There were more homicides in the U.S. in 2021 than in the previous 20 years, according to an article in The Washington Post by 2 prominent professors of criminology, Dr. Aaron Chalfin and Dr. John MacDonald.
Their article explored causes for the deadly spike in deaths. But the authors concluded those causes will “likely remain poorly understood for years to come.”
As a daughter of the South, born in the largest state in the Confederacy, I believe the Southern mindset, rooted in violence and hatred, is a major cause.
From 1910 to 1970, an unprecedented, internal migration in the U.S. spread that mindset beyond the South. According to a 2015 Cambridge University study of America’s Great Migration, by 1970, “35 percent of southern born black men and 19 percent of southern born white men (age 25 and over) were living outside the south,” creating “long lasting social ramifications.” They are apparent today.
In Charlottesville, Virginia hundreds of white supremacists “holding torches, Confederate flags and swastikas” marched in the town in 2017 chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” Three people were killed. Scores were injured.
In Indiana a 56-year-old woman on a bus repeatedly stabbed an Asian university student in the head in 2023 so there would be “one less person to blow up our country.”
The cause of the Charlottesville rally, the violent Asian stabbing and other racist incidents against Blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBTQ community was exposed almost a century ago. In 1941, a prominent Southern journalist W. J. Cash, described it in his book, “The Mind of The South,” fearing its characteristics would survive:
“Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism, and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism.”
The mindset grew out of an “apocalyptic ideology” in the 1800s when Black slaves in the South outnumbered White people, triggering White fears of slave uprisings. In 2020, the U. S. Census projected White people will be a minority in the U.S. by 2045, based on low White birth rates versus high birth rates among minorities. Today, statistics show the U.S. is diversifying even faster than predicted.
These projections confirm White Supremacists’ Great Replacement Theory – that minorities are “reverse colonizing” America. Violence the theory justifies is apparent in modern hate groups.
“All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,
In 2021, the SPLC listed 733 hate groups in the U.S. Most are in the South. But others are thriving across the country: California has 65 hate groups, Oregon has 10, Washington State has 19, Arizona has 22, Colorado has 18, South Dakota has 4, Nebraska has 9 and so does Minnesota. Maine and Massachusetts are home to several hate groups.
According to the FBI, a hate crime occurred almost every hour in 2021. The Brookings Institute called it an “epidemic.”
Hate crimes have increased 100 percent over the last 20 years, according to the Institute. In 2022, It found 62 percent of hate crimes that year were related to race and ethnicity, nearly 25 percent were related to sexual orientation and gender identity and 13 percent were related to religion.
In 2020, violent crime increased. The Brennan Center For Justice reported the murder rate in the U.S. jumped nearly 30 percent. Aggravated assaults increased 11 percent while rates of property crime and robbery declined. CNN reported that 2021 was “on pace to be the worst year for gun violence in decades.” In 2022, a Duke University crime expert concluded the U.S. was experiencing a “tsunami of lethal violence,” unlike past U.S. crime waves.
Is the Southern mindset responsible for all violent crime in the U.S.?
In 1986, a “lengthy, two-part series in The Atlantic” linked high rates of crime and poverty in Chicago to migration from the South. “Every aspect of the underclass culture in the ghettos is directly traceable to roots in the South,” Journalist Nicholas Lemann wrote at the time.
In 1996, the American Psychological Association published a University of Michigan study of Northern and Southern attitudes that cited an historic connection to the South: “Settlers of the South came primarily from herding economies on the fringes of Britain, where lawlessness, instability, political upheaval and clan rule had been present for centuries.”
In 2012, Chicago Magazine reiterated the connection between violence and the South: “One vein of history and social science suggests that its roots are in the South and the British borderland culture that it originated in.”
Today, in my opinion, violence in America can be tied in great measure to the Southern mindset’s historic approval of violence, sense of entitlement, self-absorption, America’s lax gun laws and potentially other causes. Time will tell.
Jodie Sinclair is a former TV news reporter and co-author of two nationally published books about the criminal justice system, written with her husband, a former Louisiana inmate, and the author of a recently released memoir.
from The Crime Report https://ift.tt/SOybVcU
via IFTTT