“Black-on-Black Crime” Is a Dangerous Myth
BY JAMEELAH NASHEED - Teen Vogue
Black Lives Matter is an affirmation in a world that has made it abundantly clear that, to many, Black lives don’t matter. The movement represents a generation of Black people who are taking the metaphoric baton from ancestors who were enslaved, tortured, and killed for merely existing in the bodies in which they were born. The Mapping Police Violence project has found that Black people are currently more than three times as likely as white people to be killed by law enforcement. This enduring violence is upsetting, and in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor people got upset — on a global scale. In response to this rallying cry for respect and justice, some have tried to discredit the movement, simultaneously placing blame on Black victims with a phrase that has been used by white supremacists for years: “Black-on-Black crime.”
A report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017 found that of all the violent crimes committed between 2012 and 2015, 22.7% were committed by Black people, and 63% of those were committed against other Black people. This is in comparison to 44% of all violent crimes committed by white people, 57% of which were committed against other white people. According to this data, white people commit crimes against other white people at about the same rate that Black people do against other Black people. But despite these numbers, people aren’t discussing the “white-on-white” crime problem. When a white person commits a crime against another white person, it’s just called a crime; race isn’t a factor, and that’s intentional. Using language like “Black-on-Black crime” perpetuates the myth that intraracial violence is specific to the Black community — a myth that implies Black people are inherently more violent. This tactic has been used to justify the mistreatment of Black people since the abolishment of slavery.
"Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro" was the first nationwide compilation of racial crime data. Published in 1896, this report by Frederick Hoffman was “arguably the most influential race and crime study of the first half of the 20th century,” according to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. In the report, Hoffman wrote, “Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy.” He also presented statistics about prisoners’ races with the crimes they were convicted of, writing, “The colored male…only too often leads the life of a vagrant,” and that the Black race had a “greater tendency to crime and pauperism than the whites.” This pivotal text — which was presented as a scientific study — used the language of white supremacy and explicitly stated that violence and crime are within the nature of Black people.
That language and Hoffman’s findings did not go unchallenged. In an 1897 review of the text, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Criminal statistics raise the whole question as to how far black and white malefactors are subjected to different standards of justice.” He also wrote, “When the younger generation came on the stage with exaggerated but laudable hopes of ‘rising,’ and found that a dogged Anglo-Saxon prejudice had shut nearly every avenue of advancement in their faces, the energies of many undoubtedly found an outlet in crime.” Du Bois made two points that we’re still grappling with more than 120 years later: the different ways in which Black and white Americans are treated by our justice system, and the relationship between crime and the threat of poverty due to systemic racism.
According to a separate 2014 Justice Department report, people living in households below the federal poverty level had more than double the rate of violent victimization than people in high-income households. Additionally, poor Black people and poor white people were found to commit violent crimes at similar rates: 46.4% for white people and 43.4% for Black people. With the clear connection between poverty and crime rates — and the fact that the poverty rate for Black Americans (20.8% in 2018) is more than twice the poverty rate for white Americans (8.1%) — it’s obvious that anyone who truly cares about lowering the crime rate in the U.S. would spend their time and resources working to eradicate poverty.
Racism and poverty are inextricably linked in this country. The disproportionate rate of poverty among Black Americans has been designed by generations of racist leaders who intentionally created racist policies and institutions to stifle the growth of Black Americans. None of this is new information to Black people. We know our country’s history better than most because we haven’t been able to escape it. We also know about the violence within our communities. If people who invoke the phrase “Black-on-Black crime” in response to the BLM movement paid any attention to Black people and their communities, they’d know Black people care about that too — and talk about it, a lot.
There are countless grassroots groups, programs, rallies, marches, and even music contributions powered by Black people to address this violence. Additionally, in a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, Black people supported stricter gun laws at a higher rate than white people; and in a 2018 Pew survey, when asked if gun violence is a very big problem in the United States, 82% of Black people said yes, compared with 47% of white people. Black people are concerned about all crime, but even if we weren’t, it would still be well within our rights to be outraged that the people who are paid to protect us are killing us — and more often than not, getting away with it. Each time a police officer has taken the life of an unarmed Black person and our justice system has declared them “not guilty,” both institutions are telling the world that Black lives don’t matter. We are Americans, and we have a right to demand more from our country and government.
White supremacists will justify colonization, slavery, and the confederacy, all while saying Black people are an inherently more violent race. Think about that. Crime within Black communities is comparable to crime within white communities, but white people aren’t being killed by police at the alarming rate that Black people are. Still, people like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani felt justified in saying, after the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown, “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you [Black people] weren’t killing each other.” This type of language is an attempt to justify the killings of Brown, Taylor, Floyd, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, and the ever-growing list of Black victims of police brutality. It takes the blame from the officers involved and places it on the victims simply for being Black. We’re not asking for special treatment; we’re asking for equal treatment. To call the fallacy of Black-on-Black crime anything other than anti-Black racism is an injustice in itself.
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Originally Posted by Goofy
