“Give me your money,” the tall, slender black man demanded of my fiancée and me. We were near the corner of a Detroit ghetto street not far from where the ’67 riots were sparked a decade earlier. It was cruelly ironic that we were close to the entrance to a Detroit police ministation. We were walking home at 10:30 p.m. one Saturday night after a late choir rehearsal at church. Our assailant had come out of nowhere. He announced himself ominously with a .357 Magnum revolver at the end of his shaking hand.
Terror washed over us. This was the Detroit of the 1970s, the city that had been dubbed “the murder capital of the world.” It was also a city in transition. America’s manufacturing strength had showed the first inkling of bowing to a thriving service economy. All those well-paying factory jobs that had been an elevator to the black middle class would slowly begin to disappear. Coleman Young became the city’s first black mayor in 1974. He won in large measure by promising to reform a brutal police force. Most white folk scampered to the suburbs after the riots in ’67. That left black folk in charge of shrinking resources and facing the rise of drug gangs and a spiking crime rate. I feared that night becoming one of its casualties.
“Sir, we don’t have any money,” I said. “I literally have a dollar thirty-five cents to my name.”
The man had on a pair of dark sunglasses. I couldn’t see his eyes to gauge his demeanor. All I knew is that I didn’t want my fiancée and I to die that night. She was scared speechless. I feared that any sudden move might cause him to shoot and kill us.
The Spirit urged me to talk to him. We’d just come from church. Why not call on faith to see us through?
“Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this,” I offered, praying it struck a chord of humanity, and, at least, racial intimacy.
Thank God it did.
“I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he said, his voice trembling, his body language suggesting a growing regret about his action. “But I got a wife and three kids, and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat.”
It would be another year before my son was born into poverty and I’d know the desperation a father faces when he can’t provide for his own child. Both his mother and I would be unemployed by the time he arrived. I’d have to stand in the WIC line to collect free food offerings. But for now I was focused on getting to that future.
Then our would-be robber delivered a real shock. He revealed the vicious cycle of carnage that makes some people victims and then pushes them to make others its victims, as well.
“Besides, last week, somebody did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “We just came from choir rehearsal. And if you’ll let me reach into my back pocket, I can give you my church bulletin. It has a number you can call to get some help.”
He took the bulletin and briefly glanced at it. He looked stumped, perhaps half in disbelief at my desperation, perhaps half believing that I really wanted to help him. I made my final offer.
“Look, I only have a dollar thirty-five cents, but I want to give it to you.”
“No, man, you need that yourself.”
“I insist. Take it, please.”
He told us we could go free and to walk to the end of the block. I froze. I didn’t want him to shoot us in the back. I asked him to get on his knees. I don’t quite know why I asked, or why he complied. But, miraculously, he did. I said a very brief prayer for him. I didn’t want to test the Lord’s mercy or the man’s patience. He stayed on his knees as we walked away, unharmed.
Beloved, I know what you’re thinking. You’re not considering how social deprivation leads desperate people to act desperately. You’re not thinking of how communities bereft of hope and resource claim as its victims the people who seek to escape its fatal grip. You’re not thinking of how many of you were spared such a fate because of God’s grace and white privilege. Many of you are thinking that black folk kill each other every day without saying a mumbling word. Then we loudly protest a few white cops who kill black “thugs.”
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to ambush me with that “it’s-the-blacks-not-the-cops” claim on Meet the Press. It was right before the decision was made not to bring charges against white cop Darren Wilson, who had killed unarmed black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks,” Giuliani said. “We’re talking about the exception here.”
The notion that we are indifferent to murders by other blacks is nonsense. But we also know that if Jamal or Willie kills somebody, and they’re caught, they’re going to jail. Cops are rarely held accountable for their slaughter of black people. Neither Jamal nor Willie pledged to protect and serve the community. Neither of them has been issued a badge and a gun to represent the state. The police have a higher standard to meet, a greater obligation to be cautious in using lethal force.
Black folk do protest, to each other, to a world that largely refuses to listen, the killing of blacks by other blacks. We cry out against what goes on in black communities across this nation. We think it is horrid. We know such communities are vexed by problems faced by all neighborhoods that are depleted of dollars and hope. These communities are emptied of good schools. They are deprived of the social and economic buffers that keep Beverly Hills from turning into Beirut. People usually murder where they nest. They aim their rage at easy targets.
Beloved, what you see happening among us is not best understood as black-on-black crime. Rather it is neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If our neighbors were white, they’d be victims of the same crime that plagues black folk. You are right, however, about those proportions. Ninety-three percent of black folk who are killed are killed by other black folk. But 84 percent of white folk who are killed are killed by other white folk. It’s not necessary to modify the noun murder with the adjective black. It happens in the white world too. Where’s the white-on-white crime rhetoric? Where are the rants against white folk ruining white culture with their murderous ways?