Gun violence in the Black community is given a fairly robust explanation following this theory: many Black males live in a sort of compressed space of socio-economic mobility enabled by a number of pressures. But what would be more stranger to consider is that the male cultural leaders, who should be providing "distant models", do the opposite and portray themselves as "undifferentiated" from the average man on the street: everyone keeps it "hood", "stay Black", or "keeps it real", and Black men who don't replicate this lack of differentiation, like myself, are scapegoated as "white", "gay", or both (also see the response to former HW boxing champ Deontay Wilder's viral misunderstanding with podcaster Radio Raheem). You never hear of white celebrities getting shot in a beef, but you hear about his from Black males celebrity or not; mainstream rap hegemony in Black culture has been a thoroughgoing force in eradicating differentiation in being and desire, hence the disproportionately violent competition since mimetic desire lacks distance. So its a stupid double-bind: refuse distance/differentiation and be prey to mimetic violence, or accede to distance/differentiation and be prey to scape-goating. Its interesting to note that the big rising star in the Black podcast world, Kevin Samuels, whose message is that Black men and women need to reassert and respect gender differentiation as the first step in ameliorating the state of the Black community and Black women's relationship issues in particular, has also been accused of being a closet homosexual (no offense to anyone in the LBTQ+ community this is just the nature of the beast). This tension of "undifferentiation" is probably strongest in the Black community than anywhere else in America, hence why we use words like "sellout", "white", "bougie": anything different looks like class differentiation, even if that's not the point of the difference.

This is really interesting viewpoint, consider turning this into an essay or something longer form. I'm sure plenty of people would be interested.

It's uncomfortable to say because of how racist it sounds, but I've noticed the tendency you mentioned of Black culture to homogenize the way men present themselves to the world. What do you think is the real root cause of this? It has to be something extremely powerful if it affects even the cultural leaders, the producers of the values consumed by the average people. I'm sure a lot of people would just say it's a result of oppression and slavery, but to me that sounds like a just-so story.

Things got real bad within the lifetime of my mother, the recessions of the 70s and 80s were suffered most harshly in the Black community, never mind the introduction of crack cocaine, where most of our middle class was decimated by the mid 90s (the last auto factory closures in the Flint/Detroit area, Flint a majority Black factory town).

Nationwide however, both Black and non-Black American males have been negotiating a crisis of masculinity that tracks the rate of single-mother households nationwide since the end of the 50s or so IIRC, hence the prominence of Jordan Peterson and Kevin Samuels as spearheads in the counter-feminist trend of the last few years