Police Violence is 9x More Gendered than Racialized
Why is it taboo to say that half the victims of police violence come from one minority...white men?
I heard an allegory about why some activists found “All Lives Matter” to be hate speech. It went something like this: Imagine that you’re at a family dinner and your father starts piling up food on his plate. He passes the food around the table. Everyone takes a full plate. You’re last. When the plate gets to you, it’s empty. You say, “I deserve to eat.” Your father smugly says, “Don’t be selfish, we all deserve to eat.”
#SayHerName
In 2014, the African American Policy Forum founded the #SayHerName campaign to highlight police violence against Black women. They wrote, “Knowing their names is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for lifting up their stories which in turn provides a much clearer view of the wide-ranging circumstances that make Black women’s bodies disproportionately subject to police violence.”
But Black women’s bodies are not disproportionately subject to police violence. Men make up 96% of all victims. Roughly half are white men. A quarter are Black men. A fifth are Hispanic men. Black women make up 7% of America, but only 1% of the victims.
White men make up 29% of America, but according to the Washington Post Police Shootings Database, half the victims. I specifically used the 2015 year, since their UI makes it easy for anyone to verify this.
Highlighting the vast disparity between white male victims and Black female victims shouldn’t minimize the tragedy of the deaths of Black women. It should not pit the two groups against each other in a battle of victimhood. But if you want to decrease deaths from police violence then you can’t do that if you ignore half the deaths.
Imagine for a moment that you hold two ideas in your head:
A) You believe that white men hold privilege and power, and that the needs of white men are going to be prioritized above the needs of other groups.
B) You believe that a successful strategy to reform policing is to manipulate the statistics so that most white men are unaware that white men are disproportionately victimized.
There is clearly a contradiction here.
If you want police reform, believe that white men’s needs are prioritized, and know that white men are disproportionately victimized by police violence, then obviously you should emphasize that as loudly as possible. You would want to show that chart above to every white man you know.
FiveThirtyEight studied how much media coverage Black women killed by the police receieve and found that half got “national media attention in the 60 days surrounding their death, according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of media reports, but in most cases, the coverage is limited — five stories or fewer.” They describe at length how Black women receive comparably little coverage compared with Black men. But interestingly, FiveThirtyEight did not compare Black female coverage with how much coverage white male victims receive. The authors argue that it is discrimination that leads to the comparably little coverage that Black women receive. But how many of the approximately 500 white male victims each year received national coverage? Apparently, the authors felt those victims didn’t matter enough to even investigate.
The authors interviewed Danielle Kilgo for an explanation for the gap between coverage of Black male victims versus Black female victims, and she said, “One of the biggest explanations for this is that we don’t just live in a racist society, we also live in a sexist and patriarchal one.” What Kilgo is saying is that America is racist and sexist, and some groups have more power, more privilege, and that privilege will be reflected in how much we talk about the victims. So let’s take that idea very seriously. And actually quantify it.
Using #SayHerName to Quantify the Value of a Life
In February of 2020 a helicopter crashed in southern California with a superstar NBA player onboard. He’d retired and was flying with his daughter and seven other people to his daughter’s basketball game. Imagine if you went down the street and asked a hundred random Americans if they could say the name of the player. How many do you think could do it? I’d bet at least half could remember Kobe Bryant’s name.
Now how many could say the names of the other eight people onboard? Probably not too many. As a thought experiment, what if you took those answers and put them together. Let’s assume that 50/100 could say Kobe Bryant. Then maybe a handful happened to know someone onboard. Say three could say a single name of one of the others.
How much is each life worth to American culture? You asked 100 people about seven names, so 3/700 for the other passengers. And the NBA superstar is 50/100. In this thought experiment, Kobe Bryant’s life is worth (50/100) / (3/700) or ~117 times the other people on the flight. If anything, this is probably an underestimate.
Imagine that I gave you a paper with 10 empty rows for Black women and a second paper with 471 rows for white men. How many of the 10 Black women could you name? And how many white men? At 25 lines per page that list of white male names would be 19 pages long. If you stapled them together it’d hang from your ceiling to the floor. Most people could at least name Breonna Taylor. How many white male names can your remember? Let’s say that it’s one. That’s 1/10 versus 1/471. If we proceed with the axiom that being able to say the names of victims is a measure of how much our society values their life and humanity then that means that we value the life of a black woman 47.1 times more than a white man.
But, you might say, these aren’t normalized values. There are 3.7 times as many white men as Black women in America. Here’s how that same chart would look if there were 3.7 times fewer white men, so 127 deaths instead of 471.
Even when you normalize by population, there are still 12.8 times as many white male victims as black female. Why is it evidence of systemic discrimination that Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than white Americans, but not systemic discrimination that white men are 12.8 times as likely to be killed as Black women?
You might say that it’s different, that the deaths of Black men and women at the hands of the police are a tragic reminder of racism in America. Which is another way of saying that the deaths of the other victims weren’t as tragic. But if your argument devolves to saying that the deaths of white men weren’t tragic, or as tragic, then what does that say about how much their lives mattered?
The main left/right narratives about police violence breakdown when you compare white men and Black women. The left says that disproportionate outcomes in police violence are evidence of racial and systemic discrimination. Yet, when white men are disproportionately killed, the left is silent.
But the right-wing narrative breaks down as well. The right says that disproportionate outcomes are the result of behaviors by the victims of the police shootings. That Black Americans on average commit more crime than white Americans and this puts them at risk of lethal interactions with the police. So you might abstract this argument to any two populations and argue that this is the cause for any disparities between them. And men do commit more crime than women. So that might sound reasonable on the surface. But men don’t commit 12.8 times more crime than women. Only 6.8 times as many homicides. Instead of normalizing by population, if you normalize by criminality (let’s say number of homicides perpetrated) then white men are still killed at roughly double the rate as black women.
To phrase it statistically, the left argues that the number of police shootings should be equal when you normalize by the population count. The right argues that outcomes should be equal when you normalize by crimes committed by the population. But neither of these arguments explains the gap in police violence between white men and Black women. If police violence is a function of anti-Black racism, then why is a population with light skin being killed an order of magnitude more often than a population with dark skin? If police violence is a function of criminality, then why are white men killed at double the rate of their criminality compared with Black women?
Overall, when you compare all races, men make up 96 - 97% of the victims, making them 23.8 times more likely to be killed by the police than women. If a 2.5x racial gap is a tragedy of social justice, then a 23.8x gender gap must be catastrophic. Somehow we had a national discussion on police violence and ignored the fact that the gender gap is 9 times larger than the racial gap. For young men in their twenties, this is the sixth leading cause of death for men of all races.
A Statistically Accurate Allegory
Someone passes a plate of food around a large table with dozens of people at it. At the end of the table are two poor white men, a Hispanic man, and a Black man. When the plate gets to the poor white men it’s nearly empty. The rich white people say, “You need to take less so that black man can eat.”
So the poor white man only takes a spoonful and gives the plate to the other three men.
The black man looks at his plate and then looks around the table at all the people with full plates and says, “I deserve to eat.”
The people with full plates all nod. “Yes, he does,” they say. They bang their fists against the table and yell, “Black Lives Matter!”
One of the hungry white men says, “We all deserve to eat.”
The table gasps.
Everyone turns to the poor white man and says, “You’re only saying that because you’re a racist bigot.”
A white woman says, “I know that I only have a full plate because of my white privilege.”
The other people with food nod vigorously. “Look how aware she is of her white privilege. She’s so virtuous.”
The white woman smiles smugly. “What’s important is that we teach him about his white privilege. Then maybe that black man wouldn’t be hungry.”
The four hungry men look down at their empty plates.
The white woman belches.
This article should be required reading in every college and university. But somehow the virtue-signaling faculty (disproportionally white women) would try to bury it.
Really good. I'll be citing this piece in an article soon.