Stop using ‘black-on-black’ crime to deflect away from police brutality

“Why aren’t we talking about black on black crime?”

If you’ve expressed support for Black Lives Matter, spoken out against police brutality, or written a modest column in the past few weeks, you’ve probably been asked (or chastised) for not mentioning how many more black people kill other black people compared to the police.

There are answers to the question, “Why aren’t we talking about black on black crime?” But critics of Black Lives Matter don’t want to hear them.

If they cared, they’d be asking about crime within the African American community year-round, as many black activists and neighborhood leaders do. But as Doughboy told Tre in 1991’s “Boyz N the Hood” (and it’s still true today), “Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood.”

When an opponent of Black Lives Matters talks about “blacks killing blacks” it’s almost always to deflect attention away from police brutality. As if one issue makes the other more acceptable.

When someone commits an act of terrorism against in the United States, which rightfully leads to anger and sadness, no one asks, “Well what about how many Americans kill other Americans each year?” Because that would crazy, now wouldn’t it?

But, by all means, let’s talk about “black on black crime.” You’ve probably heard a statistic like this before – The majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. That’s true, but also misleading. The overwhelming majority of white murder victims each year are killed by white assailants. So, when’s the last time you heard the term “white on white crime?”

As shocking as it may be for some to hear, people generally commit crimes against people they know or live near. If you want to have a real discussion about crime, let’s talk about the factors that contribute to it happening in the first place.

White supremacists have attributed the fact that crime rates are higher among African Americans than whites to people of color being biologically more prone to violence. In reality, crime is directly linked more to poverty than race or any other factor.

According to the Bureau for Justice Statistics, People living in households with income below the federal poverty threshold are twice as likely to commit a violent crime than people in high-income households, regardless of race.

We live in a country where the poverty rate is more than twice as high among black Americans than white. And that has as much to do with 400 years of systematic racism than anything else.

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White supremacists will tell you slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago. So, get over it. Yet, just as that was a hard sell to African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it’s equally hard to accept 30 years after Rodney King and the L.A. Riots and weeks removed from the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

Thomas Abt, a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, writes:

“Racial disparities in crime and punishment are real, but they have been produced in large part by a sustained campaign of persecution by whites against disempowered minorities, particularly African Americans. Officially, that effort has ended; overt racial discrimination has been prohibited by law for decades. Nevertheless, the brutal legacy of that campaign — racism, segregation, concentrated poverty, and violence — remains.”

None of this necessarily means a black person being killed by another black person is more or less significant than if they were killed by a police officer. Death is death and murder is murder.

Yet, what if it were captured on video? Could a victim’s family take solace in knowing evidence exists for that person to be prosecuted? That’s usually the case. But that may not matter for George Floyd. It certainly didn’t matter in the cases of Eric Garner or Tamir Rice.

What is someone supposed to do when you can be murdered legally? When police can harass you and then choke you out because you’re selling loose cigarettes or when a cop can kneel on your neck as you cry out “I can’t breathe” while his colleagues stand by and watch.

That’s why police brutality is its own unique horror. And African Americans are two and half times more likely than whites to be killed by law enforcement.

When you step outside every day knowing you’re twice as likely to be killed by someone sworn to protect you just because of the color of your skin, you’re dealing with a different type of fear. Don’t let statistics, ignorance or flat out racism cloud that.