Nate Silver: Being Black In The US Is About As Perilous As Living In Myanmar

Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com and best selling author of "The Signal and the Noise," gives his keynote address during the Mackinac Policy Conference at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Mich., Thursda... Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com and best selling author of "The Signal and the Noise," gives his keynote address during the Mackinac Policy Conference at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Mich., Thursday May 28, 2015. (Tanya Moutzalias/The Ann Arbor News-MLive.com Detroit via AP) LOCAL TELEVISION OUT; LOCAL INTERNET OUT MORE LESS
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Being black in America is about as perilous as living in war zones and developing countries like Rwanda and Myanmar, stats whiz and FiveThirtyEight editor Nate Silver said during the latest episode of “The Katie Halper Show” on Tuesday.

“If you’re a white person your chance of being murdered every year is 2.5 out of 10,000,” he told Halper. “If you’re a black person it’s 19.4, so almost eight times higher.”

The likelihood of being a homicide victim as a black American 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,” Silver explained.

The likelihood of being a homicide victim as a white American is similar for those living in Finland, Chile or Israel, he said.

“The experience lived by white people in the U.S. is totally different than by black people in particular,” Silver said.

Silver’s statistics came from a June report from FiveThirtyEight published in the wake of the mass shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Listen to the full episode here.

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Notable Replies

  1. And wow…did silver just say that? Sometimes numbers tell an ugly truth.

  2. Nate is using homicide statistics.

    Death by cop is not counted as a homicide.

    In other words, being a black man in America may be worse than living in a war zone.

  3. Good point. Being a black man in America may be more dangerous than being a Black Rhinoceros in South Africa.

  4. Nate has provided us with disgraceful statistics. White Americans need to stop making their experience the only valid experience. White Americans need to stop discounting what black Americans tell us–even our President has told us of his experiences of being stopped for no reason and we, white Americans, discount it. White Americans find an excuse for “death by cop” where the black American victim is not “pure” enough…yet this justifies the cop being judge, jury and, in some cases, executioner.

    It’s just really disgraceful. I have no other words. And I’m a white Southerner.

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