Virtuous Lies and Black Despair
24th January 2024
Teenage depression and suicide rates have been rising in the US for years, but the rates among black teens are rising farther and faster than among those of other ethnicities. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2011–2021), the percentage of black teens who seriously considered suicide rose 69 percentage points from 13 percent in 2011 to a frightening 22 percent in 2021. The average increase among all ethnicities was 37.5 percentage points—just over half the rise documented in black teens.
The same trend can be seen across multiple measures of mental health. In 2021, black teens were 63 percent more likely to have made a concrete suicide plan over the course of the past year than they were in 2011 (teens in general were only 38 percent more likely to have done so) and 75 percent more likely to have attempted suicide (the average increase among all teens was 25 percent).
Complex social phenomena can rarely be attributed to a single cause. A range of factors—from increased social media use to less free play—may play a role in teen depression overall and black teen depression in particular. But there is one possible explanation for these disturbing figures that is less often talked about: the virtuous lie that we tell about the prevalence of racism in the United States.
Social evolution operates in the same fashion as physical evolution. When a culture develops a notion that puts those who believe in it at a disadvantage from the viewpoint of natural selection, the automatic processes of evolution (which work even when you don’t want them to) will tend to remove such people from the gene pool. The Abortion War is the poster child for how this process works: Women who claim the right to kill their children will eventually remove their defective genes from the gene pool.