evidence: With their endemic violence, these places are the real basis for the high "black-on-black crime" statistics that conservatives like to trot out as evidence that responsibility for the violence to which black people are subjected lies with black communities themselves. Understandably reacting against such arguments, liberals have pointed out similarities between intra-racial murder rates: 84% for whites and 93% for blacks.104 This seems a polemically effective point: shouldn’t white communities thus take more responsibility for "white-on-white crime" too? But again, something is being obscured: according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black people kill each other 8 times more often. It is not necessary to accept the rhetorical logic by which acknowledging this appears a concession to conservative moralising. Aren’t high crime rates to be expected in the most unequal society in the developed world? And isn’t it entirely predictable that violent crime should be concentrated in urban areas where forms of employment are prevalent that do not enjoy legal protections, and which therefore must often be backed up with a capacity for direct force?