Black-on-Black Crime Is Real and So Is the Bigger Picture — Both Things Are True

There is a woman in Englewood, on the South Side of Chicago, whose name I will not print because she has suffered enough exposure to the world’s gaze without receiving any of its help. She buried her second son on a Tuesday in October. Her first son was killed in 2019. Her second in 2024. Both by other Black men. Both under twenty-five.

She is not a statistic. She is not a talking point for cable news. She is a mother who has run out of children to lose, and she represents thousands — tens of thousands — of women in this country whose grief has become so routine that it no longer qualifies as news, whose funerals have become so frequent that the church ladies know the program by heart.

I begin with her because our conversation has been poisoned. Some wield numbers as weapons. Others refuse to look at numbers at all. In the space between these two cowardices, children are dying. Real children. Children with names and futures and mothers who will never recover. So let us look at the numbers — not because they tell the whole story, but because refusing to look at them has become its own form of violence.

What the Data Actually Says

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has tracked homicide data for decades, and the numbers are consistent enough across years that disputing them requires either ignorance or dishonesty (FBI UCR, Expanded Homicide Data Table 6, 2022):

• 13.6%: Black Americans’ share of the U.S. population
• ~53%: Their share of known homicide victims and a similar proportion of known offenders
• 90%+: The share of Black homicides involving Black perpetrators

These numbers are not new. They are not contested by serious researchers on any side of the political spectrum. They are the empirical reality of who is dying and who is doing the killing, and they have been roughly stable, with modest fluctuations, for thirty years.

Now here is the point at which the conversation typically derails, because one camp seizes these figures as proof of inherent pathology — a conclusion so stupid it does not deserve the dignity of rebuttal — and another camp rushes to deflect the data entirely with what has become the most popular and most misleading response in American racial discourse.

The Deflection and Why It Fails

The deflection goes like this: “All crime is intra-racial. White people kill white people too.” And this is true. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 80% of white homicide victims are killed by white offenders (Cooper & Smith, Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008, BJS, 2011). Crime is overwhelmingly a proximity phenomenon — people victimize those who live near them, and America remains profoundly segregated.

This is an accurate observation, and it is also a profoundly dishonest argument, because it obscures the single most important variable in this entire discussion: rate.

The homicide rate for Black Americans is six to eight times higher than for white Americans. In 2020, during the homicide surge that accompanied the pandemic and the post-George Floyd policing pullback, the Black homicide victimization rate reached approximately 37 per 100,000, compared to roughly 5 per 100,000 for white Americans (CDC WONDER Database, National Vital Statistics System, 2020).

Saying “all crime is intra-racial” while ignoring a six-to-eight-fold rate difference is like saying “all countries have weather” while ignoring that one country faces a hurricane. The proportionality matters. Each unit of that rate represents a body — a mother like the woman in Englewood, a community that cannot accumulate wealth or retain teachers because the ambient threat of violence poisons every other measure of human flourishing.

Why We Refuse to See It

I understand the deflection. The fear behind it is legitimate. For more than a century, crime data involving Black Americans has been weaponized — by white supremacists, eugenicists, and politicians running on barely coded racial platforms — to justify everything from lynching to mass incarceration.

When you hand someone a number and they use it to build a cage, you learn to be wary of numbers. This wariness is not irrational. It is the survival instinct of a people who have watched their reality be distorted in the mouths of their enemies for generations.

But here is what the wariness has cost us. While we have been arguing about who is allowed to discuss this data, who has the moral standing to cite these numbers, who is a racist for mentioning them and who is a sellout for acknowledging them — while we have been policing the conversation, we have not been protecting the children.

• Homicide is the No. 1 killer of young Black men in America (CDC, 2021)
• It has held that position for decades
• It is not the leading cause of death for young white men in any age bracket
• Our collective response has been to argue about whether it is appropriate to say so

I need you to sit with that. In a country with the most advanced medical system on earth, the most lethal threat to a young Black man is another young Black man. And our collective response has been to argue about vocabulary.

The Structural Truth

Let me be unambiguous about something, because the people who will attempt to misuse this article need to hear it clearly: the structural factors that created the conditions for concentrated urban violence are real, documented, and damning.

• Redlining (1930s–1960s) created the hyper-segregated neighborhoods where violence concentrates (Rothstein, The Color of Law, Liveright, 2017)
• The destruction of Black business districts — from the literal burning of Tulsa’s Greenwood in 1921 to the “urban renewal” projects of the 1950s — stripped neighborhoods of their economic base
• The War on Drugs, which Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman admitted was designed to target Black communities, flooded those neighborhoods with law enforcement while draining them of fathers
• Mass incarceration removed men from families and returned them years later with felony records that rendered them unemployable

All of this is true. All of it matters. And none of it is sufficient to explain why the violence continues at its current rate, because the structural argument, taken alone, is also a form of evasion. It locates all agency outside the community. It says Black people are acted upon but never act. They are shaped by forces but never shape their own culture. They are victims of history but never participants in it. This is not empowerment. It is the most sophisticated form of dehumanization available — it strips an entire people of moral agency while pretending to defend them.

Both things are true. The structures are real. The cultural factors are real. The refusal to discuss either one honestly is cowardice, and cowardice has a body count.

What Is Actually Working

The good news — and there is good news, though it receives a fraction of the coverage devoted to the arguments — is that community-based violence intervention programs are producing measurable, replicable results. These programs do not wait for structural transformation. They do not wait for reparations debates to conclude or for policing to be reformed. They go into the streets now, with the communities as they are, and they save lives.

CURE Violence, founded by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin in Chicago, treats violence as a contagious disease and deploys “violence interrupters” — credible messengers, often former gang members — to mediate conflicts before they become shootings. An independent evaluation by the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research found that CURE Violence sites in Chicago experienced a 41% to 73% reduction in shootings compared to matched control areas (Skogan et al., Northwestern University, 2009).

Advance Peace, operating in Richmond, California, and Sacramento, takes the most lethal individuals in a community — the small number of people responsible for the majority of shootings — and wraps them in intensive services:

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• Mentorship and cognitive behavioral therapy
• Life skills training and a modest stipend contingent on participation
• Richmond’s homicide rate dropped 71% over a decade during the program’s operation
• 77% of fellows had no gun-related activity during or after the program (Corburn & Fukutome, UC Berkeley, 2019)

Bob Woodson, through the Woodson Center, has spent four decades demonstrating that neighborhood transformation is possible when it is led by the people who live there — not by academics, politicians, or professional activists who parachute in with theories and leave with grants. His work has shown that when you empower indigenous community leaders — the grandmothers, the ex-offenders who turned their lives around, the pastors who never left — violence drops, not because the structures changed overnight, but because the culture within those blocks shifted (Woodson, Lessons from the Least of These, Woodson Center, 2020).

The Community-Based Violence Intervention Movement

The federal government has begun to recognize what these programs demonstrate. The Community-Based Violence Intervention initiative channels resources to programs that use credible messengers, hospital-based intervention — reaching shooting victims before they seek retaliation — and group violence intervention strategies pioneered by David Kennedy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (Kennedy, Don’t Shoot, Bloomsbury, 2011).

Kennedy’s work in cities like Oakland and New Orleans demonstrated two critical findings:

• Most urban violence is driven by fewer than 0.5% of a city’s population
• Focused deterrence strategies targeting that network can produce dramatic reductions

These programs work because they refuse the false binary that has paralyzed the national conversation. They do not pretend that structural racism is irrelevant. They do not pretend that individual choices are irrelevant. They engage real people in real neighborhoods with real strategies, and they measure results with real data. They are not ideological. They are operational. They save Black lives while commentators argue about vocabulary.

The Puzzle and the Solution

A puzzle master looks at that question and identifies the variable nobody wants to name. Both political camps have built their identities around the half of the truth that serves them. The right uses the data to justify abandonment. The left uses the deflection to avoid accountability. Neither serves the mother in Englewood. Neither has stopped a single bullet.

“You cannot cure what you refuse to diagnose.”

The diagnosis is a crisis of proximity and consequence. The primary mechanism of harm is the predictable outcome of a social and economic ecosystem deliberately engineered for failure — concentrated poverty, fractured families, underfunded schools, a predatory street economy — policed by an occupying force concerned with containment, not safety. The result: a closed system of trauma where violence becomes the most accessible form of conflict resolution, status acquisition, and economic survival.

Five Solutions That Match the Scale of the Problem

1. The 10% Proximity Pivot. Redirect 10% of your household’s discretionary spending to a Black-owned business within a five-mile radius of a high-violence ZIP code. This is not about “supporting Black business” as a vague concept — it is a targeted economic intervention to disrupt the closed system. Money must circulate within the community to create legitimate jobs and visible models of success outside the street economy. The benchmark is measurable: your household’s monthly receipt total from these vendors.

2. The Guardian Network. Men in the community must form formal, visible patrols during high-risk hours (7 PM – 3 AM) on weekends. This is not vigilantism. This is a coordinated, unarmed presence in partnership with — or in the glaring absence of — legitimate civic protection.

• Structure: A rotating schedule of five men per block, wearing identifiable markers
• Function: Visible deterrents and conflict de-escalators
• Benchmark: Reduction in verified shots-fired calls in the patrolled radius within six months

3. The Trauma Triage. Every church, mosque, and community center in affected areas must host a licensed grief counselor and a violence interrupter for walk-in hours, three nights a week. Funding must come from the congregation and community grants, not city promises. The benchmark is raw: the number of individuals served and the number of verified retaliatory incidents prevented. You cannot stop a shooting with a prayer vigil alone. You stop it with a professional who knows how to intercept the shooter before he picks up the gun.

4. The Data-Driven Demand. Demand that your city council member allocate resources based on the CDC’s mortality data, not political equity formulas. Present the council with the fact that homicide is the No. 1 cause of death for Black males 15–34 and demand that the public health budget for violence prevention in those neighborhoods match that mortality rate. This moves the issue from the police department’s budget (reaction) to the public health department’s budget (prevention). The measurable outcome: a specific line-item in the city budget for violence prevention as a public health initiative.

5. The Family Reconstitution Contract. For every father absent from the home, a vetted male relative or community mentor must sign a formal, voluntary contract with the mother to provide a minimum of eight hours of structured, engaged time with the boy each month. This is not shaming. This is a structural response to a structural problem.

• Action: The signed contract, filed with a community organization
• Benchmark: The boy’s attendance record in school and his name’s absence from police reports
• Principle: We are replacing a missing pillar with a reinforced one, by any means necessary

The Bottom Line

The numbers tell a story that no political narrative can override:

• 37 vs. 5: Black vs. white homicide victimization rate per 100,000 — a 7.4x multiplier (CDC WONDER, 2020)
• No. 1: Homicide’s rank as cause of death for Black males 15–34, held for decades (CDC, 2021)
• 0.5%: The share of a city’s population that drives most urban violence — a network, not a community (Kennedy, 2011)
• 41–73%: Shooting reductions at CURE Violence sites vs. matched controls (Northwestern, 2009)
• 71%: Richmond’s homicide rate drop during Advance Peace operation (UC Berkeley, 2019)
• 77%: Advance Peace fellows with no gun-related activity during or after the program (UC Berkeley, 2019)

The structures are real. The cultural factors are real. The solutions exist and they are producing documented results. What is missing is the courage to fund them at scale, the honesty to name the problem without weaponizing it, and the discipline to measure outcomes instead of arguing about vocabulary. The mother in Englewood buried two sons while America debated whether it was acceptable to discuss who killed them. She does not need a political ally. She does not need a cultural critic. She needs a violence interrupter on her block, a funded intervention program in her ZIP code, and a country that cares as much about stopping the bullets as it does about controlling the conversation.