John J. Donohue& Charlie Grabois
After the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk’s death last year, a video clip resurfaced in which he proclaimed that Black Americans “are poorer, more murderous, and more dangerous” today than in the Jim Crow era. The soundbite sparked outrage in liberal circles, owing to the dubious suggestion that Jim Crow had conferred some advantages on its victims, and became a flashpoint in the debate about Kirk’s legacy. Since then, Kirk’s claim has spread far and wide, with respected figures like Shelby Steele of Stanford University and the former Reagan adviser Robert Woodson peddling a similar line.
Given the claim’s growing reach and the importance of assertions about Black progress to several important policy issues, fundamental questions must be asked. Is there any empirical basis for what Kirk said? And if there is no empirical basis for the claim, how did it spread so widely in conservative circles and beyond? Ten years ago, it was heard only from fringe talk show hosts like Jesse Lee Peterson, who calls Donald Trump “The Great White Hope” and liberals “The Children of the Lie.” Now, it’s in the Wall Street Journal. First things first: The claim that Black America is poorer today than it was during Jim Crow is simply preposterous.
According to official US government statistics, almost 55% of Black Americans lived in poverty in 1959, compared to under 20% today. Moreover, researchers have determined that these official figures considerably understate the progress that has been made, because they do not fully capture various forms of government support.
A more comprehensive “full-income poverty measure” shows that Black poverty fell from 50.8% in 1963 to 2.9% in 2019, while non-Black poverty fell from 15.6% to 1.4%. The poverty gap thus shrank from 35.2 percentage points in 1963 to 1.5 percentage points in 2019. Declining poverty rates among Black Americans are not a coincidence; they are a consequence of the progress made in the postwar civil rights era. Economists have brought powerful statistical tools to bear on this history, documenting how migration to America’s northern states and civil rights reforms created more opportunities for Black Americans.
Wise policies can help to extend these gains, whereas benighted ones can impair the life prospects of Black Americans (and indeed those of all Americans). Kirk’s claim that Black Americans are more violent now than during the Jim Crow era is also incorrect. The Black homicide rate today is lower than at any time between 1950 and 1965. Apart from the 2020 2022 spike during COVID-19, this has been true for 25 years.
Homicides among Black Americans began increasing just before the end of Jim Crow but declined sharply in the 1990s as the first generation of Black Americans born after the civil rights era reached their crime-prone 20s, and as the last generation born before the civil rights era aged out of crime. Americans have extremely distorted views about crime, often believing it is skyrocketing when it is falling. Political elites know this and often manipulate the public’s ignorance to serve their own ends, which is why social media over-represents the presence of Black violent criminal suspects by 26 percentage points relative to local arrest rates.
How, then, do empirically false claims like Kirk’s reach the mainstream? Unfortunately, the phenomenon is not new. Misleading narratives about Black Americans have a long history, and they survived the Jim Crow era. Today’s misinformation about Black pover ty mirrors rhetoric about the mythical “welfare queen,” a Black woman in Chicago convicted of welfare fraud who President Ronald Reagan frequently mentioned in campaign speeches. She became representative of a supposedly large cohort of Black single mothers who chose to remain poor and have children to collect government benefits.
Similarly, misinformation about Black crime echoes the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential race between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis. The ad featured a Massachusetts Black man convicted of first-degree murder who assaulted a white couple while on a weekend prison furlough. It was designed to portray Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, as soft on crime. But the truth is that furlough programmes were standard practice at the time in nearly every state. Social media have supercharged age-old stereotypes of Black poverty and criminality. Scholars have identified an “alt-right pipeline” in which individuals are fed increasingly reactionary content online, but those ideas can travel through the same network in the opposite direction. After fringe personalities produce false claims, mid-level influencers will repeat them, and eventually they will reach the mainstream—with little trace of their origins still apparent. That is why it sometimes feels like politicians and pundits can just say whatever they want. Social media blurs the barrier between the fringe, which produces fabricated claims about the world, and the candidates and commentators who can now use such claims to support their agenda.
Black Americans are not “poorer, more murderous, and more dangerous” today than in the Jim Crow era. They are more prosperous and safer by a wide margin. The First Amendment protects free expression, but one abuses that right by advancing demonstrably false claims, especially against a group that, despite having achieved rapid and dramatic economic progress, has been systematically mistreated for more than 250 years, and has yet to experience the same prosperity enjoyed by the rest of America.
John J. Donohue is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Charlie Grabois is a predoctoral research fellow at Stanford Law School.