The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

  Rioting of all kinds began to decrease in Europe in the mid-19th century. In the United States deadly rioting began to diminish at the century’s end, and by the 1920s it had entered a terminal decline.9 Using figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, James Payne tabulated the number of lynchings beginning in 1882 and found that they fell precipitously from 1890 to the 1940s (figure 7–2). During these decades, horrific lynchings continued to make the news, and shocking photographs of hanged and burned corpses were published in newspapers and circulated among activists, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A 1930 photograph of a pair of men hanged in Indiana inspired a schoolteacher named Abel Meeropol to write a poem in protest:Southern trees bear strange fruit,

  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

  Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  FIGURE 7–2. Lynchings in the United States, 1882–1969

  Source: Graph from Payne, 2004, p. 182.

  (Meeropol and his wife, Anne, would later adopt the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after the couple had been executed for Julius’s passing of nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.) When Meeropol put the poem to music, it became the signature tune of Billie Holiday, and in 1999 Time magazine called it the song of the century.10 Yet in one of those paradoxes of timing that we have often stumbled upon, the conspicuous protest emerged at a time when the crime had already long been in decline. The last famous lynching case came to light in 1955, when fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated, and killed in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman. His murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury in a perfunctory trial.

  Fears of a renewal of lynching were raised in the late 1990s, when a vicious murder stunned the nation. In 1998 three racists in Texas abducted an African American man, James Byrd, Jr., beat him senseless, chained him by the ankles to their pickup truck, and dragged him along the pavement for three miles until his body hit a culvert and was torn to pieces. Though the clandestine murder was very different from the lynchings of a century before, in which an entire community would execute a black person in a carnival atmosphere, the word lynching was widely applied to the crime. The murder took place a few years after the FBI had begun to gather statistics on so-called hate crimes, namely acts of violence that target a person because of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Since 1996 the FBI has published these statistics in annual reports, allowing us to see whether the Byrd murder was part of a disturbing new trend.11 Figure 7–3 shows the number of African Americans who were murdered because of their race during the past dozen years. The numbers on the vertical axis do not represent homicides per 100,000 people; they represent the absolute number of homicides. Five African Americans were murdered because of their race in 1996, the first year in which records were published, and the number has since gone down to one per year. In a country with 17,000 murders a year, hate-crime murders have fallen into the statistical noise.

  Far more common, of course, are the less serious forms of violence, such as aggravated assault (in which the assailant uses a weapon or causes an injury), simple assault, and intimidation (in which the victim is made to feel in danger for his or her personal safety). Though the absolute numbers of racially motivated incidents are alarming—several hundred assaults, several hundred aggravated assaults, and a thousand acts of intimidation a year—they have to be put in the context of American crime numbers during much of that period, which included a million aggravated assaults per year. The rate of racially motivated aggravated assaults was about one-half of 1 percent of the rate of all aggravated assaults (322 per 100,000 people per year), and less than the rate that a person of any race would be murdered for any reason. And as figure 7–4 shows, since 1996 all three kinds of hate crime have been in decline.

  FIGURE 7–3. Hate-crime murders of African Americans, 1996–2008

  Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics (http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.ht); see U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010a.

  As lynching died out, so did antiblack pogroms. Horowitz discovered that in the second half of the 20th century in the West, his subject matter, the deadly ethnic riot, ceased to exist.12 The so-called race riots of the mid-1960s in Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit, and other American cities represented a different phenomenon altogether: African Americans were the rioters rather than the targets, death tolls were low (mostly rioters themselves killed by the police), and virtually all the targets were property rather than people.13 After 1950 the United States had no riots that singled out a race or ethnic group; nor did other zones of ethnic friction in the West such as Canada, Belgium, Corsica, Catalonia, or the Basque Country.14

  Some antiblack violence did erupt in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it took a different form. The attacks are seldom called “terrorism,” but that’s exactly what they were: they were directed at civilians, low in casualties, high in publicity, intended to intimidate, and directed toward a political goal, namely preventing racial desegregation in the South. And like other terrorist campaigns, segregationist terrorism sealed its doom when it crossed the line into depravity and turned all public sympathy to its victims. In highly publicized incidents, ugly mobs hurled obscenities and death threats at black children for trying to enroll in all-white schools. One event that left a strong impression in cultural memory was the day six-year-old Ruby Nell Bridges had to be escorted by federal marshals to her first day of school in New Orleans. John Steinbeck, while driving through America to write his memoir Travels with Charley, found himself in the Big Easy at the time:Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.

  The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd, but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first step, the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards.15

  FIGURE 7–4. Nonlethal hate crimes against African Americans, 1996–2008

  Source: Data from the annual FBI reports of Hate Crime Statistics (http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.htm); see U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010a. The number of incidents is divided by the population covered by the agencies reporting the statistics multiplied by 0.129, the proportion of African Americans in the population according to the 2000 census.

  The incident was also immortalized in a painting published in 1964 in Look magazine titled The Problem We All Live With. It was painted by Norman Rockwell, the artist whose name is synonymous with sentimental images of an idealized America. In another conscience-jarring incident, four black girls attending Sunday school were killed in 1963 when a bomb exploded at a Birmingham church that had recently been used for civil rights meetings. That same year the civil rights worker Medgar Evers was murdered by Klansmen, as were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner the following year. Joining the violence by mobs and terrorists was violence by the government. The noble Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were thrown into jail, and peaceful marchers were assaulted with fire hoses, dogs, whips, and clubs, all shown on national television.

  After 1965, opposition to civil rights was moribund, antiblack riots were a distant memory, and terrorism against blacks no longer received support from any significant community. In the 1990s there was a widely publicize
d report of a string of arson attacks on black churches in the South, but it turned out to be apocryphal.16 So for all the publicity that hate crimes have received, they have become a blessedly rare phenomenon in modern America.

  Lynchings and race riots have declined for other ethnic groups and in other countries as well. The 9/11 attacks and the London and Madrid bombings were just the kind of symbolic provocation that in earlier decades could have led to anti-Muslim riots across the Western world. Yet no riots occurred, and a 2008 review of violence against Muslims by a human rights organization could not turn up a single clear case of a fatality in the West motivated by anti-Muslim hatred.17

  Horowitz identifies several reasons for the disappearance of deadly ethnic riots in the West. One is governance. For all their abandon in assaulting their victims, rioters are sensitive to their own safety, and know when the police will turn a blind eye. Prompt law enforcement can quell riots and nip cycles of group-against-group revenge in the bud, but the procedures have to be thought out in advance. Since the local police often come from the same ethnic group as the perpetrators and may sympathize with their hatreds, a professionalized national militia is more effective than the neighborhood cops. And since riot police can cause more deaths than they prevent, they must be trained to apply the minimal force needed to disperse a mob.18

  The other cause of the disappearance of deadly ethnic riots is more nebulous: a rising abhorrence of violence, and of even the slightest trace of a mindset that might lead to it. Recall that the main risk factor of genocides and deadly ethnic riots is an essentialist psychology that categorizes the members of a group as insensate obstacles, as disgusting vermin, or as avaricious, malignant, or heretical villains. These attitudes can be formalized into government policies of the kind that Daniel Goldhagen calls eliminationist and Barbara Harff calls exclusionary. The policies may be implemented as apartheid, forced assimilation, and in extreme cases, deportation or genocide. Ted Robert Gurr has shown that even discriminatory policies that fall short of the extremes are a risk factor for violent ethnic conflicts such as civil wars and deadly riots.19

  Now imagine policies that are designed to be the diametric opposite of the exclusionary ones. They would not only erase any law in the books that singled out an ethnic minority for unfavorable treatment, but would swing to the opposite pole and mandate anti-exclusionary, un-eliminationist policies, such as the integration of schools, educational head starts, and racial or ethnic quotas and preferences in government, business, and education. These policies are generally called remedial discrimination, though in the United States they go by the name affirmative action. Whether or not the policies deserve credit for preventing a backsliding of developed countries into genocide and pogroms, they obviously are designed as the photographic negative of the exclusionary policies that caused or tolerated such violence in the past. And they have been riding a wave of popularity throughout the world.

  In a report called “The Decline of Ethnic Political Discrimination 1950–2003,” the political scientists Victor Asal and Amy Pate examined a dataset that records the status of 337 ethnic minorities in 124 countries since 1950.20 (It overlaps with Harff’s dataset on genocide, which we examined in chapter 6.) Asal and Pate plotted the percentage of countries with policies that discriminate against an ethnic minority, together with those that discriminate in favor of them. In 1950, as figure 7–5 shows, 44 percent of governments had invidious discriminatory policies; by 2003 only 19 percent did, and they were outnumbered by the governments that had remedial policies.

  When Asal and Pate broke down the figures by region, they found that minority groups are doing particularly well in the Americas and Europe, where little official discrimination remains. Minority groups still experience legal discrimination in Asia, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and especially the Middle East, though in each case there have been improvements since the end of the Cold War.21 The authors conclude, “Everywhere the weight of official discrimination has lifted. While this trend began in Western democracies in the late 1960s, by the 1990s it had reached all parts of the world.”22

  Not only has official discrimination by governments been in decline, but so has the dehumanizing and demonizing mindset in individual people. This claim may seem incredible to the many intellectuals who insist that the United States is racist to the bone. But as we have seen throughout this book, for every moral advance in human history there have been social commentators who insist that we’ve never had it so bad. In 1968 the political scientist Andrew Hacker predicted that African Americans would soon rise up and engage in “dynamiting of bridges and water mains, firing of buildings, assassination of public officials and private luminaries. And of course there will be occasional rampages.”23 Undeterred by the dearth of dynamitings and the rarity of rampages, he followed up in 1992 with Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, whose message was “A huge racial chasm remains, and there are few signs that the coming century will see it closed.”24 Though the 1990s were a decade in which Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Colin Powell were repeatedly named in polls as among the most admired Americans, gloomy assessments on race relations dominated literary life. The legal scholar Derrick Bell, for example, wrote in a 1992 book subtitled The Permanence of Racism that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.”25

  FIGURE 7–5. Discriminatory and affirmative action policies, 1950–2003

  Source: Graph from Asal & Pate, 2005.

  The sociologist Lawrence Bobo and his colleagues decided to see for themselves by examining the history of white Americans’ attitudes toward African Americans.26 They found that far from being indestructible, overt racism has been steadily disintegrating. Figure 7–6 shows that in the 1940s and early 1950s a majority of Americans said they were opposed to black children attending white schools, and as late as the early 1960s almost half said they would move away if a black family moved in next door. By the 1980s the percentages with these attitudes were in the single digits.

  Figure 7–7 tells us that in the late 1950s only 5 percent of white Americans approved of interracial marriage. By the late 1990s two-thirds approved of it, and in 2008 almost 80 percent did. With some questions, like “Should blacks have access to any job?” the percentage of racist responses had dropped so low by the early 1970s that pollsters dropped them from their questionnaires.27

  FIGURE 7–6. Segregationist attitudes in the United States, 1942–1997

  Sources: “Separate schools”: Data from Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1997, originally gathered by the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. “Would move”: Data from Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1997, originally gathered by the Gallup Organization.

  FIGURE 7–7. White attitudes to interracial marriage in the United States, 1958–2008

  Sources: “Disapprove”: Data from Schuman, Steeh, & Bobo, 1997, originally gathered by the Gallup Organization. “Oppose”: Data from the General Social Survey (http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website).

  Also in decline are dehumanizing and demonizing beliefs. Among white Americans, these beliefs historically took the form of the prejudice that African Americans were lazier and less intelligent than whites. But over the past two decades, the proportion of Americans professing these beliefs has been falling, and today the proportion who profess that inequality is a product of low ability is negligible (figure 7–8).

  Religious intolerance has been in steady decline as well. In 1924, 91 percent of the students in a middle-American high school agreed with the statement “Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it.” By 1980, only 38 percent agreed. In 1996, 62 percent of Protestants and 74 percent of Catholics agreed with the statement “All religions are equally good”—an opinion that would have baffled their ancestors a generation before, to say nothing of those in the 16th century.28

  The stigmatizing of any attitude that smacks of the dehumanization or demonization of minority groups exte
nds well beyond the polling numbers. It has transformed Western culture, government, sports, and everyday life. For more than fifty years America has been cleansing itself of racist imagery that had accumulated in its popular culture. First to go were demeaning portrayals of African Americans such as blackface musical performances, shows like Amos ’n’ Andy and Little Rascals, films such as Walt Disney’s Song of the South, and many Bugs Bunny cartoons.29 Caricatures in logos, advertisements, and lawn ornaments have disappeared as well. The peak of the civil rights movement was a turning point, and the taboo was quickly extended to other ethnic groups. I remember as a child the 1964 rollout of a line of powdered drink mixes called Funny Face that came in flavors called Goofy Grape, Loud Mouth Lime, Chinese Cherry, and Injun’ Orange, each illustrated with a grotesque caricature. Bad timing. Within two years the latter two were made over into a raceless Choo Choo Cherry and Jolly Olly Orange.30 We are still living through the rebranding of venerable sports teams that were based on Native American stereotypes, most recently the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux. Derogatory racial and ethnic jokes, offensive terms for minority groups, and naïve musings about innate racial differences have become taboo in mainstream forums and have ended the careers of several politicians and media figures. Of course, plenty of vicious racism can still be found in the cesspools of the Internet and at the fringes of the political right, but a sharp line divides it from mainstream culture and politics. For instance, in 2002 the Senate Republican minority leader Trent Lott praised the 1948 presidential bid of Strom Thurmond, who at the time was an avowed segregationist. After a firestorm from within his own party, Lott was forced to resign his post.