Regarding violence in the African-American population:
On 14 January 2015 the Washington Post published an article by Niraj Chokshi on U.S. homicide rates.
Link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/01/14/map-the-black-homicide-rate-in-almost-every-state/?utm_term=.c5247756b671The news from the article is almost unremittingly grim. Rates of homicide among the African-American community are shameful high. Now let me bar a little against being misunderstood. What is being spoken of is the numbers of victims, per 100,000 people in a number of states, and it is generally the case that victim and perpetrator are of the same ethnicity. For our purposes it is eminently fair to ignore all exceptions.
The state with the highest rate of black homicide is Missouri. The homicide rate among black victims in Missouri was 34.98 per 100,000 in 2012. In that same year Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, and Wyoming had no black homicides of any sort. These states have small black populations both absolute numbers and in terms of percentages.
One could compare states with small black populations such as Alaska and Hawaii where in 2012 one state had no homicides and the other had three. However I doubt that these are facts which speak with a clear voice.
It might be more meaningful to ask why violent crime in general has declined over the past thirty years in the United States. As to that question, I will stand mute.
Rates of illegitimate births in the United States have varied. The comment at the Washington Post article that I found telling was one which blamed the parents of violent criminals for their criminality. There is a point in doing this. We are subject to influence not withstanding our own agency.
I believe Walter E. Williams shines a light on one of the nations great scandals in his article,
The True Black Tragedy: Illegitimacy Rate of 75%. Williams is an astute fellow. He tells us:
Hustlers and people with little understanding want us to believe that today's black problems are the continuing result of a legacy of slavery, poverty and racial discrimination. The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor black neighborhoods is entirely new in black history. Let's look at some of it.
Today the overwhelming majority of black children are raised in single female-headed families. As early as the 1880s, three-quarters of black families were two-parent. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father.
Today's black illegitimacy rate of nearly 75 percent is also entirely new. In 1940, black illegitimacy stood at 14 percent. It had risen to 25 percent by 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" and was widely condemned as a racist. By 1980, the black illegitimacy rate had more than doubled, to 56 percent, and it has been growing since. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
link:
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/walter-e-williams/true-black-tragedy-illegitimacy-rate-nearly-75Now what Williams has told us does not explain away this question of violence, but illegitimacy is an aggravating factor.
I would caution those who would claim that blacks do violence because of some inherent factor to look to the homicide rates of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Burkina Faso enjoys an enviable rate of 0.71 per 100,000. While other nations such as Lesotho are cursed with high rates of violent crime. Both of these countries are populated by black Africans, and yet in terms of violence are they not as different from one another as the night is from the day?
Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rateI put it to you: the notion that any of us are doomed to lives of criminality is just wrong.
