It’s Time to Stop Blaming Black-on-Black Crime
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By Charles D. Ellison, theRoot.com
The rhetoric around crime is factually wrong and allows some to ignore and pass the blame for systemic misdeeds.
For every unarmed black man, woman or child killed by unrestrained police officers, there’s an intellectually impoverished response when black people get visibly upset about it: What about black-on-black crime?…
Now black-on-black crime is a thing, with famous heavy-right rags embracing it as frequently as they knock the black president. It’s a fresh, new, nasty, stick-your-tongue-out retort to shut down any justifiable complaints from grieving black communities.
Which means we can talk days on end about being black, so long as it pertains to black people hurting other black people. Others have signed on, too, including some prominent black celebrities and half-intelligentsia…
Despite the intense national obsession with it, however, we haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that it never really existed in the first place. To refer to “black-on-black crime” not only defies common sense but grabs at baseless white racist science that removes blame for systemic deeds. There’s no more reason to assert “black-on-black crime” than there is to coin terms like “white-on-white crime” or “brown-on-brown crime” or let’s-just-insert-random-color-or-race-here crime. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not using those terms.
And we shouldn’t. Geography and basic population trends dictate that. Crime happens all around us, and it happens near where populations cluster. Over the past generation, we’ve allowed this unique, yet ugly designation of community crime patterns to stalk us like an angry ex-spouse, without any requisite understanding of how human beings live…
One reason is that we’re so accustomed to congregating and living where others look like us. As the data-crunching Nate Silver recently pointed out, even the “most diverse cities” are the “most segregated.” A Pew Research survey… also underscored that point: Americans talk a big diversity game, but “American communities appear to have grown more politically and economically homogeneous in recent decades.” Interestingly, that same Pew study found that a larger margin of African Americans preferred living in racially diverse communities—83 percent—than whites (60 percent).
University of Washington sociologist Kyle Crowder’s research has found that… forty-four percent of African Americans move to black neighborhoods, with just 5 percent moving into white neighborhoods. For whites, the percentage is higher, with just under 60 percent moving into neighborhoods with people who look just like them, as opposed to only 2 percent who move into majority-black neighborhoods…
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