists of black violence and predation against non-blacks (mostly, but not entirely, whites), not only murder, but also rape, assault, car-jacking, home invasion, “smash-and-grab”, “knockout-game”, etc. That this is deemed a topic “not to be discussed” and that every single (and very rare) story of “man biting dog” is hysterically amplified (without context and, almost invariably, bestrewn with falsehoods) throughout the media provides a sad commentary on the mendacity of today’s malign and malevolent media.
The Sowell video is excellent. He makes a point I never realized about the Southern redneck culture of the 1920s and 30s and the black subculture of today. Maybe he offers solutions in his book about changing that culture. Until it does change the race hustlers and the democrats will just keep exploiting it.
I’m inclined to suspect that American black crime has its roots in emancipation. All of a sudden in 1865 all blacks were free, devoid of assets, and rootless, and small farm white Southern males had been killed off in huge numbers in the Civil War, leaving defenseless widows and children. Black criminality was born out of biological necessity (we all have to eat!) and became embedded in their subsequent culture.
They have always resented whites (read about and listen to Nina Simone and Harry Belafonte). Decades ago I resided a stone’s throw from where Nina grew up.
The Civil Rights legislation freed the professional blacks to flee their “ghettos” (a term I find offensive), leaving the malevolent behind as the black upper and middle classes, which had standards and ‘enforced’ them fled. Now there are ‘black only’ suburbs of Atlanta, where the homes cost a million and more.
I have given this much thought but expect few to follow my speculation.
My understanding is that black crime patterns are a relatively recent phenomena only dating back to the 70’s, with introduction of social security, the rise of single parent families in the black community, and the breakdown of the black nuclear family, tied to the rise of ghetto culture. There’s no evidence that it dates back to emancipation.
@Cicero
I think LordAzrael is closer to being correct, albeit with it maybe starting to manifest a couple of decades after.
The issue I think with this is that we really don’t see it manifesting – certainly not on the scale we see it now – back then. Of course it happened to some extent, but in general there were a bunch of reasons that mitigated against it.
Firstly: It’s worth noting that outside of relatively specialist or high entry fields like industry, Southern Blacks and Mulattos were by far the most productive part of the South’s population. They also already had significant leg room since most of the major planters allowed them to do small private farming during their “off time” and sell it for profit, which meant that when the planter system collapsed in a tide of bluecoats and steel bayonets they were generally positioned to keep doing what they did unless something interfered.
Secondly: While the war did kill off a lot of white smallholders or dependents that were drafted into uniform, those that came BACK generally were heavily militarized (further) and even more used to violence than they had been, which meant that they could form coalitions ranging for everything from more or less benign mutual defense organizations to neo-Confederate or racist terror groups. So if rumor emerged that some “uppity” thugs were going around preying on defenseless women and children, they would see fit to remedy that even on the off chance Union troops and law enforcement wouldn’t. Tying in to three.
Three: The climate of violence during and after the civil war meant that Blacks were at grave risk, and particularly if they stepped out of line. When you have a culture of “vigilante justice” or lynching you can skip many of the finer points of due process, and it stands that a lot of those that were scythed down weren’t actually saints or particularly innocent victims.
Fourthly: most Southern Blacks and Mulattos saw the Union and its organizations like the Freedman’s Bureau and the Army as their benefactors (as indeed they were up until about 1876). They allowed Blacks to gain political power in the South for the first time (outside of the insanely small portion of Black or Mixed-Race Planter Aristocrats), and oversaw attempts like land reform. They were also the natural choice to go to if the KKK or White League or co went around. But that also meant that you couldn’t get caught (or have anyone else in the community getting caught) engaging in too sensational crimes like systematically preying on abandoned plantations and widows.
There was an upsurge in black crime, but it seems the most notable case was ironically political corruption and violence, with corrupt Republican Reconstruction governments taking power, often ruling badly, and sometimes even fighting battles or limited conflicts with each other. And these of course quickly vanished as the “Redeemers” took power and instituted something like the old system.
The consensus seems to be that the upsurge in Black crime comes decades later, in the 20th century as Blacks migrated North and to cities, and particularly after the FDR years and the brief Eisenhower interregnum. Not to say what you describe didn’t have an impact, but it probably was minor.
Many of them certainly did, but that resentment could blow out in many ways, and even WEB Dubois was generally opposed to violent war.
I think that had a role, but it probably came later, not from the Civil War but from the toxic mixture of radicalism, Big Government, and the turmoils of the world wars, Korea, and Vietnam (giving a much wider share of violent skills). Civil Rights probably upended many of the traditional methods for self-betterment and also meant there was less of a pressure to “Shape Up” and “Look Good for the Camera” but that seems to have been more of a trailing factor with the societal collapse.
Culture is what people do. If what people do is strongly affected by heredity, then so is culture, and so the issue of what the root cause is has the potential to be confused.
The dead, of course, don’t have to worry about it. For the people who would prefer not to be dead, they probably shouldn’t waste their time on what the nature of the root cause is.
I know of no US government program in the last hundred years that has tried to address any social issue through changes in heredity, so I don’t think it’s obvious at all that “nurture” causes, if distinct from heredity, are easier to move.
Download the article “the color of crime” on the internet. Old but good.
There is no law which says we must all be equal in whatever it is that interests the current discussion, whatever it may be.
I have no idea what, if any, part the “warrior gene” plays in crime but that it exists seems to be true.
https://selfhacked.com/blog/about-mao-a-and-what-to-do-if-you-have-the-warrior-gene/
Some way down is racial differences.
It’s said that ingestion of lead at an early age can lead to permanent issues which could increase likelihood of criminal behavior.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/06/01/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/
Older homes in the inner cities may still have lead paint and, I’m told, little kids chew on window sills or whatever because it tastes mildly sweet.
When you see some stupidly criminal act–not that you have moral issues with the act–in which the goal is minimal or non existent and the likelihood of getting caught is near certain and you ask yourself, “What was he thinking?” the answer might be he wasn’t.
Either of these considerations are politically unmentionable.
Richard Aubrey:
A history of traumatic brain injury is also a factor.
The responses to my tickler are appreciated. But, Ray, I found a summary of the “Color of Crime” (1998) by our DOJ, and DOJ is right out of a leftist hymnal.
Many edifying points are well-made. Thanks, guys.
Firstly: It’s worth noting that outside of relatively specialist or high entry fields like industry, Southern Blacks and Mulattos were by far the most productive part of the South’s population.
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They weren’t.
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that almost all interracial crime (an obsession of the MSM) consists of black violence and predation against non-blacks (mostly, but not entirely, whites),
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Per FBI data, about 9% of all homicides feature a black perpetrator and a non-black victim; about 4% feature a non-black perpetrator and a black victim. The ‘almost all’ might apply to forcible rape or to robbery. Does not apply to homicide.
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My understanding is that black crime patterns are a relatively recent phenomena only dating back to the 70’s, with introduction of social security, the rise of single parent families in the black community, and the breakdown of the black nuclear family, tied to the rise of ghetto culture. There’s no evidence that it dates back to emancipation.
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1. I suspect the fragmentary data on this question would not provide evidence toward the thesis that the perpetration ratio blacks v. whites is a novel phenomenon.
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2. Street crime is an activity of males between 13 and 40. Not sure what Social Security is supposed to have to do with it.
We have a ready pathway – developed by Rudolph Giuliani, William Bratton, and Raymond Kelly (among others) – to improve the level of public order in slum neighborhoods. It’s not going to make the risk to different demographic segments the same, but it will bring the segments closer together and improve the quality of life of the whole. The last three years we’ve learned that the dominant strand of thought within the Democratic Party is dead set against implementing and maintaining such a program because it offends their sense of status. Decay is a choice.
neo
TBI is a factor but whether it is unevenly distributed across racial lines is, afaik, unknown.
Another speculation has to do in the not so old days with tire-balancing weights. They’d be clipped on to the wheel as the balance machine indicated. They were lead. As they fell off, they’d be run over by traffic endlessly–in dense-traffic inner cities–and yield airborne particulates.
MacDonald writes, “This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good,”
neo correctly points out who benefits from the double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites… “the left and the MSM … would have people think that it mostly consists of white-on-black killings, much of it by authorities such as police.”
The left and it’s propaganda arm the MSM know full well the truth. They lie because that narrative advances their agenda.
The true believers on the left tell themselves that the end justifies the means.
Those on the left whose lust for power is their entire motivation do not desire the same end as the true believers. They are of course using the true believers and will do so until they are no longer needed.
But the thing is the true believers are willfully blind to the truth. They don’t want to know the truth. Nor will they protest should the utterly ruthless gather all power to themselves and then dispose of we on the right.
Which makes their eventual fate at the hands of the utterly ruthless… richly deserved.
I don’t particularly care what the cause is, I’m concerned about the effects.
Whatever happened to the idea of the “peaceful enjoyment” of your life and property?
If (especially if you are older) you can’t walk out of your door without fear of being attacked, robbed, sucker punched and knocked down, if you can’t sleep easy at night because you have a real fear of a home invasion or random shots tearing through you home, if you can’t be sure that when you stand on the train platform someone won’t try to push you onto the tracks, if you have to have your head on a swivel when you pull into a gas station or stop at a red light for fear of being jacked, if you have to be real careful which malls you go to, and have to read the crowd so that you don’t get caught up in a major, violent brawl, if you have to worry that a horde of people will suddenly descend on your business, steal everything and leave a trashed wasteland behind–and experience tells you that the cops–and especially the judicial system–will do nothing to find and visit punishment the perps–that’s a major problem.
It has been said that only a small minority of people, say, 5 % or so, commit the majority of crimes.
If true, how come law enforcement isn’t laser focused on, and spending the majority of its resources and manpower on “policing” that 5%?
@Snow on Pine:If true, how come law enforcement isn’t laser focused on, and spending the majority of its resources and manpower on “policing” that 5%?
Because of who half of that 5% is.
Richard Aubrey:
Tetraethyl lead, added to gasoline as an anti-knock (octane-boosting) additive was a major contributor to lead exposure.
I’m not buying this lead paint thing mostly effecting blacks. Because of white flight, many of the older homes lived in by non whites today were once lived in by whites!
Also, for decades fruit trees in this country were sprayed with a pesticide made of the combination – make sure you are sitting down for this – lead and arsenic! Sprayed right on the fruit! Was everybody who ate fruit back then mad as a hatter?
om
Yeah. Used to be in the oil business. Inner city atmosphere has more of practically everything except maybe oxygen due to concentration of emitters–of whatever–and reduced wind flow-through.
The effect I’ve heard of is deficient impulse control, irreversible.
Jon Baker. Couple of points. First, it doesn’t need to be everybody with some neural deficiencies, just a difference across racial lines. Second, far as I know, everybody washes fruit, all the time. So the ingestion would be of whatever the fruit absorbed and most fruit skin is fairly tight. Not like we get some version of gauze when we skin an apple. Then the stuff is washed to the ground, possibly absorbed by the root system.
And the senseless crimes–again not referencing moral or esthetic issues–where some body “just goes off” doing something which should have been obviously counterproductive–you snatched $200 from the insurance office and left your drivers license on the desk–do seem to be more frequent in some places than in others.
With the advent of cell phones and their cameras, we now have a plethora of footage of brainless brawls in fast food places, on the streets, even at a Disney location. Few Asians show up.
As I say, to presume the same predilection for any kind of behavior between races–differences resulting solely from external factors– makes no more sense than presuming identical appearance of sickle cell anemia. And the Pina Indians of Arizona have epidemic rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes due, it is hypothesized, to a “thrifty gene”. So it’s a thrifty gene or a fascination with tex-mex cooking.
I agree with Neo that the problems are cultural, the problem is that people from outside that culture have very little ability to change that culture.
A couple of commenters above mentioned Thomas Sowell and implied that he and people like him should be working harder to change the black culture. The problem is that Thomas Sowell is no more a part of that culture than I am. The people in that culture who have heard of him write him off as an “Uncle Tom” or “Sellout” or “Oreo”…much like they do with any black person who succeeds in America in any endeavor other than sports or music.
My point is that we can rail about the inner city black culture all we want but it will not change until THEY decide to change it and that won’t happen in the current atmosphere of claiming victim status and blaming whites for every ill that besets them.
I do have some sympathy for the people who still live in the cities that are so beset by violent crime, but not much. They are the ones who elected the city governments that are allowing these criminals to flourish unimpeded. A people gets the government they deserve.
In the meantime, those of us who still value the rule of law and civil society should avoid living in areas where those principles have been abandoned and should always bear in mind a concept that was, in my opinion, best elucidated by a fellow gun blogger many years ago:
“Your safety and protection is your job. The constables are just there to mark where the bodies ended up.”
–Phil of Random Nuclear Strikes
John Derbyshire has it right.
https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/the-talk-nonblack-version/
I really want it to be cultural, for more than one reason.
I’m distressed, though, by the example of (sub-Sahara) Africa. An entire continent, with abundant natural resources, with little to show relative to Anglo-American progress over the past half-millennium. There is no shortage of Asian peoples who have picked up that ball and run with it.
It’s not the often cited average IQ of 86. The tests were devised by white people for white people.
It’s the utter hopelessness of the place. We are all familiar with church groups that go on missions to Africa, to provide Africans with goods and services that we all have as a matter of course. I have known groups that spend thousands of dollars to go over to Uganda or Mali and teach the locals how to drill for clean water using nothing more than glorified hand tools. Others, with more sophisticated aims, do basic medicine and surgery at a level known to most Americans literally a century ago. Why do Africans rely on Americans to give their kids polio shots?
Disease is rampant in Africa, of course, but why do the cures that exist invariably come from American or European sources?
Why can’t they get their collective act together and figure these things out?
There will be those that blame whitey for oppressing them, and that is certainly true, but no longer, and why was it Europe conquering Africa in the first place, not a more even struggle?
How long is the metaphorical visa line at the American Embassy in Nairobi?
Why do they want to come to such a racist degenerate society?
well idi amin was trained by the british, mengistu by the us, bokassa by the french,
“Why do…?”
Hmmm, let’s take a stab here: for the same reason that so many Black South Africans bemoan the disappearance of the former apartheid government?
(WAIT A SEC! CAN ONE EVEN SAY THAT??? Or think that??)
Take a look at LeClerc’s Derbyshire link at 8:44 above, laying out a different version of “The Talk.”
See https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/the-talk-nonblack-version/
LordAzrael on April 27, 2023 at 6:28 pm said:
My understanding is that black crime patterns are a relatively recent phenomena only dating back to the 70’s, with introduction of social security, the rise of single parent families in the black community, and the breakdown of the black nuclear family, tied to the rise of ghetto culture. There’s no evidence that it dates back to emancipation.
I agree. No doubt there was some but I did not see it. I grew up in South Shore, a pleasant neighborhood in Chicago near the lake. When I was a senior in high school, I hung out at a black tavern with my buddy who had worked as a helper on a beer truck during the summer and got to know the place. We spent every Friday night there playing bumper pool. We were the only whites in the place. We got to be very good at bumper pool and almost never lost a game. Here was everyone drinking (beer was a quarter) and playing a game that the two white guys never lost. The black guys would put two quarters on the table to hold their spot as challengers. Nobody ever got angry. We never felt threatened.
Years later, I was considering going into practice with a guy from my residency program who was in Florida. I was visiting. He had a bumper pool table. We started playing. It was 15 years since I had played. My old skills started to come back and I ran the table a couple of times. The white doctor I was playing got angry and left.
That might have influenced my decision not to move there.
It seems to me that the Entertainment industry—via books, film, videos, and especially music and music videos—has played a major and despicable role in helping to dismantle, and to push today’s black culture downward, rather than upward; for the worse, and not for the better.
Apparently lots of money to be made promoting the ideas and images of “thug life”—criminality and easy money, lots of flashy jewelry, guns, booze and drugs, hot cars and hot women, all accompanied the hint—or more —of violence.
P.S.—Where are the black churches in all this?
On the outside looking in, and perhaps very wrong, but my impression is that, while their influence was very strong—almost determinative—in generations past, it has now waned considerably.
I’m not sure about the problem starting in the 70s. In the 60s I attended a Chicago-area high school located in a black neighborhood. There was a lot of black-on-black crime and, as well, a fair amount of black-on-white crime. It was not a pleasant or edifying experience. Waiting outside the school at the bus stop in the dark after football practice was a dicey proposition. Even in school blacks bullying and physically abusing white kids was a regular occurrence. If you decided not to take the bus, walking home through that neighborhood was fraught with peril. Sometimes that peril was life-threatening. It was generally acknowledged, to the point where it did not even bear comment, that the black neighborhood was more violent, for blacks and whites alike. Nobody in authority did much, if anything, about this. You learned to live with the situation. You either suffered — took a beating, allowed yourself to be robbed or brutalized or otherwise humiliated — or you fought back. Interestingly, the Polish/Ukrainian neighborhood which adjoined the black neighborhood was a no-go zone for blacks. The Polack and Ukie youths didn’t take any shit and gave as good as they got.
Those were the times.
West TX Intermediate Crude:
On Africa and its troubles – please read this post, and follow the links as well.
“P.S.—Where are the black churches in all this?”
Snow…now you’ve asked the other “nigh-unaskable” question.
My take…most sold out either to the “prosperity gospel” (Creflo Dollar, TD Jakes, Joel Osteen -spit-) and/or to “liberation theology” which is just Marxist Critical Theory veneered with Old Testament prophets of doom & retribution.
Inner city culture needs a Christian revival…like Western culture at large IMHO… but as long as the Benjamins flow some other direction, few influential black church leaders, or those who might have an influence, are going to buck the trends. And TBH…blame whitey is easier.
YMMV
Pax
IrishOtter – how much, if any, of this uptick in violence could be attributed to school busing? It certainly created a lot of friction among whites and blacks when I was in Junior High, 1970 and onward. I remember many times that our school would close early and release students in intervals (by floor dismissals) in an attempt to dissipate any crowds from hanging around.
When I worked in Flint, MI, I knew some older guys who’d grown up there. Sometimes, in talking about the black neighborhoods and the old days, they’d make an abortive move toward the throat with thumb opposed to the first two fingers.
They were referencing neckties while talking about “respectable”, “not like today” and the spoke as if they had no idea why it changed.
Odd how a memory could haul up almost as a reflex the reference to a necktie, going back at that point maybe forty to fifty years.
Something Mac Donald does not address is so-called “victimless” black mob action, in which large gangs of “yutes” ransack a store. I’ve seen some video of entire Wal-Marts being trashed. The number of such flash mind seems to be on the uptick.
This has taken on the aura of a new entitlement. There are some short videos out there where young blacks now claim that such acts are considered reparations. Once that notion takes set, black culture is toast.
Reinventing inner city schools or revitalizing churches won’t fix these attitudes. Force of some kind will eventually be necessary. So, the vandalism may stop, but attitudes won’t change.
How about the clip below in which a black women–with several carts with reportedly over $1,000 in food and other merchandise–tries to check out at a Target store–says she doesn’t have enough money to pay for all of this and, then, demands that she should be given these goods, free and clear, by Target, as “Reparations.”
This is followed by her arguing with several Target employees, then their “loss prevention” people and her pushing into the office of one of them, cornering him and getting “up in his face,” and him clocking her, and eventually the police were called. *
Or,
how about this BLM organizer justifying looting as Reparations? **
Or, some student’s views of this looting? ***
* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQm25YR-97U&t=29s
** https://nypost.com/2020/08/13/blm-organizer-who-called-looting-reparations-doubles-down/
*** https://www.theblaze.com/news/college-students-rioting-looting-justified
P.S. So, this idea of “Reparations” as justification is in the air, and it looks like it’s spreading.
Harking back to my comment of April 27th at 10:52 PM above, here’s another example of what I was talking about from NYC
See https://www.breitbart.com/pre-viral/2023/04/30/police-hunt-suspect-after-ny-subway-rider-allegedly-stabbed-with-ice-pick/