Let me preface this by saying I always feel somewhat uncomfortable writing about racial issues because claims about race are so often misconstrued as establishing bias in one way or another. That being said, I find it very annoying that a lot of nonsensical claims about race are often passed around when a quick reality check would shatter the said claims.
Today’s exhibit is a Wired story about Tim Wise’s Alternet article, School Shootings and White Denial, which is apparently being widely circulated via e-mail. Wise hypothesizes that school shootings occur because whites ignore violence and dysfunction in their own neighborhoods while obsessing about violence committed by African Americans,
What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long. What affects the urban “ghetto” today will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you tomorrow, and unless you address the emptiness, pain, isolation and lack of hope felt by children of color and the poor, then don’t be shocked when the support systems aren’t there for your kids either.
While we shouldn’t ignore the sort of violence that occurred at Columbine and elsewhere, the notion that white American is particularly violent is disproved by the evidence and widespread acceptance of this claim would be very dismaying since it would likely shift resources to combat violence from where it is needed (this is exactly what happened with AIDS, for example, where resources were large wasted on middle class white kids).
The bottom line is this: African Americans are six times as likely to be a victim of a homicide as are white Americans. Much of that increased risk occurs at a young age. By age 20, for example, a black male has a 2.8 percent chance of being murdered compared to a white male who has a mere 0.4 percent risk — a seven-fold level of risk.
As far as murder offense by race, the statistics there are actually worse than the victim statistics. Despite the disproportionate risk of being a victim of murder, whites still made up the majority of murder victims. That is not so for offenders. When it comes to murders committed by perpetrators under the age of 18, in 1999 35.7 percent of offenders were black compared to 33.2 percent white (2.2 percent were committed by other racial groups, and in 28.9 percent of cases, the race of the killer was unknown).
That is an incredible number and indicates, despite Wise’s claims to the contrary, that it is largely black inner city areas that need the most help in combating violence rather than the largely white suburbs.