Yes, Iāve wondered that. I donāt know if itās apathy, resignation, or lack of information about how bad it is. Itās actually really bad when you look at the numbers:
I got these numbers for homicides from the CDC and reformatted them and added some calculations. The data is sorted by the Per 100k column and worse-than-average outcomes are highlighted. I added precision to % values that otherwise rounded to 0%:
Of the 26,031 homicides in 2021 - the most recent year available - black people suffered 56% of the homicides while they made up just 14% of the population. Thatās 4.1 times the average.
It gets even worse when you break the numbers down by gender:
Black males are just 7% of the population but suffer 48% of the homicides, 7.3 times the average.
Even black women are slightly above the average, while women overall are way below average.
In stark contrast to black men, Asian women, at the bottom of the table, are really good at not getting killed. Their rate is just one tenth of the average. With about half the population of black men, 112 of them were killed compared to 12,476 black men. Maybe someone should ask them how they do it?
If itās true that most of the murders of black men are by black men (I have heard it is but didnāt find any data today), it may well explain some things, such as why there is little political will to do anything about it.
Given that black men are just 7% of the population, and ~half the murders are in that small population, itās easy enough to āotherā them, or to not see the problem at all because itās āsomewhere elseā.