The once venerable Lancet medical journal has denounced “racial inequities” underlying the disproportionate yearly number of murders of black women in the United States.
In the U.S., “Black women aged 25-44 years are disproportionately murdered compared with their White counterparts,” the Lancet laments in its latest issue while calling for “reducing gun access” and “increasing green spaces in communities where Black women largely reside.”
Despite ongoing efforts to reduce racial and structural inequities, the result of these efforts “remains unclear” when it comes to lowering the proportion of murders of black women in America, the journal declares.
In 2020, for instance, the homicide rate among black women was 11.6 per 100,000, the Lancet found, compared to three per 100,000 among white women.
“This inequity has persisted over time and is virtually unchanged since 1999,” it states.
“The racial inequity was greatest in Wisconsin, where in 2019-20, Black women aged 25-44 years were 20 times more likely to die by homicide than White women,” it adds.
While proclaiming “an urgent need to address homicide inequities among Black and White women in the USA,” the Lancet proposes “enacting federal legislation that reduces gun access.”
It also suggests that policymakers must address “long-standing structural factors that underpin elevated gun violence.” They can do this by “implementing sustainable wealth-building opportunities; developing desegregated, mixed income and affordable housing; and increasing green spaces in communities where Black women largely reside.”
Unfortunately, by only comparing the homicide rate of black and white women in a certain age range, the article misses vital background data.
According to the FBI, for the latest year that reliable statistics are available (2019), more than half (54.7 percent) of the murder victims were black despite the fact that black Americans make up only 12.6 percent of the U.S. population.
More than three-quarters (78.3 percent) of the 13,927 murder victims in the United States were male, not female, which could suggest further inequity.
Perhaps more telling still, when the race of the offender was known, 55.9 percent of homicides were committed by black Americans. Of the 16,245 murders committed in the U.S. that year, black Americans committed 6,425 and white Americans committed 4,728. Black Americans are therefore 8.88 times more likely to commit murder than non-black Americans, statistically.
The FBI also found that most white Americans are murdered by white Americans and most black Americans are murdered by black Americans. In the case of the homicide of black victims, the murderer is over ten times more likely to also be black.
Black women (and black men) are overwhelmingly more likely to die at the hands of a black man than at the hands of another woman or a white man, a persistent problem that will require a little more than “increasing green spaces” to overcome.