This brings to mind Matt Yglesias’s recent discussion of the white-on-white murder rate in the U.S., an effort to shed light on what some are calling the “fallacy” of talking about black-on-black crime. Yglesias warns that “white-on-white murder in America is out of control,” and to make his point he compares it to white-on-white homicide rates in a number of other countries:
This is not to say that white people are inherently prone to violence. Most whites, obviously, manage to get through life without murdering anyone. And there are many countries full of white people — Norway, Iceland, France, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — where white people murder each other at a much lower rate than you see here in the United States. On the other hand, although people often see criminal behavior as a symptom of poverty, the quantity of murder committed by white people specifically in the United States casts some doubt on this. Per capita GDP is considerably higher here than in France — and the white population in America is considerably richer than the national average — and yet we have more white murderers.
While one can debate what it means for a country to be “full of white people,” it is worth noting that the white share of New Zealand’s population (74 percent) is lower than that of the United States (77.7 percent), and the non-white populations of France and Britain are quite high. Moreover, non-white individuals in these countries are, like non-white individuals in the U.S., more likely to be killed than whites. It is not clear to me how Yglesias calculated the white-on-white murder rate in these societies, but I’m happy to accept that all of them have a lower white-on-white murder rate than the United States.
But if we instead compare the rate of intentional homicides of these countries to the rate for the white population of the U.S., the white U.S. does not in fact look like a dramatic outlier. (I want to stress that I could be getting something wrong here, so please let me know if I’ve gone astray and I will revise accordingly.)
According to statistics gathered by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the 2011 intentional homicide rates per 100,000 for the countries identified by Matt are as follows: Norway (2), Iceland (1), France (1), Denmark (1), New Zealand (1), and the UK (1). The rate for the U.S. as a whole is 5. As of 2011, there were 3,172 white murder victims in the U.S., according to the FBI. The white population as a whole is 245.5 million, including whites who identify as Latinos. This yields an intentional homicide rate of 1.29, a number almost indistinguishable from those of Iceland, France, Denmark, New Zealand, and the UK and lower than the intentional homicide rate of Norway, Canada (2), Belgium (2), Israel (2), and Finland (2). In contrast, there were 2,695 black murder victims in 2011 against a 2013 black population of 41.7 million, which yields an intentional homicide rate of approximately 6.5., a rate higher than that of Kenya (6) but lower than that of Lithuania (7).
