Shortly after Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23, the national discussion turned once again to police brutality—and the right, once again, tried to justify it.
Variations of “Blake was a criminal!” “He was resisting arrest!” and “More whites are killed by police!” peppered social media. But it was that old standby “When are we going to talk about Black-on-Black crime?” that provoked the most discussion in my own feed.
Tropes like these resound after every high-profile police shooting of an unarmed Black person. The implication with the last one is that if Black lives truly mattered, we’d be more concerned with the violence Black people inflict on each other than with police killings. But Elliott Currie’s new book, A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America, unpacks the thinly veiled racism behind this well-worn conservative talking point by examining the causes and history of violence within Black neighborhoods.
Currie argues that Americans do indeed pay too little attention to the violence ravaging cities like Chicago. The way conservatives frame the issue, however, stops the discussion in its tracks by playing on stereotypes of Black people—Black men, in particular—as criminals while suggesting that we downplay these terrible police shootings.
Currie, a criminologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, draws on a century’s worth of research—from W.E.B. Du Bois’s work at the turn of the century to recent university studies—to make his case that the violence engulfing some Black communities is not, in fact, a “community failure,” but rather “a symptom of social injustice.” The book is data-driven, nearly to a fault: the narrative slows at times from the statistical onslaught. But for an issue as contentious as this, the research needs to speak for itself, and Currie allows it to do that.
Following emancipation, Currie writes, Black people were still viewed as “something less than American.” As the Great Migration led African Americans to Northern cities, the burgeoning communities were increasingly disregarded by whites. Black schools, for example, received scant resources; courts were unduly punitive toward Black defendants; and Black neighborhoods were either ignored or abused by law enforcement.
Such conditions created communities with depressing rates of poverty, and, as a result, crime. In fact, the book’s findings on the devastating effects of poverty—on everything from sleep deprivation and poor cognitive performance to declining health and, especially, crime—are jaw-dropping. One of the most enlightening studies was conducted in the 1990s, addressing what is known as the “racial invariance thesis.” It found that any group of people—whether white, Black, Asian, or Latinx—would respond with the same levels of violence if placed, as Currie puts it, “in the same structural conditions.”
Currie’s remedies are well-wrought, sweeping, and in our fraught political climate, probably unrealistic. In addition to ending mass incarceration and implementing mild gun regulations, Currie prescribes a dramatic increase in government spending—including a job guarantee—to reduce poverty and alleviate socioeconomic inequalities. Income inequality is another factor that drives violence because, he argues, it “engenders bitterness, disaffection, and ‘pent-up aggression.’ ” American income inequality, in fact, is at its highest level ever recorded.
The most powerful takeaway from A Peculiar Indifference is that, to prove once and for all that Black lives matter, Americans must stop ignoring the violence devastating Black communities. But the answer is not to shrug off police brutality nor to assign Black people a proclivity toward violence that doesn’t exist. Instead, we must end the policies of austerity advocated by both political parties and the regressive tax cuts favored by the right, and invest substantially in our poorest, most disregarded communities.
“After all,” Currie notes, “we are one of the richest societies in the world, and our wealth did not appear from nowhere: it came in part from exploiting the labor and resources from those who are now in most need of help.”