By Steve Sailer
04/17/2022
For almost two years now, I’ve been pointing that the vastly celebrated triumph of Black Lives Matter from May 25, 2020 onward has had far-reaching consequences, many of them malign. One of the less expected disasters caused by the “racial reckoning,” even to me, was the growth in black traffic deaths.
Even I was shocked to see the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration road deaths data broken out by race. Like the FBI crime data, this comes from police departments.
An alternative source is the Centers for Disease Control, which track the causes noted on death certificates. They found a similar 8% increase in 2020 over 2019 in overall road deaths (which suggest a huge increase in deaths per mile driven since miles driven dropped over ten percent in 2020.)
What’s striking in the CDC numbers is the numbers by race, with the black increase in percentage of deaths being more than order of magnitude higher than the white percentage increase.
The CDC has published causes of death up through 2020 (because 2021 ended only 3.5 months ago):
| CDC Deaths |
Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities |
|||
| 2019 | 2020 | % Chg | ||
| Total | 37,595 | 40,696 | 8.2% | |
| NH White | 23,785 | 24,368 | 2.5% | |
| NH Black | 6,181 | 7,882 | 27.5% | |
| NH Asian | 936 | 872 | -6.8% | |
| NH Native American | 646 | 664 | 2.8% | |
| Hispanics | 5,979 | 6,836 | 14.3% | |
| Other | 68 | 74 | 8.8% |
Overall, despite a sharp decline in miles driven in 2020 due to the pandemic, motor vehicle traffic fatalities were up 8.2% from 2019 to 2020.
But, traffic fatalities declined among Asians and were up less than 3% among whites and American Indians. They were up sharply among Hispanics (14.3%) and up catastrophically among blacks (27.5%).
Unfortunately, the CDC doesn’t report this data broken out by month, but the NHTSA numbers show that the huge upsurge in reckless driving from blacks is noticeable from June 2020, beginning the week after George Floyd’s death.
The CDC’s motor vehicle traffic fatality table is similar (but not exactly the same as) their homicide fatality table for the same two years:
| CDC WONDER Database | 2019 Homicide Victims | 2020 Homicide Victims | Increase in Homicide Victims in 2020 vs. 2019 | % Increase in Homicide Victims in 2020 vs. 2019 | Share of Homicide Victims 2020 | Rate per 100k |
| Black | 10,030 | 13,594 | 3,564 | 36% | 55.3% | 31.2 |
| Hispanic | 3,122 | 3,920 | 798 | 26% | 16.0% | 6.4 |
| American Indian | 316 | 382 | 66 | 21% | 1.6% | 13.8 |
| White | 5,264 | 6,256 | 992 | 19% | 25.5% | 3.1 |
| Asian/Pacific | 369 | 373 | 4 | 1% | 1.5% | 1.8 |
| Unstated | 40 | 51 | 11 | 28% | 0.2% | |
| Total | 19,141 | 24,576 | 5,435 | 28% | 100.0% | 7.5 |
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.