The vast majority of homicide victims are killed by people of their own race. People tend to kill who they know.
usnews.com
"You hurt people who are a lot like you. That's how it works," says David Kennedy, a professor and director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Among the roughly 6,000 cases in which the race of the victim and the offender were known, the number of blacks killed by blacks rose to 2,380 last year, an increase of about 8 percent from 2014.
However, the share of black-on-black homicides as a proportion of black people killed actually fell by just under 1 percentage point, to 89.3 percent. This undoubtedly fractional decrease – which marked the third straight year of incremental reductions – still meant that for the first time since the start of the 21st century, the percentage of black victims killed by another black person stood below 90 percent of the total of black people killed.
Often less discussed – to the consternation of experts and columnists – is the phenomenon of white-on-white homicides. The number of white people killed by other whites rose 3.5 percent to 2,574 victims in 2015.
White-on-white killings as a percentage of all homicides involving a white victim also fell, to 81.3 percent, marking the lowest share of such killings since 2001.
The margins are small, fluctuating by less than 3 percentage points in the last 15 years: Since 2001, the share of black-on-black and white-on-white homicides as a proportion of those killed of each race peaked at 91.9 and 84.2 percent, respectively.
Source: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers