This article offers a psychoanalytic explanation of why blacks commit a disproportionate number—half—of violent crimes in the United States. Slavery and its crippling psychological effects are discussed, as are the devastating psychological consequences of the hundred years of discrimination, segregation, and anti-black terror that followed. The conclusion reached is that black aggression was stimulated inordinately by all this, while simultaneously the black superego was decisively weakened and rendered incomplete and conflicted. These psychological difficulties have persisted and become endemic among the poor, uneducated, lower-class blacks who populate the rotting core of many American cities. Unlike their parents and grandparents, however, they no longer fear imminent bodily harm or death at the hands of violent whites and no longer turn their aggression back upon themselves and become depressed, but feel free to externalize their aggression in periodic riots and violent crime. The solutions suggested in this article include the elimination of social policies that stimulate the aggression of blacks by threatening their sense of self-worth, and the promotion of social policies that help to strengthen their superegos; e.g., minimizing the number of fatherless black households. Ways of using the criminal law to reinforce the black superego are also considered.
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