Black-on-Black Crime Is Real and So Is the Bigger Picture — Both Things Are True

There is a woman in Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, whose name I will not print because she has suffered enough exposure to the world’s gaze without receiving any of its help, and she buried her second son on a Tuesday in October, and the sky was the kind of gray that does not promise rain but merely refuses to commit to anything at all, much like the city officials who sent a form letter and a grief counselor who stayed for forty-five minutes. Her first son was killed in 2019. Her second in 2024. Both by other Black men. Both under twenty-five. She is not a statistic. She is not a talking point for cable news. She is a mother who has run out of children to lose, and she represents thousands — tens of thousands — of women in this country whose grief has become so routine that it no longer qualifies as news, whose funerals have become so frequent that the church ladies know the program by heart.

I begin with her because the conversation we are about to have is one that has been poisoned by people who wield numbers as weapons and by people who refuse to look at numbers at all, and in the space between those two cowardices, children are dying. Real children. Children with names and futures and mothers who will never recover.

So let us look at the numbers, not because they tell the whole story, but because refusing to look at them has become its own form of violence.

What the Data Actually Says

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has tracked homicide data for decades, and the numbers are consistent enough across years that disputing them requires either ignorance or dishonesty. Black Americans constitute approximately 13.6% of the United States population. In 2022, they represented roughly 53% of known homicide victims and a similar proportion of known offenders. The vast majority of these homicides — over 90% — involved Black victims killed by Black perpetrators.

These numbers are not new. They are not contested by serious researchers on any side of the political spectrum. They are the empirical reality of who is dying and who is doing the killing, and they have been roughly stable, with modest fluctuations, for thirty years.

Now here is the point at which the conversation typically derails, because one camp seizes these figures as proof of inherent pathology — a conclusion so stupid it does not deserve the dignity of rebuttal — and another camp rushes to deflect the data entirely with what has become the most popular and most misleading response in American racial discourse.

The Deflection and Why It Fails

The deflection goes like this: “All crime is intra-racial. White people kill white people too.” And this is true. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 80% of white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Crime is overwhelmingly a proximity phenomenon — people victimize those who live near them, and America remains profoundly segregated. This is an accurate observation, and it is also a profoundly dishonest argument, because it obscures the single most important variable in this entire discussion: rate.

The per-capita homicide victimization rate for Black Americans is between six and eight times the rate for white Americans. In 2020, during the homicide surge that accompanied the pandemic and the post-George Floyd policing pullback, the Black homicide victimization rate reached approximately 37 per 100,000, compared to roughly 5 per 100,000 for white Americans. To say “all crime is intra-racial” while ignoring a six-to-eight-fold difference in the rate at which people are being murdered is like saying “all countries have weather” while ignoring that one country is experiencing a hurricane.

The proportionality matters. It matters because each unit of that rate represents a body. It represents a mother like the woman in Englewood. It represents a community that cannot accumulate wealth, cannot sustain businesses, cannot retain teachers or doctors, because the ambient threat of violence poisons every other metric of human flourishing.

Why We Refuse to See It

I understand the deflection. I understand it because the fear behind it is legitimate. For more than a century, crime data involving Black Americans has been weaponized by white supremacists, by eugenicists, by politicians running on barely coded racial platforms, to justify everything from lynching to mass incarceration to the systematic disinvestment in Black neighborhoods. When you hand someone a number and they use it to build a cage, you learn to be wary of numbers. This wariness is not irrational. It is the survival instinct of a people who have watched their reality be distorted in the mouths of their enemies for generations.

But here is what the wariness has cost us. While we have been arguing about who is allowed to discuss this data, who has the moral standing to cite these numbers, who is a racist for mentioning them and who is a sellout for acknowledging them — while we have been policing the conversation, we have not been protecting the children.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes leading causes of death by age, race, and sex. For Black males between the ages of 15 and 34, the leading cause of death is homicide. Not heart disease. Not accidents. Not suicide, though that is rising too. Homicide. It is the number one killer of young Black men in America, and it has been for decades.

I need you to sit with that. The number one cause. In a country with the most advanced medical system on earth, the most lethal threat to a young Black man is another young Black man. And our collective response has been to argue about whether it is appropriate to say so.

The Structural Truth

Let me be unambiguous about something, because the people who will attempt to misuse this article need to hear it clearly: the structural factors that created the conditions for concentrated urban violence are real, documented, and damning. Redlining, which the federal government enforced from the 1930s through the 1960s, created the hyper-segregated neighborhoods where violence concentrates. The deliberate destruction of Black business districts — from the literal burning of Tulsa’s Greenwood in 1921 to the “urban renewal” projects of the 1950s that bulldozed functioning Black communities — stripped neighborhoods of their economic base. The War on Drugs, which Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman admitted was designed to target Black communities, flooded those neighborhoods with law enforcement while draining them of fathers. Mass incarceration removed men from families and returned them years later with felony records that rendered them unemployable.

All of this is true. All of it matters. And none of it is sufficient to explain why the violence continues at its current rate, because the structural argument, taken alone, is also a form of evasion. It locates all agency outside the community. It says that Black people are acted upon but never act, that they are shaped by forces but never shape their own culture, that they are victims of history but never participants in it. This is not empowerment. It is the most sophisticated form of dehumanization available — it strips an entire people of moral agency while pretending to defend them.

Both things are true. The structures are real. The cultural factors are real. The refusal to discuss either one honestly is cowardice, and cowardice has a body count.

What Is Actually Working

The good news — and there is good news, though it receives a fraction of the coverage devoted to the arguments — is that community-based violence intervention programs are producing measurable, replicable results. These programs do not wait for structural transformation. They do not wait for reparations debates to conclude or for policing to be reformed or for the political class to stop using Black pain as campaign fodder. They go into the streets now, with the communities as they are, and they save lives.

CURE Violence, founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin in Chicago, treats violence as a contagious disease and deploys “violence interrupters” — credible messengers, often former gang members — to mediate conflicts before they become shootings. An independent evaluation by the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research found that CURE Violence sites in Chicago experienced a 41% to 73% reduction in shootings compared to matched control areas.

Advance Peace, operating in Richmond, California, and Sacramento, takes the most lethal individuals in a community — the small number of people responsible for the majority of shootings — and wraps them in intensive services: mentorship, cognitive behavioral therapy, life skills training, and a modest stipend contingent on participation. Richmond’s homicide rate dropped 71% over a decade during the program’s operation, and an independent evaluation found that 77% of Advance Peace fellows had no gun-related activity during or after the program.

Bob Woodson, through the Woodson Center, has spent four decades demonstrating that neighborhood transformation is possible when it is led by the people who live there rather than by academics, politicians, or professional activists who parachute in with theories and leave with grants. His work in neighborhoods from Washington, D.C., to Milwaukee has shown that when you empower indigenous community leaders — the grandmothers, the ex-offenders who turned their lives around, the pastors who never left — violence drops, not because the structures changed overnight, but because the culture within those blocks shifted.

The Community-Based Violence Intervention Movement

The federal government, to its credit, has begun to recognize what these programs demonstrate. The Community-Based Violence Intervention initiative, funded with $5 billion in the Biden administration’s initial proposals, channels resources to programs that use credible messengers, hospital-based intervention (reaching shooting victims before they seek retaliation), and group violence intervention strategies pioneered by David Kennedy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kennedy’s work in cities like Oakland and New Orleans demonstrated that most urban violence is driven by a remarkably small number of individuals — often fewer than 0.5% of a city’s population — and that focused deterrence strategies targeting that network can produce dramatic reductions.

These programs work because they refuse the false binary that has paralyzed the national conversation. They do not pretend that structural racism is irrelevant. They do not pretend that individual choices are irrelevant. They engage real people in real neighborhoods with real strategies, and they measure results with real data. They are not ideological. They are operational. And they are saving Black lives while the commentariat argues about vocabulary.

The Courage to See

The question before us is not complicated, even if it is painful. Do we love Black children enough to look at the data that describes their deaths? Do we love Black communities enough to pursue every strategy — structural, cultural, interpersonal — that might reduce the killing? Or do we love our political positions more than we love the people those positions claim to protect?

There is a faction that will use these numbers to argue that Black people are inherently violent. They are wrong, and they are contemptible, and their argument collapses under the weight of any serious historical or sociological analysis. There is another faction that will refuse to look at these numbers at all, that will call this article an act of betrayal, that will accuse me of giving ammunition to racists. To them I say: the ammunition is the body count. The ammunition is a generation of young men in caskets. The ammunition is a mother in Englewood with no more children to bury. Your silence is not protection. It is complicity dressed in the language of solidarity.

James Baldwin wrote, in a letter to his nephew, that the world is not what it claimed to be, and that the details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. But Baldwin also wrote — and this is the part that the people who quote him selectively prefer to forget — that we must accept the past and the present with clarity, that we cannot change anything until we accept it, and that the price of liberation is the willingness to see what is actually there.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin

Black-on-Black crime is not a slogan. It is not a conservative talking point. It is not a figment of racist imagination. It is the daily, grinding, relentless catastrophe of a community losing its children to violence at a rate that dwarfs every other group in this nation, and the first step toward ending it is to speak its name without flinching, to look at the data without deflecting, and to pursue solutions with the same ferocity we bring to the arguments about who is allowed to discuss the problem. We cannot fix what we refuse to see. And we have refused to see this for far too long.