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Notes -
When I was an undergrad, while I recognised that black Americans were disproportionately likely to commit crimes (especially murder, per the 13/52 meme), I believed that the underlying cause was socioeconomic status, and that if you looked at working-class whites you would find them committing murder at about the same rate as working-class blacks.
I haven't believed this for many years. For a long time I believed that the overrepresentation of black Americans in murder statistics was "unexplained" (while scoffing at certain woke "just-so stories" like the legacy of slavery or Jim Crow). Recently, @beej67 (who doesn't post here anymore, I don't think) persuaded me that the real underlying cause is "rate of fatherlessness", and black American men are vastly more likely to have been raised by a single mother than other ethnic groups.
I don't think "rate of fatherlessness" works as a single cause, I would think, though it's surely a contributing factor. I think there's more of a whole cultural milieu that leads to worse behavior and outcomes. African American is not merely a racial group, but also a cultural one—I believe I've read that immigrants often dislike the influence of their children's peers on their children.
Now why does that culture exist in the way it does? No idea. It's surely has many causes, many pressures that have pushed it to be that way, but I'm not knowledgeable about that.
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