Elon Musk has an idiosyncratic way of engaging with X, the once-known-as-Twitter social media platform that he now owns. He does his share of corporate posting, offering up videos of Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets. But he also spends a lot of time amplifying right-wing propaganda, both directly in his feed and by replying to posts made by other people.
When you or I reply to a post on X, a few people might see it. When the owner of the site — a guy with more than 187 million followers — does it, it vastly boosts the visibility of that post. That holds true even when the poster is offering misinformation about crime and race in the United States.
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On Monday evening, Musk offered a characteristically terse reply to one such post: “!”
The claim that prompted that expression of amazement? That there had been a marked increase in the number of White Americans killed by Black Americans over time.
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“It’s true that things have changed since the 1950s,” user eyeslasho wrote. “1950s: Blacks killed about 600 more whites each year than whites killed blacks. Now: Blacks kill nearly 1,500 more whites each year than whites kill blacks.”
This isn’t true, which we’ll get to in a second.
This line of argument is not a novel one. For some time, racists have pointed to disparities in homicide rates as a way of suggesting that Black Americans are inherently dangerous or threatening to public safety. These assertions are often flatly wrong and almost always ignore extenuating factors, like poverty.
In 2015, Donald Trump shared an image suggesting that 4 in 5 White murder victims were killed by Black offenders, which is also false. At the time, the most recent available data showed that the vast majority of White murder victims were killed by White people, just as most Black murder victims are killed by Black people. Victims tend to be killed by people they know, and most people know mostly people who share their racial identity.
Setting aside the specific numbers offered by eyeslasho for a moment, there’s a very good reason the number of people killed might have more than doubled since 1950 — the U.S. population also more than doubled over that period.
The assertion being made isn’t about rates of homicide, it’s about raw totals. So the number of people in the country matters. If you go from 1,000 murders in a population of 100 million to 1,800 murders in a population of 200 million (for example), there’s a raw increase of 800 murders — but a lower murder rate.
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We should note that the rates of increase in the size of the White and other populations since 1950 have not been the same. The size of the White population increased by 50 percent between 1950 and 2020 while the size of the Black population increased by 170 percent. But, again, the baseline matters: The country added 70 million White people and only 26 million Black people.
In a later post, eyeslasho presented a chart that purported to be the source of their claim. It attributed the estimates of the number of homicide victims to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database. That tool uses data from the National Vital Statistics System, which doesn’t include information about the race of the perpetrator of a homicide, only of the victim.
The FBI, though, does collect both pieces of information. An analysis of homicide trends from 1976 to 2005 posted at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) website doesn’t tell us what the numbers looked like in the 1950s, but it does show that over time most homicides have been committed by offenders of the same racial group as victims.
In the late 1970s, the difference in the number of White homicide victims killed by Black offenders and the number of Black victims killed by White offenders averaged about 580. The peak came during the crime wave in the early 1990s, when the gap was about 960.
By 2019, the last year before crime surged during the coronavirus pandemic, the gap was 320 — lower than at any point between 1976 and 2005. Washington Post analysis of raw data for 2022, obtained through the FBI’s Data Discovery Tool, shows a gap of 444 killings. That is also lower than any point during the three decades in the BJS data.
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Again, these are raw numbers, not ones adjusted for population. So even with the increase in population from 1976 to 2022, the number of homicides is lower, including across racial lines. Again, too, the homicides for which we have 2022 data show that 87 percent of White or Black homicide victims who were killed by a White or Black offender were killed by an offender of their own race.
One question that emerges here is how Musk saw this post in the first place. He largely follows right-wing users, so it’s possible that one of them retweeted it and brought it to Musk’s attention. Another question that emerges is why he felt that this claim — suspect just from the standpoint of population increases — deserved that exclamation point of amazement. What was it about a false claim that Black killings of White people had increased relative to White killings of Blacks that piqued his interest?
In May 2023, eyeslasho had another post on X that bears mentioning here. In it, he asserted that Musk’s “acknowledging data on race and crime has done more to raise awareness of the disproportionalities observed in these data than anything I can remember.”
“Observed” is doing all of the work in that sentence.
