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.
