It’s common for progressive columnists to falsely claim that serial killers are disproportionately white. But that claim is untrue, notes University of Michigan economics professor emeritus Mark Perry. As he observes, “The Black share of Serial Killers has more than doubled from ~20% in the early 1900s to more than half today (54.2% in 2020), while the White share has declined from 75% in 1900 to 33.3% today (2020). In all decades, the percentage of Black serial killers exceeds the percentage of Black citizens in the US population. Since 2000, the majority of serial killers have been Black, even though the public perception is that more serial killers are White.” Most serial killers in recent years, such as Beltway sniper John Muhammad, have been black, even though blacks are only 13.6% of the population.
Yet, the Washington Post and Philadelphia Daily News published an op-ed by two left-wing academics falsely claiming that whites are responsible for “nearly all” mass shootings. The Washington Post also published a column by a feminist professor who said “I hate all men and wish they were dead.”
Progressives are more likely than other Americans to harbor certain prejudices, such as viewing white people as lazy and violent. “Clinton voters in 2016 rated white people as significantly lazier than blacks and Hispanics,” noted Wesley Yang. He was citing 2016 survey results from the American National Elections Studies, summarized in a working paper, “The 2016 Election and the Left’s Lurch Left.”
It is not clear why Clinton voters felt this way: A higher percentage of whites than blacks were employed in the United States in most of the period between 2014 and 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in the most recent month measured, January 2024, the employment rate was the same for blacks and whites (60.0% of both were employed). Whites being at least as likely to work is not consistent with progressive beliefs that white people are lazy.
“White liberals aged 18-24 rated whites and Christians as more ‘violent’ than blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims,” Yang also notes, referring to liberals’ responses to the ANES questionnaire. Liberals’ belief that white people are especially violent is odd, given that the black crime rate is much higher than the white crime rate. 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.
The homicide rate is 10 times higher among black teens than white teens. Blacks make up only 13.6% of the U.S. population. But they constitute a vastly higher percentage of those arrested and convicted for violent crimes. The FBI’s “Crime in the United States: 2017,” Table 43, showed that blacks constituted 53.1% of all people arrested for “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter,” 54.3% of all people arrested for robbery, and 28.7% of all people arrested for rape. These higher black crime rates have long been the case: For example, 43.7% of all rapists in state prisons were black two decades ago, according to a 1997 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. [See Lawrence A. Greenfeld, Statistician, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (Feb. 1997) (NCJ-163392)].
Blacks also have higher rates of committing non-homicide violent crimes. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics looked at the higher black arrest rate for these crimes and found that it was consistent with the higher black crime rate. 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 whites, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates, not racism: “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).
Having lots of white people around does not trigger a spike in crime rates. States like Iowa, Maine, and New Hampshire have very low crime rates, despite being overwhelmingly white (Maine is 94% white and New Hampshire is 91% white).
The working paper cited by Yang also takes issue with this strange assumption by liberals that whites and Christians are more violent. On page 9, it states:
Blacks in the US account for a vastly disproportionate share of violent crimes, b) Hispanics, on average, are somewhat more likely to engage in violent crimes than whites, and c) Muslims, on average, are more likely to engage in acts of terrorism than Christians.
Progressive media have peddled the false idea that white people are especially dangerous. CNN’s Don Lemon claimed that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.”
Lemon’s remarks reflect the false assumption that terrorists and mass shooters are disproportionately white. They aren’t. Even the liberal publication Slate once admitted this. As Slate’s Daniel Engber noted, “Mass shooters aren’t disproportionately white,” and “white people” are not “over-represented among mass shooters.” As a letter writer pointed out in 2013 in the Philadelphia Daily News, “Mass killings have also been committed by nonwhites, such as Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, Beltway sniper John Muhammad, Long Island Rail Road shooter Colin Ferguson, and Wisconsin’s Chai Soua Vang.” The fact that many other mass shooters are white simply reflects the fact that about three-quarters of Americans are white.
This reality did not stop the liberal Washington Post from publishing a misleading diatribe blaming whites for mass shootings. That op-ed by Charlotte and Harriet Childress falsely claimed that “nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years … have been committed by white men and boys.” The Post published that untrue claim, even though most of the shootings committed in The Post’s own region were committed by non-whites, such as Beltway sniper John Muhammad and Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho.
White people don’t have a monopoly on terrorism outside of the U.S., either. Two of the world’s three most violent terrorist groups — Boko Haram and al-Shabab — are African. The bloodiest terrorist group in the world in several recent years was Boko Haram, a violent Nigerian sect. That African terrorist group has killed countless thousands of people, including burning students alive and abducting many girls, and laid waste to entire regions in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
