Myth of Black-on-Black Crime

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Every. Single. Time.

''It's as though there is something defective about black culture and moderate income, and low-income, working-class kids and families live in different worlds,'' said the University of Illinois geographer David Wilson, who traced the origins of the term in the early 1980s in his brilliant book, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence (Syracuse University Press).

The term came into vogue as cities were undergoing a radical economic transformation; manufacturing jobs, once the staple of the black working class, were being replaced by unemployment and illicit industries such as the volatile crack trade. Instead of attributing the spike in violence to middle-class flight, poverty, hopelessness, or the larger social and economic shifts cities were grappling with, the media's ''emphasis became looking at a supposedly defective, aberrant black culture,'' Wilson said.

''Supposedly we saw youth that were going astray and that was the problem,'' Wilson continued. ''The media imposed this narrow [black-on-black] lens that looked at the category of culture. The culture was deemed as problematically different than the mainstream.''

In his most recent book, Cities and Race (Routledge 2007), Wilson looked at how prevailing public policies in cities have taken these racialized arguments to some very scary places

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The Myth of Black-on-Black Violence
As we head into another long, hot summer, the media -- and black folks -- need to retire this loaded term.

By: Natalie Hopkinson | Posted: June 16, 2010 at 6:22 AM


This year's Black History Month was a particularly bloody one in Shelby County, S.C. Sergio Leary, Ja'cole Wilson, Karon Barrow and Leon Thurman Jr., all young people in their 20s, were all shot dead, according to local news reports.

The Shelby Star's analysis of the burst of violence, hit on all the usual crime reporting clichés: ''black,'' ''at-risk youth,'' ''subcultures that don't value'' life. And then, there's the clincher. ''Despite overall crime numbers falling in recent years, black-on-black [emphasis added] violence remains a prevalent issue,'' the newspaper reported.

You can expect to hear these key phrases on a local television news report near you as temperatures--and tempers--rise this summer. Black clergy like Al Sharpton, prominent black thinkers like Kevin Powell, and writers at black journals like the Urban Politico will shake their heads at this ''black'' scourge, self-flagellating that ''we gotta do better.''

Of course, any loss of life is cause to scream from the mountaintops. But explaining the tragedies by using loaded phrases like ''black-on-black'' violence is dangerously wrong. First, in a country that is essentially still segregated (and not necessarily by black people's choice) what race do you expect for both victim and perpetrators to be? Language like ''black-on-black violence'' effectively smacks a racial label on problems that are socioeconomic and thus the collective, moral responsibility of every American.

At this particular moment in our history, it is more important than ever to reject these kinds of racialized explanations. They are being used to slander public school children as incapable of learning; to deem affordable housing a hopeless cause. In gentrifying cities, ''black-on-black crime'' is used as a weapon to encourage public policies that treat black people as blights on the new urban aesthetic. There is a moral imperative to challenge these assumptions.

Every. Single. Time.

''It's as though there is something defective about black culture and moderate income, and low-income, working-class kids and families live in different worlds,'' said the University of Illinois geographer David Wilson, who traced the origins of the term in the early 1980s in his brilliant book, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence (Syracuse University Press).

The term came into vogue as cities were undergoing a radical economic transformation; manufacturing jobs, once the staple of the black working class, were being replaced by unemployment and illicit industries such as the volatile crack trade. Instead of attributing the spike in violence to middle-class flight, poverty, hopelessness, or the larger social and economic shifts cities were grappling with, the media's ''emphasis became looking at a supposedly defective, aberrant black culture,'' Wilson said.

''Supposedly we saw youth that were going astray and that was the problem,'' Wilson continued. ''The media imposed this narrow [black-on-black] lens that looked at the category of culture. The culture was deemed as problematically different than the mainstream.''

In his most recent book, Cities and Race (Routledge 2007), Wilson looked at how prevailing public policies in cities have taken these racialized arguments to some very scary places. According to Wilson, city planners in gentrifying cities now argue that there is a new global reality afoot. As such, prominent urbanists such as Richard Florida argue that what we need in our cities more than ever are creative people. People who are highly educated--people who can find their niche in the world economy.

This might be all well and good, if we lived up to the ''post-racialism/colorblindness'' everyone keeps crowing about. You know, that notion that you are not judged by your skin tone. That in America, everyone has an equal chance. No need to bring up the nastiness of the past.

Easy enough if you are not born into a community that has been cut off from ''mainstream'' education, health care and economic opportunities since the days of slavery. Segregated enclaves have always played a role in warehousing the black folks that the larger society does not quite know what to do with. But now as cities across the United States gentrify, more than ever, Wilson says, black ''ghettos'' are playing a functional role: ''That is to warehouse populations that are non-contributory to the 'go-global' movement. If the population is 'non-contributing' stash them somewhere in the city that is isolated. They need to be isolated because they cannot be allowed to contaminate these areas that are showy and diverse.''

And then even if you are black and among this coveted ''creative'' class, terms like ''black-on-black'' violence put you in the same pathological box.

Thankfully, the use of the term has subsided from its 1980s heyday. But it still pops up whenever there is a high-profile rash of urban violence: Think Aiyana Jones in Detroit; Derrion Albert in Chicago. Then there's Oakland, where recently someone created a Facebook group against black-on-black violence.

We should take a page from journalists in the United Kingdom. The stylebook of the Guardian newspaper bans the use of the phrase ''black-on-black violence.'' The stylebook explains, ''imagine the police saying they were 'investigating an incident of white-on-white violence between Millwall and West Ham supporters.'''

Indeed. The term ''black-on-black violence'' is a slander against the majority of law-abiding black Americans, rich and poor, who get painted by this broad and crude brush. I've been black all my life, but no, actually, I don't have to ''do better.'' I've never handled a gun in my life. And if some knucklehead points one my way, I'm entitled to the same level of outrage and swift police response a white victim would get. So do Shelby County's recent murdered residents Sergio Leary, Ja'cole Wilson, Karon Barrow and Leon Thurman Jr.

If we don't challenge these assumptions we only ask Shelby Star readers like ''Bodecia'' to come to the following conclusion:

''It is about race--when one fraction of the community is killing off their own people that is a problem with their race and a problem that they must take responsibility for and clean up. Myself, being white [I] will absolutely NOT be visiting the 'knot' to offer assistance. I don't have a suicide mentality... I applaud the black community for speaking out and making this a topic of conversation. The black leaders need to be sure this stays on the front page (in the face) type of coverage.''

Or not.

http://www.theroot.com/views/myth-black-black-violence?page=0,1

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Why "Black-on-Black Crime" is a Dangerous Idea

Jamelle Bouie

July 17, 2013

Final thoughts on the myth of "black-on-black crime."



In writing about the myth of “black-on-black crime” this week, I’ve gotten a huge number of responses, from both sides. The disagreement, in particular, has taken the form of incredulousness. For example, here’s Rod Dreher of the The American Conservative, who says that the Zimmerman verdict has caused me to “lose my mind”:

Jamelle Bouie today wrote a Daily Beast post tied to the Trayvon Martin situation, claiming that the fact that nearly all black murder victims in America are killed by blacks just goes to show that there is no such thing as black-on-black crime, and that the concept is ginned up by white people to justify their fear of black masculinity and black criminality. Bouie also says that NYC’s stop-and-frisk program is racist, and not justified by statistics — this, even though NYPD stats show that 96 percent of all shooting victims are black or Hispanic, and 97 percent of all shooters were black or Hispanic.

These statistics are so clear, so consistent, and so overwhelming that it defies rationality to claim that the youth of black males is being stolen by the likes of George Zimmerman. It’s being stolen by other young black men.

No one has said that crime between African Americans isn’t a problem. The point is that blackness has nothing to do with it. “Black-on-black crime” is a frame that presupposes black criminality—that there’s something inherent to blackness which makes intra-group crime more prevalent and more deadly. But that’s nonsense, and all it does is obscure the history that brought us to this point. After a century of anti-black violence and public policy—of manufactured ghettos, forced hyper-segregation, and state-supported peonage—is economic perilousness and heightened violence among the victims and descendants of those people really a shock? And if it isn’t, then why would talk about crime in these communities as a factor of blackness, and not of history and circumstance?
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The only thing we accomplish by focusing on “black-on-black crime” as an independent phenomena—distinct from “white-on-white crime”—is justify universal suspicion of black men, and young black men, in particular. This is a problem. It’s absolutely true that “NYPD stats show that 96 percent of all shooting victims are black or Hispanic, and 97 percent of all shooters were black or Hispanic,” but it’s also true that the number of black and Latino offenders is a small fraction of all blacks and Latinos. But stop and frisk turns all blacks and all Latinos into potential offenders—it erases individual consideration and imposes collective suspicion.

This alone should make the program indefensible. When you add data to the mix—in 2012, New York police made 532,911 stops, in 89 percent, there was no criminal activity found, and in only 0.2 percent did the police find guns—it’s hard to see how you could support the policy, much less justify the universal scrutiny of all black and Latino men. And it’s worth noting that this blanket suspicion makes it harder to police communities. A reader explains:

I’ve been a cop for 5 years. I work one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a predominantly black housing development. In that 5 years I’ve steadily built a rapport with the community, one based on transparency—being frank and open with everyone I talk to, both about police matters and sometimes my own thoughts and tastes.

When an event like the Martin v Zimmerman one occurs, all that rapport goes to hell. All my work is ruined, and my relationship with the people I serve is injured.Instead of being “Cody” or “Red” or “The Flash”, I go back to just being that ****ing white cop in the community’s eyes.

Stop and frisk is both racist and damaging to actual police work. Why defend it?

Before I finish this, one last word on Dreher. “It’s being stolen by other young black men.” No one believes that the only threat to young black men comes from the “likes of George Zimmerman.” No one. What we’re trying to say is this: The manufactured image of rampant black male criminality creates fear, and that fear leads people to profile (stop and frisk), barricade themselves (gated communities), and confront individual black men because they must be up to something (George Zimmerman: “Those ****ing punks always get away.”).

Not only do black men have to live lives aware of that fear, but they have to be conscious of the fact that—in the wrong situation, at the wrong time, with the wrong person—it could get them killed. And that’s what’s been stolen: The right to walk freely as an individual, and not as the member of a suspect class.

http://prospect.org/article/why-black-black-crime-dangerous-idea

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Trayvon Martin, Blackness, and America's Fear of Crime

Jamelle Bouie

July 16, 2013

Further thoughts on pathology and "black on black" crime.




I’ve written here, and elsewhere, that “black-on-black crime” as a specific phenomena isn’t a thing. Yes, the vast majority of crimes against African Americans are committed by other African Americans, and yes, black men face a higher murder rate than any other group in the country. But those facts are easily explained by residential segregation and proximity—people commit crimes against those closest to them—and the particular circumstances of many black communities, which are marred by concentrated poverty and nonexistent economic opportunities.

“But what’s the big deal?”, you might ask. “Why can’t we use ‘black-on-black crime’ as a shorthand for these particular problems?” The answer isn’t difficult. Violent crime in hyper-segregated neighborhoods doesn’t happen because the residents are black. Their race isn’t incidental—the whole reason these neighborhoods exist is racial policymaking by white lawmakers—but there is nothing about blackness that makes violence more likely. Focusing on the “black” part of the equation takes this violence out of the realm of policy, and into the world of cultural ills. “Black-on-black crime” describes a pathology—a social abnormality—that can’t be fixed by political action. “Those people are just that way,” and as such, we should leave them to their devices, and defend ourselves if necessary.

Indeed, if criminality is inherent to African Americans, then it doesn’t matter who you’re defending yourself against. At any and all times, you’re stopping someone who is, or could become, a criminal. It’s how you get policymakers like Michael Bloomberg and policies like “stop and frisk,” which says, in effect, that if you are black and male, New York City is justified in treating you as a potential offender.

Now, you could try—as Richard Cohen attempts in the Washington Post—to put limits on this suspicion. We only have to worry about urban African Americans, he argues. They are the criminal threat:

I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

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But stereotype creep is inevitable, and within a few paragraphs, “urban crime” becomes “crime,” hoodies are the universal uniform of “thugs”, and all black men become justified suspects of either the law, or interested citizens:

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?

Again, when black pathology is your frame for understanding crime, any decision to pursue black men is justified, because by definition they are suspects. It’s why Cohen doesn’t have a problem with George Zimmerman’s fateful decision to stop and follow Trayvon Martin. It doesn’t matter that Sanford, Florida is a small town, or that the two were in a gated community—the only important variable, for Cohen, is Martin’s blackness.

American life is already defined by a steady fear of black men. The Monkey Cage, for instance, highlights a study that finds a plurality—40 percent—of white Americans who say that “many or almost all black men were violent,” compared to the less than 20 percent who said the same of black women and white men. The focus on “black-on-black crime” intensifies that, while ignoring the extent to which the things that drive black crime rates–including the hugely disproportionate share of murders committed by African Americans—aren’t particular to blackness.

Of course, if we were to acknowledge that African American crimes rates aren’t just a case of black people being black, then we would have to do something about it. And, in general, white Americans aren’t fond of devoting national resources to fixing racial problems.

http://prospect.org/article/trayvon-martin-blackness-and-americas-fear-crime

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itt mekk mii laff wen oyinbo canservative tried fe defend da killinn aff trayon ann addar blakks bye oyinbo by chattinn bout blakk on blakk crimes. itt sadden mii wen blakks gitt brainwashed bye oyinbo racist blakk pon blakk crime argument den chatt da same nunsense as racist oyinbo