It’s so nice to live in a
bubble. Every morning, I wake up, I walk outside my door, and I go for a
long run along the streets of my quiet, well-lit, very tidy,
neighborhood. As I run, I see at least one, but more often two or three,
police cars patrolling the streets. I wave and the officers wave back.
I feel safe. I do not worry about getting shot, robbed, or
otherwise attacked. Am I naïve? Nope. I’m just white.
This week, the New York Times reports on the significant extent to which race
plays a factor in gun-related injuries and deaths across the United States.
Why are these shootings not
receiving much attention outside of the communities in which they occur?
Simple. It’s all about race.
Most shootings with four deaths or injuries are invisible outside their
communities. And most of the lives they scar are black.
Although the news is quick to
inundate us with stories about mass shootings at suburban high schools, college
campuses, movie theaters, and houses of worship, the reality is that most
shootings occur in places most of us never even think about.
Most of the shootings occurred in economically downtrodden neighborhoods.
These shootings, by and large, are not a middle-class phenomenon. The
divide is racial as well. Among the cases examined by The Times were 39
domestic violence shootings, and they largely involved white attackers and
victims. So did many of the high-profile massacres, including a wild shootout
between Texas biker gangs that left nine people dead and 18 wounded. Over
all, though, nearly three-fourths of victims and suspected assailants whose
race could be identified were black. Some experts suggest that helps explain
why the drumbeat of dead and wounded does not inspire more outrage.
When was the last time you
found yourself in an “economically downtrodden” neighborhood? Exactly.
There is a fundamental disconnect between our knowledge of gun-related
violence and the reality of the situation. Experts note that
black-on-black shootings do not attract as much attention as other mass
casualty events because most folks simply can’t relate.
“Clearly, if it’s black-on-black, we don’t get the same attention because
most people don’t identify with that. Most Americans are white,” said James
Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston.
“People think, ‘That’s not my world. That’s not going to happen to me.’”
Michael Nutter, the former
Philadelphia mayor, put it very bluntly.
“The general view is it’s one bad black guy who has shot another bad black
guy,” he said. “And so, one less person to worry about.”
Even academics and other
researchers whose job it is to study gun violence have managed to overlook or
simply ignore the impact of black-on-black shootings.
Droves of experts study high-profile massacres by so-called lone-wolf
assailants, usually driven by mental disorders, at schools, workplaces and
other public spaces. Academics regularly crunch data on single homicides and
assaults. But the near-daily shootings that wound or kill several victims — a
relatively small subset of the shootings that kill nearly 11,000 people and
wound roughly 60,000 more each year — are uncharted territory for researchers,
said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis.
We know, however, that race
plays a critical role in any legitimate analysis of gun violence in the United
States. For starters, blacks are still disproportionately affected by gun
violence.
Though the rate of gun homicides plummeted for seven years after its 1993
peak, blacks are still six times as likely as whites to be both victims and
offenders.
The statistics from Cincinnati
highlight the point.
African-Americans make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000
residents. But last year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and
very likely the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the
city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.
The color of your skin remains
a strong predictor of whether you may by shot to death.
The gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack
epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still die
from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending on whether
the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I. statistics show that
African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent of the population, make up
about half of both gun homicide victims and their known or suspected attackers.
While race is the single best
predictor of gun homicide rates, experts note that it is merely a proxy for
other social problems.
Some researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates
is the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they say, is
merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic disadvantages
that help breed violence.
In short, gun violence does
not impact wealthy neighborhoods the way it affects the poorer parts of the
community.
Of the ZIP codes where four or more people were shot during a single
encounter in 2015, 86 percent are poorer than the nation as a whole.
So, go ahead and enjoy your
morning jog. As long as you’re white, you’ll be just fine.
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