By Steve Sailer
11/25/2020
From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine:
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Steve SailerNovember 25, 2020
Six months into the Racial Reckoning, it’s timely to review A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America by a conventional liberal criminologist named Elliott Currie of the U. of California at Irvine:
Much of the country has been understandably outraged by the continuing plague of police killings of black Americans; after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police in May 2020, that anger exploded into some of the most widespread and sustained protests against police violence in US history. There has been far less outrage over the ongoing emergency of everyday interpersonal violence in black communities.
Many conservatives credulously believe progressives’ claims that the social sciences vindicate liberal ideology. But, when read carefully, social scientific works can be a trove of politically incorrect data. Here are some striking facts gleaned from A Peculiar Indifference:
Between 2000 and 2018…more than 162,000 black Americans lost their lives to violence…the population of a substantial midsize American city — say Jackson, Mississippi….
As Currie admits, the vast majority of black murder victims are unquestionably killed by other blacks. The criminologist offers a lengthy historical explanation of why that is still, in 2020, the fault of whites (as you no doubt would anticipate, FDR’s redlining plays a role), but the 21st-century empirical data in the book is eye-opening:
In the United States today, a young black man has fifteen times the chance of dying from violence as his white counterpart.
Read the whole thing there.
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