Suicide Watch
June 26, 2024
Something unexpected has been going on with suicide rates over the past half decade.
First, though, some background: It is widely assumed by many people who don’t pay close attention to social science statistics that because African-American life is, as we are so often told, unbearably tragic, the rate at which blacks kill themselves to escape the crushing burden of systemic racism must be very high.
In reality, a basic finding of American social science determined that, among younger people under age 45, while American Indians have horribly high suicide rates and whites, despite all their white privilege, have bad levels, blacks, although they suffer extraordinarily high rates of dying at the hands of one another, have relatively low rates of dying by their own hand.
For most of the 21st century, the black suicide rate was about half the white rate (among people under 45, whom I will concentrate upon in this column).
Understanding that helps explain things like Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, which states that if there are more dead than wounded in a mass shooting, the shooter is likely to be nonblack (he stuck around to finish off the wounded because he’d already resolved he was never coming home); but if there are more wounded than dead, the shooter is likely to be black (because the gunman doesn’t hang around because he’s shooting to kill somebody he’s mad at, not to get killed himself).
But the low black suicide rate seems to be changing over the past decade.