Back in 2019, I reviewed Wilfred Reilly’s book Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War. Reilly is a part-black redneck college professor who teaches at Kentucky State in Frankfort.
Good question: According to the CDC WONDER database of causes of death, the per capita ratio of black deaths to white deaths by homicide in Kentucky for 1999-2020 ranged from 7.1x in urban Large Central Metros to 1.6x in rural NonCore (Nonmetro):https://t.co/vGVmEr4TOw pic.twitter.com/njasMlyDHY
— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) August 12, 2022
These are homicide victims, not homicide perpetrators, but the correlation is usually pretty high between the two.
Kentucky’s Large Central Metro is Louisville, which is a pretty shooty town. Kentucky blacks settle down pretty quickly as they get less urban and by the rural NonCore (Nonmetro) category, their homicide death rate is only 1.6 times as bad as Kentucky whites.
Reilly offers an interesting perspective:
Have you spent a lot of time in KY?
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) August 12, 2022
"Illegal" is an interesting modifier here, but probably 25%+ of all white and Black males just carry guns in every environment I venture into. I often have my pistol holstered. Guns are, if anything, rarer in metro Louisville.
So, what is it nationally?
So, the black to white homicide death ratio falls with each less dense type of place, from 9.2x in Large Central Metros to 4.3x in NonCore (Nonmetros). The black Crude Rate of homicide deaths is only half as bad in rural areas (14.3 per 100,000) as in big cities (28.5).
In contrast, whites are least likely to die by homicide in big city suburbs (Large Fringe Metro), but otherwise their homicide Crude Rates are pretty similar (e.g., 3.1 in Large Central Metro and 3.3 in NonCore (Nonmetro)).
But the homicide rates nationally don’t get as similar as they do in Kentucky.
(I’m using non-Hispanics for the national numbers although to save time I didn’t specify non-Hispanic for the Kentucky numbers, figuring it would make much difference in Kentucky.)
Nationally, if I’m doing my arithmetic right, this would suggest that if blacks were distributed in the same proportions of urbanization as whites, that the black to white homicide ratio would fall by 10% from 8.0 to 7.2, which isn’t trivial but not huge either.
