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I consider myself sympathetic to dissident rightist views and yet I find arguments such as this somewhat baffling. Endemic black gun violence wasn’t much of a social issue in the US until 1970 or 1980, was it? So American society was clearly finding entirely mundane ways of curbing it before that.
A little earlier; the uptick in homicide starting after 1963. The limited data I can find suggests the homicides were of similar racial mix as today (and got more white as you get into the 1980s). It is tempting for the wrongthinker to draw a straight line between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and this fact, but I don't know of any direct evidence for that.
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Redlining, or de facto segregation through discriminatory housing practices was one method of keeping black gun violence from spreading to white neighborhoods. Additionally, crack cocaine started being a problem around the 1980s, disintegrating the social fabric for black communities that previously held back violence in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_in_the_United_States
Is crack as a cause statistically proven or did it just correlate? Crack still exists today (Hunter Biden) and it’s easy to get cocaine but no one blames crack today for murder rates. Chicago I am more familiar with and most murder is over stupid shit. Like someone posted a video on YouTube calling you bad names.
Great Migration was over the prior few decades. Plus Civil Rights. So perhaps the first generation moving to big cities had some selection effects for behavior, but the kids did not who would have come of age in the ‘80’s. Honestly just spitballing a theory because crack caused murders to go boom makes less sense today since crack still exists and no one blames crack today.
Crack ruined the preexisting social order in black communities that kept gun violence down from previous decades. Afterwards, gun violence and gang wars became embedded and normalized in parts of black culture. So even without the crack, the gun violence continued because it had been normalized for an entire generation. Additionally, there were advancements in drug production chemistry know-how and increased world trade that led to increasing popularity of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. Now, we have Mexican drug cartels importing opioid precursors from China, and those drugs make their way into black communities.
So, my thesis is that black murder rates are high without crack for two reasons - gun violence normalization and alternative drugs supplanting crack in the drug economy ecosystem. Fentanyl doesn't lead blacks into gun violence directly, but I'm sure the dealers and distributors use violence to protect their business.
I guess corners mattered a lot more back then. Today they don’t. So maybe it did just cause a cultural thing. I know anytime I go thru Chicago murders it’s over very dumb stuff and rarely appears drug dealing related. Cartels I think have also cut down on drug murders. But someone from the southwest would know more. It’s bad for business so they keep the violent part of the drug trade in Mexico.
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