Bravado in the absence of order (1)

Homicide, culture, institutions and race talk.

This is the first part of a re-working on an article published in Aero Magazine in 2019. The reworking was prompted by listening to this discussion with behavioural economist Jens Ludwig, whose years of research had reached some very congruent conclusions with those in my original essay.

I have also done further reading and thinking since I wrote the essay in 2019. This now includes Jens Ludwig’s excellent book, which I highly recommend. Moreover, I relied upon a study which turned out not to replicate. Hence the reworking.

Racialised stigma—and the effects thereof—are central to understanding why rates of homicide and other violence were, and remain, so much higher among the descendants of slaves than other Americans. Yet to characterise those descendants in racial terms is to misunderstand the relevant social dynamics. Let me explain.

The problems start with the term black (or Black). The notion of a unified “black” identity in the contemporary US is nonsensical, even without considering class differences, as it amalgamates together the descendants of slaves from within the territory of the now United States, immigrants from the Caribbean plus recent African immigrants; three groups with very different characteristics and patterns of behaviour. These differences also apply elsewhere—a study of the 2011 London riot notes that members of the Caribbean community in Britain and recent African migrants had very different patterns of action and response.

African-American economist Glenn Loury’s The Anatomy of Racial Inequality—a deeply illuminating study of the dynamics of stigma—demonstrates that stereotypes can be accurate, self-reinforcing and the result of stigmatisation. The book could, however, be more aptly entitled The Anatomy of Stigmatized Inequality as the analysis applies with equal facility to, say, the Cagots of northern Spain and western France.

Distinctive histories

African slaves began arriving in British North America in the seventeenth century, which is more than enough time for the process of ethnogenesis, as that can take place across a single lifetime—in 1920 there was no such thing as a specific Palestinian people, there clearly is now.

Treating the descendants of American slaves as a specific ethnic group not only directs attention to shared historical experiences and patterns, it does not imply some deep, distinctive commonality based on simply on skin colour or race—conceived as continental origin—with Caribbean Americans or recent African migrants where little or none exists. The first group has the entire burden of the history of racial stigma in the US; the second far less; the third little or none—yet notably benefits from racially-conceived affirmative action policies aimed at remedying the same. Alas, the three very distinct groups are usually aggregated together in US statistical data.

No US Presidential candidate from either major Party has been a descendant of American slaves. It may not be entirely coincidental that a prominent philosophical critic of the notion of race, who is also cautiously skeptical of identity politics generally, is a British-born, Ghanaian-raised mixed ancestry immigrant to the US.

Jamaican-born economist Malcolm Gladwell expresses the ethnic divide between descendants of American slaves and Caribbean-Americans vividly:

I think only when you look very closely at that difference do you understand the heavy weight that particular American heritage places on African-Americans. What’s funny about West Indians is, they can always spot another West Indian. And at a certain point you wonder, “How do they always know?” It’s because after a while you get good at spotting the absence of that weight.

Or, to put it another way, cultural cues and expectations are real, and they matter—dramatically so in the Bible story of shibboleth (Judges, 12:1-6).

That descendants of American slaves are an ethnic group of primarily African—rather than European—descent, has allowed what were, in effect, ethno-cultural patterns and burdens, to be passed off as “racial”, characterising a group of people with ancestors from a different continent as a racial group, rather than people—i.e., a set of human lineages—with a specific history. That stigmas constructed in racial terms have—as is discussed in this and the following post—imposed multi-generational burdens is hardly a recommendation for continuing race talk, especially given its inherent lack of differentiation about who bears what burden of stigmatisation.

Selection pressures

There is, however, a complication here. Sub-Saharan African diasporas do have higher rates of violent crime than, for instance, East Asian diasporas.

Violent crime is overwhelmingly a “power law” phenomenon: a tiny proportion of—overwhelmingly men, particularly young men—commit the majority of violent crime. The combination of physical robustness and lower executive function (notably patience) selects for violent crime. Executive function is highly heritable. A population with a larger “tail” in its population of physically robust young men with lower executive function will have a higher rate of violent crime than a population with a smaller “tail” of such.

Sub-Saharan populations had stronger selection pressures for physical robustness than East Asian populations because Africa was where Homo sapiens evolved, so had parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores that co-evolved with humans. The more “random” selection pressures are, the more they select for physical robustness.

Human populations outside Africa are vermin (i.e., an introduced species) which—apart from arid Australia with its poisonous wildlife and challenging foraging—lowers the ecological challenges and pressures relative to the threats and opportunities coming from other humans. The more responsive selection pressures are to management with and of fellow humans, the more they select for executive function.

Sub-Saharan Africa thus selected more strongly for dealing with non-human pressures than elsewhere—with Australia as a notable exception. Sub-Saharan Africa was also the continent of slavery. The low population density—due to co-evolved parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores—meant that seizing an able-bodied human was more valuable than seizing land. This further shifted selection pressures towards physical robustness compared to executive function.

Conversely, the sequence of being Artic foragers, followed by irrigation farming in dense human populations, then (polygynous) elite selection by examination, with a non-breeding underclass, generated increased selection for higher executive function in East Asia. It is, therefore, not surprising that Sub-Saharan African diasporas have higher rates of violent crime than do East Asian diasporas.

Culture matters

Here’s the thing, however. No human is without culture. When it comes to behaviour, race is never independent of culture. Nor of the dynamics of locality. Rates of violent crime—and especially homicide—among Sub-Saharan African diasporas vary greatly across time and space, including locality. Clearly, the size of the high physical robustness/lower executive function tail is not remotely the entire story.

Every human comes with cultural patterns attached: with embedded framings/patterns of belief (schemas) and patterns of action (scripts). The Loury principle of relations (connections) before transactions applies to us all.

People spend two or more decades having their System One (fast/immediate reaction) thinking being shaped by their social milieu, while their System Two (slow/considered reaction) thinking absorbs framings from their social milieu, before they become substantial economic transactors. Consequently, people from different cultures will make different decisions in the same circumstances.

Cultures are, in effect, assemblies of life strategies. They assemble, transmit and reinforce particular framings/patterns of belief (schemas) and patterns of action (scripts). Such reinforcement comes from what registers as success in people’s social milieus, the various normative social technologies—customs, conventions, social norms—the importance and types of various social connections, and so on. For we are a highly imitative and status-conscious species as constituent elements of being a highly cooperative species.

All this tells us what evolutionary biology and anthropology also tell us: we Homo sapiens are profoundly cultural beings working off a genetic base that enables us to be such cultural beings. Everything social emerges from the biological.

But people from within the same culture can also experience very different social circumstances. Homicide rates vary hugely by locality, even within a city. A clever study found that Scots-Irish—whose ancestors came to the American colonies in the C18th—continue to have higher rates of homicide in the contemporary US: but only in the American South, in the areas where institutions—particularly enforcement of law and order—had been weaker (for reasons discussed below).

This is a clear case of same ethnicity, different outcomes, depending on local institutional capacity. As we will see, institutional coverage—what we might call experienced institutional capacity—also matters.

Deniz Demirci on Unsplash

There are two forms of aggression, which use different brain circuits. One in proactive (i.e. premeditated) aggression. We Homo sapiens tie with Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as the most proactively aggressive primates.

In the US, only about 20-25 percent of homicides can be classed as instrumental homicides—killings done for, or as a by-product of, some personal gain. These are typically “System Two” killings.

The other form of aggression is reactive aggression; aggression “in the moment”: aggression as an immediate response to what someone does. We Homo sapiens are the least reactively aggressive primates—likely because beta males got together and proactively killed off the much more reactively-aggressive alpha males. That is, our species systematically murdered its way to niceness that fostered group cooperation. Hence us being both the most gracile, and the only surviving, species of genus Homo.

In the US, about 75-80 percent of homicides are “in the moment” killings. These are “System One” (i.e. immediate response) killings. Whatever:

1. makes personal confrontations more or less likely to get physical;

2. such confrontations more or less likely to turn violent; and

3. such violence more or less likely to turn deadly,

will affect homicide rates. Such factors vary greatly by locality, by culture—people from different cultures in the same circumstances will make different decisions—by polity and over time.

If things get to stage two, having ready access to guns will raise the homicide rate: potentially a lot. If things rarely get to stage two, gun access will not matter much. Hence cultures and localities with similar levels of gun ownership/access can have wildly different homicide rates.

Moreover, executive function affects how readily we shift to System Two thinking. The stronger our executive function, the less we are likely to remain in the System One thinking within which most homicides happen. The neurological basis of executive function is still developing as late as our early 20s. Young men are more likely to act on System One thinking than are older men.

Culture is clearly also adaptive—it changes over time as what behaviours are, or are not, reinforced, changes. The Scots-Irish not having higher homicide rates outside the American South is a case of behaviour adapting to local circumstances. This is why institutional capacity—and coverage—also matters.

A complication here is that culture can influence institutional development. A recent study traces when and how the post-Civil War Confederate diaspora spread anti-black racial stigmatisation—with policies to match—across the Western United States.¹

When it comes to human behaviour—what people do—culture and locality matter way more than race. Because of the physical markers of continental origin, race is highly visible: that is very different from it being causally dominant.

How other people treat you on account of the racialisation of your identity, that can matter. That can matter a lot. But no person is “just” their race, their pattern of continental ancestry; especially not in their own behaviour.

Institutions and stigmatisation

The abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution—enforced by Northern victory in the American Civil War—did not abolish the appeal of acquiring effortless virtue from essentialising status (in this case, racialised status) nor the wish to protect political power and economic prospects via racialised social cartels. Jim Crow arose in the post-Reconstruction American South. The Jim Crow regime was:

racial segregation (e.g., of schools and public transport), Black voter disenfranchisement (e.g., literacy requirements and poll taxes), and restricted the geographic mobility of Black Americans (e.g., vagrancy laws and enticement laws).

There was also systematic under-policing of African-American communities married with extra-judicial killings (i.e. lynchings).

The apparatus of Jim Crow of a mixture of state-permitted private violence and explicit exclusions created a need to denigrate so as to justify; to engage in ontological insult to justify oppressive social injury. These were adaptations and continuations of the denigrations used to justify enslaving fellow “children of God”.

The denigration of descendants of American slaves was so intense, not despite the grandeur of American ideals, but because of said grandeur. The verbal and other degradation needed for Jim Crow had to be intense enough to cover the gap between their actual status and what being an American citizen was supposed to mean. A tension that civil rights leader Martin Luther King later brilliantly flipped back on itself, invoking both Christian and American Founding values against racial segregation and discrimination.

A “boy”, a “n*gger”, was not entitled to the dignity and freedom of a “real” citizen. The stigmatisers could, and did, use race as a cover for justifying exclusion and exploitation. As ever, those denigrated were blamed for being denigrated.

Out of this came segregation. Community enclaves can include positive aspects—a positive, and now largely lost, consequence of segregation was a lively African-American commercial life within the segregated communities.

In the American context, however, segregation implied far more than residential clustering (that often drove up rents); it was shorthand for a pervasive lack of social contact and providing far less state services for the segregated descendants-of-slaves communities, with each reinforcing the other: including (in some ways especially) police coverage. “Separate but equal” provided a judicial fig-leaf to cover the chasm between American ideals and what was done (and not done).

Evidence from a recent study tells us that the effect of slavery had been washed away by 1940, but the effect of Jim Crow lingers. Jim Crow itself was the racialisation of pre-Civil War structures of repression used against the “masterless men”—the “poor white trash”, many of whom were Scots-Irish—who were alienated from the slavery system by slavery’s stigmatisation of physical labour and driving up of the price of land. The “masterless men” whose potential alliance with the slaves the plantation elite regarded as an existential threat. Hence the Deep South seceding when the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln was elected US President on a platform that included tariffs and homesteading—political catnip to the “masterless men”.

In the Antebellum South, the “masterless men” were subject to—depending on the State—voting restrictions based on residency, property, felony conviction, and poll taxes; vagrancy laws; public whippings; under-policing of their communities; and lynchings. Their labour could be auctioned off to pay debts. Consequently:

Poor white men, especially, began to be considered “dangerous” and violent individuals who were always looking for trouble. As Edward Ayers found, affluent Southerners likely feared poor white men more than they did slaves. The note of one physician contained sentiments that seemed to “have been widely shared.” When traveling alone, the doctor admitted, “the sudden appearance of a white man generally excited some apprehension with regard to personal safety, but the sight of a black man was always cheering, and made him feel safe.” (Merritt, p.219)

Jim Crow was the racialisation—i.e. the re-targeting—of the pre-existing Southern System. It was an assemblage of its most oppressive features, with added anti-enticement laws and intensified stigmatisation, that also built on pre-existing laws against “free blacks”.

The former “white” targets of the Southern System were brought into the system by racial flattery and preferences, evangelisation of their communities and mobilisation of the Lost Cause myth. The last was despite—or perhaps because—many of the “masterless men” had either failed to support, or violently opposed, secession from the Union.

The intense racial stigmatisation was not merely to exclude African-Americans, it was also to include the “poor white trash/masterless men”. This seems to have been successful, as the study of the effects of slavery and Jim Crow finds that:

… the more oppressive a Jim Crow regime is, the more economically significant the gains by the border region’s wealthiest ten percent of white families. In sum, our results suggest that Jim Crow was an extractive institution that benefited the wealthiest white families at the cost of Black families while shielding poor white families from direct harm.

Racialisation of identity is almost invariably an elite—or, perhaps, counter-elite—strategy, as they stand to gain from divide-favour-dominate strategies. In the contemporary US, the most intense practitioners of the racialisation of identity are the elite universities. (Whether it has been under slavery, Jim Crow or Critical Social Justice, the Democratic Party has been the main political support for racialising identity—nowadays, this extends to using different language when speaking to minority audiences.)

Given its restrictions on labour mobility and choice, Jim Crow was a form of institutionalised labour bondage. As a result:

We find that the border discontinuity estimates [i.e., comparing border counties] are almost identical to differences in neighboring states’ overall long-run effects on Black economic progress … This finding suggests that the geography of Black economic progress is entirely driven by institutional factors, not by factors that vary continuously—such as economic activity, culture, agriculture, or population density.

Institutions, and their coverage, matter.

Part 2 will explore the interaction of stigmatisation, institutional coverage and homicide patterns in the US.

References

Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, ‘Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery,’ Hoover Institute Working Paper 23005, June 2023. https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/LRP WP 23005.pdf

Samuel Bazzi, Andreas Ferrara, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas P. Pearson, Patrick A. Testa, ‘The Confederate Diaspora,’ Working Paper 31331, June 2023, Revised May 2025. http://www.nber.org/papers/w31331

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Cydney H. Dupree & Susan T. Fiske, ‘Self-presentation in interracial settings: The competence downshift by White liberals,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2019) 117(3), 579–604. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60f440ee21958c59e08b1fcb/t/60f4739e1ad9bf1c32bf956e/1626633162022/Dupree-Fiske-2019.pdf

Laura E. Engelhardt, Daniel A. Briley, Frank D. Mann, K. Paige Harden Tucker-Drob, ‘Genes Unite Executive Functions in Childhood,’ Psychological Science, 2015 August, 26(8), 1151–1163. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4530525/

Jonathan St. B.T. Evans, ‘In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol.7 No.10 October 2003, 454-459. https://faculty.weber.edu/eamsel/Classes/Methods (3610)/Old Sections/Fall 2010/Fall 2010 Project/Evans (2003).pdf

O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

Pauline Grosjean, ‘A history of violence: The culture of honor and homicide in the U.S. South,’ Journal of European Economic Association, 2014, 12 (5), 1285–1316. https://www.uts.edu.au/globalassets/sites/default/files/121017.pdf

Juta Kawalerowicz, Michael Biggs, ‘Anarchy in the UK: Economic Deprivation, Social Disorganization, and Political Grievances in the London Riot of 2011,’ Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 2, December 2015, 673–698. https://www.academia.edu/7634221/Anarchy_in_the_UK_Economic_Deprivation_Social_Disorganization_and_Political_Grievances_in_the_London_Riot_of_2011

Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality: The W.E.B Du Bois Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2002.

Jens Ludwig, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Emily M. Norman, Devon L. L. Polaschek and Nicola J. Starkey, ‘Executive function in individuals who are compliant and non-compliant with the conditions of a community-based sentence,’ Psychiatry Psychology and Law, 2022 Feb 10;30(2):161-176. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10026818/

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

David Sun, ‘Arctic instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology,’ Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Online First Publication, March 3, 2025. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-88410-001.html

Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Two types of aggression in human evolution,’ PNAS, January 9, 2018, Vol.115, No.2, 245–253. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713611115

1. This has obvious implications for immigration policy. The strength of local institutions matters: the Confederate diaspora had stronger effects the more important they were in the early Euro-settlement of a locality. The Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism in the UK, by profoundly weakening democratic feedback—leading to a decline in British state capacity—has made immigration much more fraught in the UK.