Inside today’s Daily Journal…

Editor’s Note: Last month Porter published a book that is sure to become one of the most controversial titles of the year – 2029: The End of America. Among the leading foundational causes for America’s descent into cultural chaos is the legal theory of “disparate impact.” Codified into law by the 1991 Civil Rights Act, the law has been used to destroy public education, by demanding that all students receive the same grades – even when they’re failing. But the greatest damage to our society has been the law’s application to public safety. Below you’ll find something you’re not allowed to say in America today: black people, in aggregate, are very dangerous.

In 2023, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that black Americans, who make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population, were the victims of homicide at a rate of 21.3 per 100,000.

That is more than six times the rate for white Americans. The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports show that black Americans account for roughly half of all known homicide offenders in the United States, across every year for which data are available.

These are not controversial numbers. They are the official numbers.

They describe a concentration of violent crime so intense that a child born today in certain neighborhoods of Baltimore, Chicago, or St. Louis faces a statistical lifetime risk of homicide comparable to that of a soldier in active combat.

Demographers will tell you that black people, all around the world and in America both before and after the Civil Rights Act, are more violent than other races. Merely writing that is considered racist today, as if facts, by themselves, could possibly be prejudiced.

Consider the cross-national evidence first, because the cross-national evidence is the hardest for black apologists to explain away.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has published comparable international homicide statistics for more than 20 years. The countries at the top of the global homicide rankings – year after year, decade after decade – are the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the African-descended population centers of Central and South America: El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, South Africa, the Bahamas, Belize, Venezuela, and Brazil. The countries at the bottom of the rankings are the ethnically homogeneous nations of East Asia and Northern Europe – Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, and Switzerland.

This pattern is not explained by American slavery, because most of these countries were never involved in American slavery. It is not explained by American segregation, because most of these countries were never involved in American segregation. It is not explained by the American welfare state, because most of these countries have no meaningful welfare state. It is not explained by the Ferguson Effect, the 1994 crime bill, redlining, the Moynihan Report, Jim Crow, or any of the other American-specific causes that black political activists invoke whenever the American numbers are discussed.

Consider the historical evidence next. The homicide rate among free black Americans in the antebellum North – documented in the court records of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston across the 1830s and 1840s by the historian Roger Lane and others – was already multiples higher than the rate among whites in the same cities. This was two decades before Emancipation. It was a century before the Great Migration. It was a century and a half before the welfare state the criminologists blame.

The pattern was there in 1840. It was there in 1890 and 1920 and 1950. It has been there in every decade for which we have records, at something like its current ratio.

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, himself a black Jamaican, has made this point in print for 40 years. He has been ignored for 40 years even though Patterson cannot be dismissed as a racist.

Consider the controlled evidence last. When researchers compare homicide rates within racial groups by socioeconomic status – poor whites versus poor blacks in comparable neighborhoods, middle-class whites versus middle-class blacks in comparable neighborhoods – the racial gap narrows but does not close. Wealthy black people kill at a rate that’s higher than poor white people.

Poverty matters. Family structure matters. Fatherlessness matters. But after every control the criminologists can throw at the data, a residual gap remains, and the residual gap is not small. It is obvious and has been in the data since such statistics have been kept.

Now set that evidence beside the criminologists’ standard explanation. The criminologists will tell you that the legacy of the welfare-state destruction of the black family, combined with the collapse of black education, combined with the flight of legitimate employers from the inner city, combined with 50 years of progressive prosecution policies that refuse to incapacitate repeat violent offenders, has produced the environment in which the violence occurs.

Every element of the criminologists’ story is true, too. The black family was destroyed by the welfare state. Black education did collapse. Legitimate employers did flee. Progressive prosecutors do refuse to incapacitate violent offenders. Each of those factors raises the homicide rate, in any population subjected to it, by a measurable amount.

But none of those factors, singly or together, explains the cross-national evidence or the antebellum evidence or the within-group residual.

You can subtract every American-specific factor the criminologists name, and you still have Jamaica and Honduras and the Bahamas at the top of the homicide tables. You still have free black people in the 1840s showing higher rates of homicide. You still have the residual gap in the multivariate regressions. The criminologists’ explanations are not wrong. They are insufficient. A 2011 paper by the behavioral geneticists J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen – scholars pilloried in their lifetimes and still pilloried now – argued that the cross-cultural persistence of the pattern pointed to something deeper than environment.

Here is what I have come to believe after 30 years of reading the data honestly. The honest answer is that we do not fully understand why the disparity exists and has continued to exist for centuries. The disparity has cultural components and historical components and, yes, almost certainly some biological components that America’s political and academic establishment resolutely continues to ignore.

But it does not matter whether the cause of the disparity is genetic or cultural or historical or some combination of all three. It does not matter whether it is 100% environmental or 50% or 10%. It does not matter whether Rushton was right or the criminologists were right or the truth lies somewhere neither side will publish.

What matters, for the purposes of governing a country and protecting its citizens, is that black Americans commit homicide at roughly eight times the rate of white Americans. And black Americans are the victims of homicide at roughly six times the rate of white Americans. This has been true in every decade for which we have records.

A republic cannot govern itself by pretending that facts it finds uncomfortable do not exist.

The criminologists’ explanations may be right, partially right, or wrong – it does not change what has to be done. What has to be done is the same thing any functioning society does with its most violent offenders, of any race, in any era: identify them, arrest them, convict them, and incarcerate them until they are no longer a threat to their neighbors.

We are the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. We absolutely have the ability to punish violent criminals, of any race, and to make sure they never hurt anyone, ever again.

The doctrine of disparate impact has made it an impossible job, because the doctrine holds that the pattern of who gets arrested is itself evidence of injustice, regardless of the underlying pattern of who commits the offenses. Under the doctrine, a police force that correctly identifies the offenders in its jurisdiction – and therefore produces arrest statistics that reflect the offending statistics – is, by that very fact, guilty of racial discrimination.

So the police stop correctly identifying the offenders. And the offenders, no longer arrested, go on to kill more people. And the additional people they kill are, in overwhelming majority, black – because the offenders live among their victims, and their victims are their neighbors. The doctrine, sold as a protection for black Americans, has produced a policing regime that leaves black Americans unprotected from the offenders in their midst.

The doctrine is almost as much at fault as the killer.