NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} apparently touched a nerve when I wrote in a recent op-ed that exceptionally high homicide rates among young low-income black males in big cities can be traced to a “subculture of violence,” which I defined as “a propensity to resort to violence to resolve interpersonal conflict.” What really set off hundreds of readers was the following: “This traces back to the nineteenth century South, where whites manifested similar behavior, dubbed an ‘honor culture’ by historians. Blacks, overwhelmingly southerners in the nineteenth century, adopted the white southern subculture of violence and took it to northern cities in the Great Migration.”

Many complained that I was excusing black criminals or, worse, blaming whites (or southern whites) for their misdeeds. But a group’s culture — its shared beliefs, values, and behaviors — never excuses individual misconduct. Every offender is responsible for his own action, even if others in his group tend to behave the same way and he was under their influence. So whites aren’t to blame for black killers just because whites behaved violently generations ago and blacks adopted their ways.

For various reasons, African-American crimes of violence rose significantly in the 1880s and 90s, a time when 90 percent or more of the U.S. black population lived in the South. For most of the 20th century their violent-crime rates were high compared with whites, even young, poor whites. And they remain high today. No explanation for this has achieved consensus among scholars, and each theory has run into difficulties.

For example, some say racism is to blame. One version of the racism explanation is the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which dates back to the 1930s, when Jim Crow was commonplace in the United States. According to this theory, black violence against other African Americans is the product of frustration over the all-encompassing racism of American society, a violence that would be directed at whites were it safer to engage in such behavior. Implicit in this view is the notion that black crime has a social or political content, i.e., that it is an expression of profound discontent with the social order. This hypothesis is perfectly plausible given our history of virulent racism, but it has two shortcomings.

First, the offenders themselves do not seem to have been motivated by such considerations. They were driven, or so it appears, by interpersonal conflict and an intense concern with establishing respect, not some broader social goal.

A second problem is this: If black violence is a product of racial subordination, one would anticipate a reduction in that violence as the repression diminished. Consequently, in the early 20th century we would have expected less black violence in the North, where the caste system was less pervasive and less entrenched than below the Mason-Dixon line. This, however, has not always been the case. In 1925, for instance, rates of black victimization by homicide were higher, on average, in northern states (56.4 per 100,000, compared with 41.3 in the South).

Furthermore, after the civil-rights gains of the 1960s, when white racism, though far from being eliminated, was at its nadir to that point in American history, we would have predicted a further decline in black violent crime. But starting in the late 1960s, African-American violent-crime rates hit new peaks, most of it directed at other blacks.

The subculture-of-violence theory is a better fit than the frustration-aggression hypothesis, as it does not try to correlate black crime with the history of racism in the United States. However, the subculture theory alone is not able to explain the variability in black crime rates, which, like white rates, rise and fall as a result of other factors, such as the availability of guns or the use of drugs (e.g., crack cocaine) associated with violence.

Despite its efficacy, the subculture theory is subject to attack by the Left, which sees it as racist, not necessarily because it is based on a theory of an inherent or biological shortcoming attributed to African Americans but because it allegedly perpetuates negative stereotypes about racial minorities.

Regarding the inherent-defect claim, no serious analyst argues that blacks are innately and irremediably violent. Such a claim is easily debunked by reference to the low crime rates among middle- or upper-income African Americans or among blacks from different cultures, such as certain African or Afro-Caribbean groups. I have documented how, despite their skin color, history of brutal slavery, and unfamiliarity with English, impoverished Haitian “boat people” in 1980s Miami had relatively low crime rates.

As for the argument that the subculture theory encourages racist stereotypes, Peter Bornschein in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Philosophical Research points out that a refusal to examine the validity of a theory of crime has the potential to be just as harmful to the victims as is racial stereotyping. By treating cultural theories as taboo, Bornschein points out,

we risk not correctly identifying the cause of the relatively high rate of violent criminal offense among African Americans, the burden of which is mostly borne by African Americans themselves. No doubt, black people have an interest in not being unfairly stereotyped. But they also have an interest in not being murdered, robbed, assaulted, etc. Surely this supports considering all causal hypotheses relevant to this phenomenon and judging them on the evidence.

Examining all credible theories of crime helps us identify the true cause of the problem, which, in Bornschein’s words, “should be welcomed by anyone who cares about truth and social justice.”