With constant fear of police brutality and trending controversies these days, the value of life for black and white Americans is inequitable. Nate Silver, the founder and editor of FiveThirtyEight, has statistics to back this with sickening realities.
On the latest episode of The Katie Halper Show, the statistician explains that “if you’re a white person your chance of being murdered every year is 2.5 out of 10,000… If you’re a black person it’s 19.4, so almost eight times higher.” Silver also goes into explaining that the murder rate for white Americans is similar to the murder rate for people living in Finland, Chile or Israel whereas the murder rate for black Americans, is similar to the rate found “in developing countries that are war zones even, like Myanmar, or Rwanda, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, places that have vast disorder."
He discusses police brutality as well:
So I’m an editor now as well as a writer so we think when a story occurs is this a quote unquote “random act of violence” or is this representative of some broader trend and I think these stories about police brutality, it’s uncovering things that have been going on for a long time and that are very common experiences…Now that we do have video cameras everywhere it’s not a coincidence that all of a sudden now that we have means to record these things all of a sudden these things crop up all the time.
You can listen to the entire discussion, here.
