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 effect 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 the black superego was decisively weakened and rendered incomplete and conflicted. These psychological difficulties have persisted