Two Countries

Scott Adams recently proposed looking at the US murder rate as if the US was two countries, one white and one black.  Sounds like a plan to get himself canceled.  However, I had seen a graphic on the internet - a known reliable source - that did something like that.  I found some numbers for a variety of countries on Macrotrends.net.  Here are the murder rates for 2018 per 100,000 people.

Yes, the United States looks pretty bad.  It would appear that the further south one travels in North America, the worse the murder rate.  Now, let's take a look at the FBI data for 2018 murders.

Now that we have the raw number of murders by race, let's determine the rate per 100,000 so we can plug it into the previous chart.  Working backwards, we can determine the population by this formula:

Population = Murders/(murder rate/100,000)

Macrotrends used 326,895,161 for the US population.  Let's stick with that number.  According to the Census bureau, Whites made up 73% of the population and blacks accounted for 12.7%.  What does that give us?

Clearly, we have imperfect data but it should give us some ballpark idea.  In order to determine the murder rate by race, we use the reverse of our population formula above:

Murder Rate = Murders/population*100,000

Wow, that's quite the range there.  Scott Adams makes an interesting point.  These numbers certainly demand his cancellation.  Let's plug them into the countries chart and see what we get.

Clearly, the murder rate just for white America is still more than double the rate for any of the European countries.  However, it is around half of what the comprehensive number showed.  As for black America, it is more dangerous than Mexico.  One must consider that the murder rate has spiked in the last two years and the numbers are now much worse.