Asia Times: Genosuicide and its causes

Heather Macdonald got some facts wrong, but the article has worthwhile information.

“Black lives matter” became the slogan of the anti-police protests that followed the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Do they? Does yours? Parts of black America appear determined to destroy themselves—black men, that is, rather than black women, who graduate from university at twice the male rate and hold more full-time jobs. Call it genosuicide, the self-willed extinction of a people, and it happens all the time, especially when young men decide that to matter, they must assert themselves violently. There is nothing uniquely “black” about the inner-city catastrophe now unfolding in America, as some historical examples will show.

In the reasonable fear of legal persecution, police in America’s inner cities have stepped back from aggressive enforcement of the law, and the result is a sudden surge in homicides that have killed hundreds of people, almost all of them black. As Heather MacDonald reported in the Wall Street Journal May 29, “Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years. In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.”

To demonstrate that they matter, young black men kill other young black men in appalling numbers. The Economist notes that if black America were a country, it would have the highest murder rate in the world, adding, Black Americans are still eight times more likely to be murdered than whites and seven times more likely to commit murder, according to the FBI. An incredible one-third of black men in their 30s have been in prison.”
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