After the tragic shooting last month which killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Nate Silver asked himself a question: what is the statistical divide between homicide rates amongst white and black Americans?
The answer shocked even Silver, who discussed his findings this week with Katie Halper on her radio show.
Here is how Halper presented what Silver had to say at Raw Story:
As he explained to me on the latest episode of The Katie Halper Show, “If you’re a white person your chance of being murdered every year is 2.5 out of 10[0],000… If you’re a black person it’s 19.4, so almost eight times higher.”
To put this into context, Silver explained, the murder rate for white Americans is similar to the murder rate for people living in Finland, Chile or Israel. The murder rate for black Americans, on the other hand, is similar to the rate found “in developing countries that are war zones even, like Myanmar, or Rwanda, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, places that have vast disorder. To me that stat was so striking that I thought this was a case where even if you kinda zoomed out, that was a data point that helped to inform the discussion.”
Indeed, Silver found that the homicide rate amongst black Americans is not just nearly eight times higher than that for white Americans, but
twelve times higher than the rate of people killed in other developed countries. Here is Silver's visual representation of that fact from his findings in June:
While Silver notes that, statistically, citizens of both races are more likely to be killed by someone of the same race, this fact "doesn’t negate that the threat black Americans face from homicide is radically different from the one whites do." Nor does it negate the everyday threat black Americans face from law enforcement, which, as Silver notes, we're finding evidence of at an increasing rate.
The Black Lives Matter movement draws from the continued, historic disregard for and dehumanizing of black people. Their lives, their dreams, and their physical bodies. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in "Letter to My Son," adapted from his important book just published called Between the World and Me:
“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”
In order to destroy this tradition, we must destroy the institutional racism which allow for this tradition to continue, a tradition which has created – among other things – one of the highest homicide rates in the developed world.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, recently published by Oneworld Publications.