The only apparent achievement of the Racial Reckoning was to make everyone feel worse about both themselves and the other race.
Per Gallup, a steady 70% of whites and 65% of blacks described race relations as very/somewhat good during the Dark Ages of 2001-2013. Once leftists and the media stuck their oars in, those numbers plunged to the low 40s and low 30s respectively.
It'd be supremely ironic if the RR ultimately led directly to the abolition of affirmative action and disparate impact, which seems at least possible.
Right, that was the first sign. Unless you count when he threw his white grandmother under the bus in Philadelphia. Trayvon Martin was bad, Michael Brown in Ferguson worst of all. It's really a pity. He had a golden opportunity to bring America together on the subject of race and he threw it all away.
He couldn't help himself. Obama lost a Democratic Congressional District primary very badly in the late 1990s to an "authentic" black candidate because Obama was a white-talking half-black man. In his mind, I think he vowed to become more authentic as a black man without turning off white liberals. It worked.
Between the traffic fatalities, criminality and now the suicides I'd say it's pretty clear that #BLM is bad for blacks. COVID lockdowns of gregarious blacks and putting everyone behind a mask and telling everyone to line up for a shot, actually two shots, actually the first dose two-shot series then the booster (honestly, I lose track) can't have been too healthy for marginal black psyches either.
Between BLM, transmania, and the consequences of mass illegal immigration, it’s pretty obvious the progressive left can stomach an incredible amount of human collateral damage in pursuit of their political goals. Not surprising when you consider the major political figures of left wing ideology in the 20th century - Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, etc.
I don’t pay more than passing attention, but I’ve noticed an uptick in reported shootings by licensed concealed carry holders. These often turn out to be black guys in terrible neighborhoods. I don’t care enough to follow the stories over time, but I won’t be surprised when we have a “very concerning” trend showing that licensed concealed carriers are increasingly involved in murders.
If the police don't enforce laws, you are going to get vigilantes.
In the 1970's a black female friend of mine got the crap beaten out of her which resulted in serious injuries. The perp was released after less than a week and threatened her again. A week later, he was shot in the head. When I asked her if she had been involved in his murder, she told me "No, but he had made a lot of enemies."
Instapundit likes to point out that the police exist to protect criminals from the wrath of the public. If they continue to fall down at the job, vigilantism will make a comeback.
Looks like the main spike was in Black male suicides. I suspect to the women leading the BLM charge, those (like the Black deaths of exuberance from speeding and "erupting" gunfire) are acceptable losses. Come to think of it, the light-hearted talkative Blacks of my experience are all males.
I think that is unfair. Although the black women in the media like Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reid etc. are all pretty horrible, I knew a lot of black women when I was a student and working in Chicago and I really liked them. The older women (this is back in the early 1980s) often had real southern charm and were quite fun to talk to. Midwit black elite women (many of whom are not ADOS but are instead, descended from 3rd world elites) get their power from crapping on our society, however I don't think that is true for most black women although they are often seriously brainwashed (like many white women).
My comment was aimed at "the women leading the BLM charge," most of whom were black, but obviously including numbers of adjacent/allies/whatever. As for reporting my personal experience, how can that be "unfair"? How would you suggest I deal with your criticism: by making up another "fairer" experience, or simply not saying it?
I agree. The nitwit women on tv are getting paid millions of dollars to espouse certain points of view and it’s gotten into their heads. They don’t represent real people. Watch an episode of the view when Barbara Walters was boss. It was more reasonable.
Could pot legalization be a factor? Sports gambling seems much more common, too. Young black men don't typically have a lot of wealth, but if they lose their mother's, too? Black unemployment fell in the pre-covid Trump years--did that make the unemployed feel their failure more?
How do they correctly distinguish intentional ODs from accidental ones?
Have banks managed to extend affirmative action to credit cards?
As a stockholder, I'm annoyed by Wells Fargo bragging about the hundreds of millions of credit to low income/depressed areas while their stock price is also depressed.
The enforced isolation of Covid rules may have played a role. Word from prison guards is that black inmates in solitary flip out much faster than white inmates.
It would be helpful to know if these extra suicides are more towards the bottom or top of black society. Less daily struggle can be depressing. Being surrounded by people who are doing better, knowing you can never measure up, can be depressing.
I haven't checked the literature (there might not be literature) but my experience and instinct tells me that your mood will be better on the average if you do not ruminate on it and your situation. There is a certain wisdom to the idea that ignorance is bliss. Going online and participating in a community of incels that agree and magnify your belief that you were dealt a bad hand of cards and there is no hope is a lot worse than just kinda suspecting it on your own.
The CDC data doesn't include much on class, other than county where the deceased lived. I could look at a few comparisons with affluent blacks vs. poor blacks, e.g., Queens vs. Bronx, but I don't think the same size would be too good.
Yeah, I figured. I suspect it's children of middle class blacks pushing up the numbers but I have nothing to back that up. Suicide is sad. I always think if something distracted them at the moment they finally worked up the nerve, they might go on another ten years.
I'd guess it's tied to black fertility cratering. Blacks have started to embrace the secular worldview like whites, only about 20 years later, and are behaving similarly.
Suicide is heavily influenced by culture. In China, last I checked, women actually commit suicide more than men.
You have to be careful with suicide definitions when comparing stats. IIRC women in most Western countries attempt suicide more often but since they tend to try less lethal methods they don't die as often. I think fewer men attempt it but since we are likely to use a more lethal method the actual number of deaths is greater. Maybe the Chinese are different but the same differential might still apply
It has to be draining seeing microagressions everywhere. Thinking the world is run by corrupt racists. Now that I think about it, what is the suicide rate of UNZ readers?
I can't scientifically explain how the deaths of "exuberance" are so much higher for blacks. But socially I would guess that being "exuberant" is lots of fun unless you are on the dead end of "exuberance." When the film "The Untouchables" came out about thirty years ago, young black males were enthralled by the film. I think black handgun deaths rose.
What kind of person is depressed enough to commit suicide? I would guess that alcoholics are prime suicide sorts. Ernest Hemingway tops the list. The actress Capucine flung herself off a building. I don't know if is she was an alcoholic but her one-time boyfriend, Bill Holden, certainly was. Actress Maggie McNamara flamed out early in her career and killed herself in the late 70s when she was a lowly typist. I don't know if she was an alcoholic. Alcohol in large quantities tends to act like a depressant.
Perhaps blacks are less afflicted with suicide because they are less likely to be alcoholics. Or they are less self-reflective. They are less apt to ponder their failures and blame themselves.
Good point. Senator John East was a polio victim and had hypothyroidism. He killed himself in his own garage by carbon monoxide. He felt anguished that his mental powers were diminishing.
The black unemployment rate exploded in 2020. It went from 7.0 in March to 16.9 by June. That’s insane. It took two years to get back to 2019 levels (this is according to the St. Louis Fed, which has a great website for economic stats).
The lockdowns were surely a huge piece of that, but the riots and fires that supposedly didn’t happen likely played a huge part. How many people’s jobs went up in smoke in Kenosha, for instance?
Those two years of slow decline in the rate were also the worst for inflation under Biden, as well. So, a lot of blacks probably found that their lives sucked the same way whites’ did in that era for the same reason. It’s the Carter-era Misery Index redux.
So, how many black guys whose lives got better under Trump 45 found themselves screwed over and depressed for a couple years? I don’t buy the pandemic as an explanation for the murders and traffic deaths - you’ve pretty much destroyed that argument. But, I think the economics of the post-pandemic era could have something to do with the suicides.
Which brings me to mass illegal immigration, a central part of the post-pandemic climate. Maybe it made their lives suck worse? It undermines black wages as a whole faster than anyone else’s. Maybe they don’t like the feeling of being replaced any more than poor whites?
The Deaths of Exuberance were clearly tied to police retreating to the coffee shop after 5/25/20, as seen in the weekly data. I haven't looked at suicide by week, but I doubt if cops can do much about it, one way or another.
If you have a gun and really want to check out nobody can do much, I’d say.
If the question is why Deaths of Despair got worse among blacks I’d guess that they did for the same reason Trump got more black votes than any Republican since Nixon. Things got better, then things got worse.
Sean Trende wrote in 2016 that Trump won by doing well among people with their business together in places falling apart full of people falling apart. Why couldn’t a similar thing happen with black Americans? Black lives getting better between 2016 and 2020 would be Not News, which is why Trump’s inroads with blacks are inexplicable to some. But some actual black people would, you know, notice.
I think the same dynamic applies to Trump’s Hispanic gains. Lives got better, then inflation and chaos from immigration undid it. If someone has a better explanation for how Trump won *Laredo* I’d be all ears.
I’m inclined to think the divergence between the life prospects of black women versus black males that has become a chasm contributes to these alarming suicide statistics for males.
I lived and worked in South Africa for several years and I didn’t observe the same chasm amongst my employees, 90+% of whom were black. My sample is skewed as we were a premier employer, able to hire selectively.
Unfortunately, although I have backgrounds in medical sociology, statistical analysis, and demography, I am currently in an unrelated, massive project I began in the 1980's. It's only religion, hence much less important than health, but I'm reluctant to back off of it now and pursue this or another matter Steve brought up previously on my own dime. I am feeling the pressure, but for now all I am offering is speculation.
(1) Suicide is a rare event, so accounting for it epidemiologically requires amassing data over long time and geographical extents. This article is a good start, but data from other countries and time-spans is needed to see how suicide rates are affected by propaganda or government programs.
(2) It is possible that suicide rates are related to exposure to news and news analysis generally, for the general trend is that those mass media activities try to get people upset and unhappy. Hence, if a person easily finds propaganda supporting his/her biases and listens to or reads more of it than usual -- you get the point. We might wonder why leftists seem to be less happy than others; but they more easily find mass media communications that will reinforce the angry, pessimistic, fearsome, or anxious emotional states and morally required beliefs that they crave. For a very few, the result can be catastrophic. Is the suicide increase primarily among black racists?
(3) It is also possible that importing white genetics into the black population reduces genetically-influenced tendency to have high self esteem regardless of actual circumstances. Is the suicide increase primarily among people with large amounts of Northern European DNA?
Considering the possibility that suicide rates might reflect infection with a mental virus, it might be interesting that medical professionals might eventually devise diagnostic criteria and treatment. They seem to be pretty slow about it, though.
Robertson, L. H. (2017). The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus. Theory &
The idea that units of culture may act as a virus controlling some of the perceptions and actions of individual has been the subject of considerable controversy since proposed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. This debate has occurred in the absence of a defined mental viral structure or a target body upon which such viral structures may act. This paper develops a paradigm in which the self is understood as such a body upon which future research into “mindviruses” may be undertaken. Possible mechanisms for mind-viral transmission are discussed. Criteria for defining a mental virus are used to examine evidence of possible mind virus contagion in suicides, suicide cults, terrorism and religion.
The only apparent achievement of the Racial Reckoning was to make everyone feel worse about both themselves and the other race.
Per Gallup, a steady 70% of whites and 65% of blacks described race relations as very/somewhat good during the Dark Ages of 2001-2013. Once leftists and the media stuck their oars in, those numbers plunged to the low 40s and low 30s respectively.
It'd be supremely ironic if the RR ultimately led directly to the abolition of affirmative action and disparate impact, which seems at least possible.
I blame a lot of it on Obama, who promised to be a uniter but, once elected, decided to be a divider instead.
Obama showed his true stripes when he went after that Cambridge cop after he arrested Skip Gates.
Right, that was the first sign. Unless you count when he threw his white grandmother under the bus in Philadelphia. Trayvon Martin was bad, Michael Brown in Ferguson worst of all. It's really a pity. He had a golden opportunity to bring America together on the subject of race and he threw it all away.
He couldn't help himself. Obama lost a Democratic Congressional District primary very badly in the late 1990s to an "authentic" black candidate because Obama was a white-talking half-black man. In his mind, I think he vowed to become more authentic as a black man without turning off white liberals. It worked.
Between the traffic fatalities, criminality and now the suicides I'd say it's pretty clear that #BLM is bad for blacks. COVID lockdowns of gregarious blacks and putting everyone behind a mask and telling everyone to line up for a shot, actually two shots, actually the first dose two-shot series then the booster (honestly, I lose track) can't have been too healthy for marginal black psyches either.
Talk about an inauspicious start to a decade ...
Between BLM, transmania, and the consequences of mass illegal immigration, it’s pretty obvious the progressive left can stomach an incredible amount of human collateral damage in pursuit of their political goals. Not surprising when you consider the major political figures of left wing ideology in the 20th century - Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, etc.
I don’t pay more than passing attention, but I’ve noticed an uptick in reported shootings by licensed concealed carry holders. These often turn out to be black guys in terrible neighborhoods. I don’t care enough to follow the stories over time, but I won’t be surprised when we have a “very concerning” trend showing that licensed concealed carriers are increasingly involved in murders.
If the police don't enforce laws, you are going to get vigilantes.
In the 1970's a black female friend of mine got the crap beaten out of her which resulted in serious injuries. The perp was released after less than a week and threatened her again. A week later, he was shot in the head. When I asked her if she had been involved in his murder, she told me "No, but he had made a lot of enemies."
Agreed. “When the law is turned against the people, the people will turn against the law.”
Seems like the perfect cold case left cold.
Instapundit likes to point out that the police exist to protect criminals from the wrath of the public. If they continue to fall down at the job, vigilantism will make a comeback.
Nothing personal, but would it qualify as "spergy" to ask her such a question? Seems to me 95% of people wouldn't.
I hope I'd have the nerve to offer her an alibi.
No one is going to confess.
Looks like the main spike was in Black male suicides. I suspect to the women leading the BLM charge, those (like the Black deaths of exuberance from speeding and "erupting" gunfire) are acceptable losses. Come to think of it, the light-hearted talkative Blacks of my experience are all males.
I think that is unfair. Although the black women in the media like Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reid etc. are all pretty horrible, I knew a lot of black women when I was a student and working in Chicago and I really liked them. The older women (this is back in the early 1980s) often had real southern charm and were quite fun to talk to. Midwit black elite women (many of whom are not ADOS but are instead, descended from 3rd world elites) get their power from crapping on our society, however I don't think that is true for most black women although they are often seriously brainwashed (like many white women).
My comment was aimed at "the women leading the BLM charge," most of whom were black, but obviously including numbers of adjacent/allies/whatever. As for reporting my personal experience, how can that be "unfair"? How would you suggest I deal with your criticism: by making up another "fairer" experience, or simply not saying it?
I agree with you on the BLM women. I interpreted your statement more broadly then you meant so I apologize for that.
I agree. The nitwit women on tv are getting paid millions of dollars to espouse certain points of view and it’s gotten into their heads. They don’t represent real people. Watch an episode of the view when Barbara Walters was boss. It was more reasonable.
Could pot legalization be a factor? Sports gambling seems much more common, too. Young black men don't typically have a lot of wealth, but if they lose their mother's, too? Black unemployment fell in the pre-covid Trump years--did that make the unemployed feel their failure more?
How do they correctly distinguish intentional ODs from accidental ones?
Sports gambling sounds pretty plausible.
Have banks managed to extend affirmative action to credit cards?
As a stockholder, I'm annoyed by Wells Fargo bragging about the hundreds of millions of credit to low income/depressed areas while their stock price is also depressed.
The enforced isolation of Covid rules may have played a role. Word from prison guards is that black inmates in solitary flip out much faster than white inmates.
Covid isolation may well have hit blacks, a sociable race, harder.
I blame a lot of it on Obama, who promised to be a uniter but, once in office, decided to be a divider instead.
It would be helpful to know if these extra suicides are more towards the bottom or top of black society. Less daily struggle can be depressing. Being surrounded by people who are doing better, knowing you can never measure up, can be depressing.
I haven't checked the literature (there might not be literature) but my experience and instinct tells me that your mood will be better on the average if you do not ruminate on it and your situation. There is a certain wisdom to the idea that ignorance is bliss. Going online and participating in a community of incels that agree and magnify your belief that you were dealt a bad hand of cards and there is no hope is a lot worse than just kinda suspecting it on your own.
Interesting that you mention incels. I'm not sure how aware Sailer commenters are of the "blackcel" phenomenon. For example, this tragic case from last year: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html
Single mothers, lack of male role models. It's not that surprising, really.
The CDC data doesn't include much on class, other than county where the deceased lived. I could look at a few comparisons with affluent blacks vs. poor blacks, e.g., Queens vs. Bronx, but I don't think the same size would be too good.
Yeah, I figured. I suspect it's children of middle class blacks pushing up the numbers but I have nothing to back that up. Suicide is sad. I always think if something distracted them at the moment they finally worked up the nerve, they might go on another ten years.
I'd guess it's tied to black fertility cratering. Blacks have started to embrace the secular worldview like whites, only about 20 years later, and are behaving similarly.
Suicide is heavily influenced by culture. In China, last I checked, women actually commit suicide more than men.
You have to be careful with suicide definitions when comparing stats. IIRC women in most Western countries attempt suicide more often but since they tend to try less lethal methods they don't die as often. I think fewer men attempt it but since we are likely to use a more lethal method the actual number of deaths is greater. Maybe the Chinese are different but the same differential might still apply
I’ve heard that too.
Women go the pill route rather than using a handgun. Slitting one's wrists must be difficult although admittedly I haven't tried it.
Chinese are definitely different. As recently as the 90s women actually succeeded in killing themselves three times as often as men.
Possibly related -- Matt Yglesias tries to address the association between wokeism and mental illness:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/happy-4th-of-july-why-are-young-liberals
"The world is one big theater of oppression, which explains my morosity," they think.
It has to be draining seeing microagressions everywhere. Thinking the world is run by corrupt racists. Now that I think about it, what is the suicide rate of UNZ readers?
Thanks for posting that link!
Can something beyond the sheer number of guns explain the huge disparity in the ratios of black to white deaths of exuberance?
I can't scientifically explain how the deaths of "exuberance" are so much higher for blacks. But socially I would guess that being "exuberant" is lots of fun unless you are on the dead end of "exuberance." When the film "The Untouchables" came out about thirty years ago, young black males were enthralled by the film. I think black handgun deaths rose.
The sheer number of cars, perhaps. Blacks have been driving like their hair is on fire since the lockdowns.
What kind of person is depressed enough to commit suicide? I would guess that alcoholics are prime suicide sorts. Ernest Hemingway tops the list. The actress Capucine flung herself off a building. I don't know if is she was an alcoholic but her one-time boyfriend, Bill Holden, certainly was. Actress Maggie McNamara flamed out early in her career and killed herself in the late 70s when she was a lowly typist. I don't know if she was an alcoholic. Alcohol in large quantities tends to act like a depressant.
Perhaps blacks are less afflicted with suicide because they are less likely to be alcoholics. Or they are less self-reflective. They are less apt to ponder their failures and blame themselves.
Extreme physical pain can cause contemplation of suicide.
Good point. Senator John East was a polio victim and had hypothyroidism. He killed himself in his own garage by carbon monoxide. He felt anguished that his mental powers were diminishing.
"They are less apt to ponder their failures and blame themselves."
This is it. Blacks simply do not suffer from feelings of inadequacy.
The black unemployment rate exploded in 2020. It went from 7.0 in March to 16.9 by June. That’s insane. It took two years to get back to 2019 levels (this is according to the St. Louis Fed, which has a great website for economic stats).
The lockdowns were surely a huge piece of that, but the riots and fires that supposedly didn’t happen likely played a huge part. How many people’s jobs went up in smoke in Kenosha, for instance?
Those two years of slow decline in the rate were also the worst for inflation under Biden, as well. So, a lot of blacks probably found that their lives sucked the same way whites’ did in that era for the same reason. It’s the Carter-era Misery Index redux.
So, how many black guys whose lives got better under Trump 45 found themselves screwed over and depressed for a couple years? I don’t buy the pandemic as an explanation for the murders and traffic deaths - you’ve pretty much destroyed that argument. But, I think the economics of the post-pandemic era could have something to do with the suicides.
Which brings me to mass illegal immigration, a central part of the post-pandemic climate. Maybe it made their lives suck worse? It undermines black wages as a whole faster than anyone else’s. Maybe they don’t like the feeling of being replaced any more than poor whites?
The Deaths of Exuberance were clearly tied to police retreating to the coffee shop after 5/25/20, as seen in the weekly data. I haven't looked at suicide by week, but I doubt if cops can do much about it, one way or another.
If you have a gun and really want to check out nobody can do much, I’d say.
If the question is why Deaths of Despair got worse among blacks I’d guess that they did for the same reason Trump got more black votes than any Republican since Nixon. Things got better, then things got worse.
Sean Trende wrote in 2016 that Trump won by doing well among people with their business together in places falling apart full of people falling apart. Why couldn’t a similar thing happen with black Americans? Black lives getting better between 2016 and 2020 would be Not News, which is why Trump’s inroads with blacks are inexplicable to some. But some actual black people would, you know, notice.
I think the same dynamic applies to Trump’s Hispanic gains. Lives got better, then inflation and chaos from immigration undid it. If someone has a better explanation for how Trump won *Laredo* I’d be all ears.
The suicide rate was rising before 2020--when black unemployment was falling.
I’m inclined to think the divergence between the life prospects of black women versus black males that has become a chasm contributes to these alarming suicide statistics for males.
I lived and worked in South Africa for several years and I didn’t observe the same chasm amongst my employees, 90+% of whom were black. My sample is skewed as we were a premier employer, able to hire selectively.
Unfortunately, although I have backgrounds in medical sociology, statistical analysis, and demography, I am currently in an unrelated, massive project I began in the 1980's. It's only religion, hence much less important than health, but I'm reluctant to back off of it now and pursue this or another matter Steve brought up previously on my own dime. I am feeling the pressure, but for now all I am offering is speculation.
(1) Suicide is a rare event, so accounting for it epidemiologically requires amassing data over long time and geographical extents. This article is a good start, but data from other countries and time-spans is needed to see how suicide rates are affected by propaganda or government programs.
(2) It is possible that suicide rates are related to exposure to news and news analysis generally, for the general trend is that those mass media activities try to get people upset and unhappy. Hence, if a person easily finds propaganda supporting his/her biases and listens to or reads more of it than usual -- you get the point. We might wonder why leftists seem to be less happy than others; but they more easily find mass media communications that will reinforce the angry, pessimistic, fearsome, or anxious emotional states and morally required beliefs that they crave. For a very few, the result can be catastrophic. Is the suicide increase primarily among black racists?
(3) It is also possible that importing white genetics into the black population reduces genetically-influenced tendency to have high self esteem regardless of actual circumstances. Is the suicide increase primarily among people with large amounts of Northern European DNA?
Considering the possibility that suicide rates might reflect infection with a mental virus, it might be interesting that medical professionals might eventually devise diagnostic criteria and treatment. They seem to be pretty slow about it, though.
Robertson, L. H. (2017). The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus. Theory &
Psychology, 27(3), 354-368. doi:10.1177/0959354317696601
Abstract
The idea that units of culture may act as a virus controlling some of the perceptions and actions of individual has been the subject of considerable controversy since proposed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. This debate has occurred in the absence of a defined mental viral structure or a target body upon which such viral structures may act. This paper develops a paradigm in which the self is understood as such a body upon which future research into “mindviruses” may be undertaken. Possible mechanisms for mind-viral transmission are discussed. Criteria for defining a mental virus are used to examine evidence of possible mind virus contagion in suicides, suicide cults, terrorism and religion.