The painful legacy of justified violence
At the beginning of June, Nature Human Behavior published an analysis of the impact of COVID stay-at-home orders on crime rates in 27 cities around the world.
The international team of researchers found that, “on average, the overall reduction in crime levels across all included cities was — 37%.”
The category of crime that showed the smallest decrease during lockdown was homicide, with “only” a 14% drop.
Contrast that with The Associated Press story the Journal ran on its front page on June 11: “Homicides are up in U.S.; myriad complex reasons.”
Many U.S. cities saw a doubledigit jump in 2020.
The article describes the political strategy of Republican leaders in Congress to blame this sorry example of American exceptionalism on Democratic mayors. And, indeed, big city mayors are disproportionately Democratic. The rural-urban divide is real.
But of the 10 states with the highest homicide rates in 2019, eight (Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Missouri, Alaska, Arkansas and Tennessee) are solidly red. The other two are Maryland, which currently has a Republican governor, and New Mexico, which had a Republican governor through 2018.
Violence in America isn’t caused by the party affiliations of its leaders.
A much stronger clue is provided by the uneven distribution of violence across the country.
In 2019, 10 U.S. states had homicide rates less than onefifth that of Mississippi (onefifth!). The low-homicide states are in New England, the upper Midwest and the middle of the Pacific — Hawaii has more than weather and scenery going for it. Utah and Idaho also belong to this peaceful club.
By contrast, homicidal violence is heavily concentrated in the southeast. Six of the most murderous states were members of the Confederate States of America. Two others (Missouri
and Maryland) were border states — slave states that remained within the Union.
And then there’s New Mexico, which was also a slave state, although slavery took a much different form here — and we prefer not to mention it.
Andrés Reséndez’s eye-opening book, “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America,” begins with an account of an 1850 slave auction in New Mexico Territory.
The account was written by the territory’s first Indian agent, a southerner who didn’t disapprove: “Good looking females … are valued from $50 to $150 each; males, as they may be useful, one-half less, never more.”
There are many reasons for violence, of course, including jealousy, drink and drugs. But those motivations are spread pretty evenly around the country. Something else distinguishes the highmurder states.
Racial conflict doesn’t explain it. FBI figures show that most murderers (80-90%) share their victim’s race. But history offers a compelling explanation.
Slavery is a form of social organization sustained by behavior that, in any other context, would be condemned as criminal: kidnapping, assault and battery, extortion, child abuse.
In the antebellum South, rape became a way for enslavers to increase their wealth, because the half-white children of slaves were also slaves.
Slave societies are societies governed by a moral code that justifies the use of violence to enforce hierarchy. The 13th Amendment ended chattel slavery, but it didn’t change the moral code.
The most violent places in America are places with long histories of justifying violence.
Historians sometimes describe the South as an honor culture, but I think that phrase obscures more than it illuminates because the word “honor” has so many shades of meaning, most of them positive.
What the historians are describing is a stratified culture in which accepting an insult is degrading, literally: It lowers one’s rank. Retaliation becomes necessary to reclaim one’s former position.
This dynamic drives much of the excess violence that characterizes our former slave states. As sociologist Jerel M. Ezell puts it, “Research conducted with violent offenders demonstrates an overwhelming tendency for individuals in this population to frame their violent acts as tuned responses to perceived slights.”
That’s why research consistently shows an “offender-victim overlap.” Today’s victim will be tomorrow’s perpetrator, and vice versa, because they’re competing for status within a hierarchy that recognizes only winners and losers.
There’s an obvious way to break the cycle of provocation and retaliation: law. If victimized people could rely on the legal system to punish violence, and if victims and witnesses had confidence they would be protected from retribution, things would start to change.
Two former slave states, Texas and Virginia, have in recent decades greatly reduced the level of violence within their borders. They’ve turned themselves into nearly-normal states, with homicide rates only a little above the national average. Florida and North Carolina are following in their path. New Mexico could do the same. If it wanted to.