Oddly, the City of Erie police haven’t released the name of the perpetrator of the recent mass familicide in Pennsylvania. We know that it was a 45-year-old male who was related to the victims, but that is all. The police are also withholding other crucial facts. For example, we know that one of the victims was the shooter’s daughter, Angelina Stone, who was pregnant. But we don’t know if her mother was one of the victims.
The Internet believes it knows who the perpetrator is, but I am waiting for the police to reveal his identity. X is alive, with profiles claiming the man was a white man radicalized by the Republican Party. It may be a white man, but I don’t see how Republican Party politics would radicalize a white man to kill his family. The Republican Party is pro-family.
The shooter’s daughter, Angelina, clearly has black ancestry. Julius Windham, referred to in local interviews by his middle name, Ezekiel, the father of Angelina’s nearly 2-year-old daughter, Amari’anna, who was also killed, is black. Was the shooter black? Was her mother black? Although the police have not revealed whether Angelina’s mother was killed, the Internet is reporting that she is among the victims. But no race has been identified.
I am interested in these questions because social media profiles immediately jumped to the conclusion that, since this was a mass shooting and because white men perpetrate most mass shootings, this must be a white man. Again, the shooter may very well be a white man, but the inference is based on false assumptions.
First, most mass shootings—three or more victims—occur in black-majority urban settings. It is a myth that white men are more often mass shooters compared to black men or that they are statistically overrepresented in mass shootings. Black men are dramatically overrepresented in homicide overall, perpetrating roughly half of all murders in the US. Black men are only 6 percent of the population.
Second, while it is true that white men perpetrated more familicides involving three or more victims, they are statistically less likely to perpetrate this murder type. One-third of all familicides involving three or more victims are perpetrated by black men. This means that black men are drastically overrepresented in this crime type. To be sure, most of those who perpetrate this crime type are white men, but then most men in the US are white. This is a majority-white country.
What is behind social media profiles within moments of the shooting jumping to the conclusion that this was a white man? The posts often come with the gleeful assertion that this was not a black man. They desperately want it to be a white man, not only to smear white men as dangerous (the posts often come with this assertion), but to take the focus off of the overrepresentation of black men in homicide.
When the demographics of homicide are discussed, the accusation of racism hovers above. Yet more than half of all homicide victims are black, and their killers are most often other blacks. Do the victims not matter because they are black? They seem to matter when the perpetrator is white. But white-on-black homicide is rare. Why are progressives so determined to selectively obscure the race of killers at the expense of the race of their victims? Why do they immediately presume a mass murderer is white or feel relief when he is not a black man? I didn’t make this political. I am addressing the politics of the phenomenon.
I also have a moral concern. How are we going to confront the pathologies of urban black neighborhoods if we make it a sign of racism to talk about racial demographics of serious crime? The fact that black men are overrepresented in homicide is a problem that the nation must address. We must talk about this for the victims’ sake. Their lives matter. We cannot ignore them because progressives find the facts inconvenient.
