A Peculiar Indifference The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America

Elliott Currie, Sean Patrick Hopkins

eAudio - 2020

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a devastating exploration of the racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and a blueprint for ending this fundamental social injustice About 170,000 black Americans have died in homicides just since the year 2000. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined; a young black man in the United States has a fifteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white counterpart. Even black women suffer violent death at a higher rate than white men, despite homicide's usual gender patterns. Yet while the country has been rightly outraged by the recent spate of police killings of black Americans, the shocking amount of "everyday" ...violence that plagues African American communities receives far less attention, and has nearly disappeared as a target of public policy.As acclaimed criminologist Elliott Currie makes clear, this pervasive violence is a direct result of the... more