A Peculiar Indifference

Named a best book of 2020 by the New York Times and Kirkus Reviews “A smart, timely, deeply disturbing and essential book by a veteran scholar and leading expert on the criminal legal system. . . . This is not a Black crisis but a national emergency.” —The New York Times Book Review About 170,000 Black Americans have died in homicides just since the year 2000. Violence takes more years of life from Black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined; a young Black man in the United States has a fifteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white counterpart. Even Black women suffer violent death at a higher rate than white men, despite homicide’s usual gender patterns. Yet while the country has been rightly outraged by the recent spate of police killings of Black Americans, the shocking amount of “everyday” violence that plagues African American communities receives far less attention, and has nearly disappeared as a