To the extent that they admit the black crime rate is higher than the white crime rate, progressives blame it on society, saying it is due to the higher black poverty rate. But this argument is contradicted by the fact that when Asians were poorer than whites — because many Asians were dirt-poor immigrants from communist countries — Asians still had a lower crime rate than whites. And this was true even in places and times where Asians were subject to more discrimination than blacks are subject to today.
As Professor James Q. Wilson, an authority on public administration, once noted, “During the 1960’s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing. That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.” See Crime & Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime (1985).
Asians are much less likely to commit crimes than blacks, even when they are poor recent immigrants. For example, Asians are 15% of California’s population, but only 2% of its jail population — a huge racial disparity. Nationally, less than 2% of the jail population is Asian or Pacific Islander, even though they account for more than 6% of the U.S. population. This is not due to any racism in favor of Asians — indeed, occasionally discrimination occurs against Asians, such as in police stops in California’s Siskiyou County. In the 19th Century, California massively discriminated against Asians in its criminal justice system, including barring Chinese people from testifying in court in People v. Hall (1854).
Progressives commonly claim the black crime rate is not really higher than the white crime rate, they are merely overpoliced, resulting in blacks being incarcerated more than whites for committing the very same crime. Or that even if the black crime rate is higher, society is really to blame, by driving blacks to crime through economic deprivation and discrimination. Progressives sometimes make both arguments in alternative, as the progressive Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus once did — she argued that if the black crime rate really is higher than the white crime rate, that reflects even worse on society than if the black crime rate isn’t.
Both of these alternative claims are false. The black crime rate really is higher. Rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. In 2019, 6,425 black people committed homicide, compared to only 4,728 white people, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.
Downplaying crimes committed by blacks harms black people most, because most violent crimes against black people are committed by other black people. The depolicing that followed George Floyd’s death harmed black people most by causing black-on-black crimes to skyrocket. As the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal notes, “black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles since the George Floyd race riots; blacks between the ages of ten and 24 were killed in gun homicide at 24 times the rate of whites in that age cohort. Those black victims are not being gunned down by America’s alleged white supremacists or by the police; they are being gunned down by other blacks.” Most crimes against black people are black-on-black, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to FBI data, 89 percent of blacks who were murdered in 2018 were killed by black offenders.
Racism and overpolicing are not why the black arrest rate is higher than the arrest rate for other races. A 2021 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than people in general, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates: “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018). Far from being overpoliced, the U.S. is actually less policed than most of the world, with fewer cops than Europe. As criminology professor Justin Nix notes, “Given its level of serious crime, America has ordinary levels of incarceration but extraordinary levels of under-policing.”
Racial differences in arrest and incarceration rates do not prove racism, even if they are viewed as “racial disparities” or as form of “disparate impact.” In an 8-to-1 ruling, the Supreme Court emphasized that there is no legal “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, since such a presumption is “contradicted by” real world data showing big differences in crime rates. Thus, racial disparities in arrest or incarceration rates don’t violate the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination (See United States v. Armstrong (1996)).
Blacks do have a higher poverty rate than whites, but most black people are middle class, not in poverty. Racism does not explain what differences in median income exist between blacks and whites. Non-white immigrants from Africa and Asia commonly earn more than whites do, showing that racism is not a barrier to success. Asian Americans have the highest average net worth and highest average income, despite harsh discrimination against Chinese and Japanese Americans in the past.
There is a simple “roadmap out of poverty” that works for people of any race, according to the black economist Walter Williams: “Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.”
Past discrimination does not explain present-day racial disparities in wealth or income. Asians once experienced far worse housing discrimination than blacks in California, yet they have much higher incomes and more assets. As the New York Post notes, “several historically marginalized groups out-perform whites today. Take Japanese Americans, for example: For nearly four decades in the 20th century (1913 – 1952), this group was legally prevented from owning land and property in over a dozen American states [including California]. Moreover, 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II,” which forced many interned Japanese people to sell their businesses at fire-sale prices, ruining them. “But by 1959, the income disparity between Japanese Americans and white Americans nearly vanished. Today, Japanese Americans outperform whites by large margins in income statistics, education outcomes, test scores, and incarceration rates.”
Incarceration deters crimes, as studies have found (such as one by the National Bureau of Economic Research). Thus, the criminal-justice system saves lives — especially black lives — by deterring murder and other violent crimes.
