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The statistics add up to a horrify- ing equation. In America today, a white female has 1 chance in 606 of becoming a murder victim. A white male has 1 chance in 186. A black female has 1 chance in 124. A black male has 1 chance in 29.
The problem is particularly acute in major cities where black gangs proliferate. In Chicago in 1983, 412 of the 729 homicides were blacks killing blacks. Between July and November last year in Detroit, more than 100 children --they cannot be called anything else, they were under 17--were shot. All but four were black. The Watts riots of 1965 caused 34 deaths. That figure is currently equaled every 38 days among blacks in Los Angeles.
"The uncomfortable fact," writes Charles Silberman, author of Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice, "is that black offenders account for a dis- proportionate number of the crimes that evoke the most fear." This fear is felt by all Americans, but the anxiety felt by blacks is more intense, more pervasive, more real, for they are the ones who suffer most from violence. The white fear of black violence, recently personified by Subway Vigilante Bernhard Goetz, does not reflect reality: only 5% of the nation's 11,300 one-on-one slayings in 1983 involved whites killed by blacks.
The issue of black-on-black violence is a disquieting and sensitive subject, one that is often left in silence by the growing number of blacks who have made it into the middle class and by traditional civil rights leaders who prefer to speak out on other issues. "Today we are faced with a new American dilemma, one that is especially difficult for black leaders and members of the black middle class," says Glenn Loury, a professor of public policy at Harvard. "The bottom stratum of the black community has compelling problems that can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society."
The violence of today seems divorced from rationale and motive. The murders are mindless, random, indiscriminate. Young black men seem to be murdering one another with a malign indifference, killing with the casual air of Bruce Lee dispatching men in a kung fu movie. For some, it seems as if murder has become a kind of noxious fashion or wanton recreation. "Members of the new generation kill, maim and injure without reason or remorse," writes Silberman.
The psychology that seems to underlie the epidemic is as numbing as the statistics. Many of these young killers display an absence of what psychiatrists call affect. They show no discernible emotional reaction to what they have done. Some seem incapable even of regarding their victims as human beings. The senseless nature of it all baffles Paul Maurice, a retired black homicide detective from New York. "It appears that they don't have any idea of the consequences of taking someone's life," he says. "When you get a guy to 'fess up as to why he did it, you get very shoddy answers: 'He took my coat.' 'He took my dollar.' 'He stepped on my girlfriend's foot.' "