One truth should be clear: If you want interracial killing you have to have interracial communities. Wasn’t that one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dreams? To live in a nation where black and white folk could be victims of crime in integrated neighborhoods? Didn’t he argue that thieves should pay more attention to the content of our Cadillacs than their color? Perhaps I am misremembering?
White folk commit the bulk of the crimes in our nation. And, beloved, it might surprise you that white folk commit the most violent crimes too. According to FBI statistics, black folk committed 36 percent of violent crime in 2015, while white folk committed 42 percent of violent crimes in the same year. White folk consistently lead all other groups in aggravated assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism. And white folk are far more likely to target the vulnerable too. White folk lead the way in forcible rape. You’re also more likely to kill children, the elderly, significant others, family members, and even yourselves. White folk commit a majority of gang-related murders too. A majority of the homicide victims in this country are white. White folk are six times as likely to be murdered by a white person as they are to be taken out by a black “thug.” The white-on-white mayhem is profound, yet no one speaks of it in racial terms.
That’s because the phrase white-on-white crime doesn’t serve a larger ideological purpose. White-on-white crime does not jibe with the exclusive focus on a black-on-black narrative that conservatives, and liberals too, have bought into. The success of that narrative depends on a few things. You had to construct the ghetto as a space of savagery that was unique to black folk. Never mind the fact that its first occupants were the Irish, Poles, Italians—and especially the Jews. Then you had to say that any right-thinking folk wouldn’t kill each other.
But there is no inherent blackness to the crime that occurs in black communities. Take blackness out of the equation and you’d have social engineers and Ivy League professors trying to fix crime-infested communities. We know this because big brains and social reformers from the late 1800s well into the 1930s successfully addressed crime waves set in motion, and endured, by poor European immigrants. Keep blackness in place and you have social engineers and Ivy League professors blasting the intrinsic pathology and inherent depravity of black life. These experts will conclude that our families and neighborhoods produce the seeds of their own destruction. The 1965 Moynihan Report on the Negro family—a report by Harvard professor and Johnson administration official Daniel Patrick Moynihan that warned that a castrating black matriarchy and a “tangle of pathology” threatened the black family—is a famous example.
Beloved, you don’t stop there. You feel compelled to make crime merely a matter of ethical collapse. You don’t mention the systemic removal of goods and services that drive some folk to crime. Nor do you talk much of black folk lacking the social supports that other ethnic groups enjoy. There is hardly any mention of the failure of the markets that are supposedly neutral, but which, in fact, favor those who aren’t black or poor.
Beloved, let’s try a brief thought experiment. Let’s apply the logic of some of your arguments about black folk to you. Take your argument that we should pay more attention to black-on-black crime than white cops killing black folk because more blacks are killed by other blacks. Now let’s compare the number of white Americans killed by whites to the number of Americans killed by terrorist acts. I can already feel your hair standing on end. You see how hurtful it is to make such a comparison? You see how it could miss the point of giving each cause of suffering its due? According to your logic, we should not be concerned with political acts of terror committed on American soil because, since 9/11, less than 100 people have been killed in such attacks in America while 11,208 people were killed by firearms in 2013 alone and 21,175 died by suicide with a firearm.
By Giuliani’s logic, then, the obsession with terror is both misplaced and hypocritical. We should focus instead on the plague of firearms on the American population. Far more white folk kill each other than are killed by terrorists. So let’s stop worrying about terrorism and worry about white-on-white homicide. Stop griping about a couple of planes crashing into a couple of towers. Stop crying over a few folk getting butchered by a few religious fanatics when the routine crime that snuffs white life lies in a white man’s assault rifle.
Notice how just reading those words makes your blood boil? See how your nationalist bravado flashes? Can you imagine how your rage might spill over if that were said to you with the same callous disregard for white life that Giuliani speaks with when he dismisses cops killing unarmed black folk? See how your temperature rises by just reading those words? These are words that are rarely spoken directly to white America. Words that reflect back to you your dishonesty and indifference and tone-deafness to our plight.
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Beloved, I must admit that there are ways that black folk do aim hate at each other, ways we do rip each other apart. A lot of it has to do with how we’ve taken into our minds and souls the poisonous bigotry you’ve spread. It’s brutal and agonizing to watch, especially because we are imitating the hate for blackness, for “otherness,” that you taught us. But you seem hardly aware of this sort of black-on-black crime. Could it be that you don’t really care about black-on-black crime unless you can use its existence to attack us even more?
But there is some value to you in our folly. You can point to it and say, “See, black folk are just as bad as us. They’re even more destructive and hateful to each other than whites have ever been. See, just as the song in the Broadway play Avenue Q says, ‘We’re all a little bit racist.’” (Of course that’s a horrible misuse of the term. Better to say we’re all just a little bigoted, yes, or prejudiced for certain. But I’m afraid you’ve got to own racism all by yourselves, beloved. It signals the power not only to hate, but to make that hate into law, and into convention, habit, and a moral duty. Thank God brave Americans challenged the legal and ethical roots of racism in this country.)
You even find comfort in exploiting black prejudices—against darker black folk, against women, against queer folk, against poor folk. You feel good about it because it lets you off the hook as well. It’s as if you take glee in thinking black people are equally bigoted. Especially when you hear one of us tell our dark-skin children not to marry a dark-skin mate so they won’t have dark children. Or when you hear one of us say that only light-skin people have “good hair,” or that there was no homosexuality in Africa and that it’s a white man’s plague.