Male Violent Death Rates: Whites v. Blacks (Updated)

 

Source: Way Of The World (h/t WRSA)

To better view the graph, I found that if you click on the image so it opens into its own box, then right click on the image and select "Open Image In Its Own Tab" you then will have the magnification cursor that allows you to open the image to its full size so you can more easily see the numbers. This is for Opera and it might be different with your browser. Alternatively, you can download the image and open it.

    What is interesting, looking at the graph, is that simply looking at black homicide rates (and to be clear, they are murdering each other), you can see how violent crime shot up in the 1960s and into the 1970s, largely mirroring social unrest in the black community and growing acceptance of drug use; dipped slightly before going back up about the time of the Miami riots (and the rise of the cocaine trade) before dipping in the mid-1980s as politicians took a tougher stance against crime; climbing again in tandem with the crack epidemic (but also around the time of the Rodney King riot) and then falling again as politicians again took a tougher stance against crime (including passage of three-strikes laws); to rise again about the time of the Ferguson riots and to the present. While you can probably establish a cause and effect between the drug trade and violence, it begs the question of a linkage between black riots/protests and black violent crime. Do the protests encourage blacks to flout the law (including killing one another) or vice versa?  

    Also note that the white murder rates largely mirror the black murder rates, but in a much more muted manner. The more serious issue among white males is the suicide rate which seems to largely reflect the economic fortunes of white men: we can see it coming off a high corresponding with the end of the depression, and then starting to rise again as white male wages started to stagnate in the 1970s and beyond, American industry was shipped overseas and jobs were increasingly taken by immigrants and their offspring.