When it comes to race, finding a middle ground seems to be a consistent issue. People are stuck between pretending to ‘not see race’ or inaccurately applying race where its role is insignificant. The narrative of ‘black on black crime’ is the latter. For decades we have heard about the problem with ‘black on black crime’ without considering the extent to which it is a racist narrative.
“#BlackLivesMatter but what about when black people are killing themselves in the streets?”
Not only are statements like this lazy, they are also reductive and obtuse. Black Lives Matter began in protest to the systematic mistreatment/unlawful murder of black people in the U.S. by non-black police officers. The pattern implies that black people, often men, are the targets of police officers who are fearful on account of racist ideas of black masculinity and thus, race is a core factor.
The focus on the racial element of ‘black on black crime’ however, implies black people kill other black people because they are black. This implies that black populations are a monolithic group who have a disposition to crime that no other demographic does. That the only reason black people could kill black people is because they are black. Yet, both history and the present shows racialised murders are carried out more so by the system of white supremacy — not those who are disadvantaged by it.
This narrative is not new. In Akala’s critically renowned book Natives he states that ‘Africans sold their own people is the historical version of black on black violence’. This being in reference to another lazy rhetoric seeking to justify the degradation of black people by white supremacists. Black people didn’t “sell each other” because they are black but because of class and tribal conflicts, because slaves had been made the currency in African nations by white imperialists and other issues which aren’t as simplistic as ‘blackness’.
As well as this, in using the racist rhetoric of “black on black crime” as a rebuttal to why protests against the racialised killings of unarmed black people should be halted, you imply that it can be justified because black people “kill themselves too”. This is dangerous because it:
a) conflates two exclusive issues simply because they are concerning black people. Unlawful killings by police is racialised and symbolic of the toxic relationship between institutions and black people. Crime within the same demographic however, is common, not distinctive to black people, nor abnormal when considering any other ethnic/societal group.
b) victim blames the group whom are being hurt. In arguing black people shouldn’t protest their racialised murders because of supposed black on black crime you imply the victims are at fault. That those killing them are in some sort of dystopian copy-cat scenario where the police are simply duplicating what they have seen from black people, which is quite obviously false.
“But black people are killing other black people — what else should we call it?”
How about we simply call it “crime”? Just as we do with other races. If we’re looking at it simplistically, sure, black people do kill other black people, but we are not an anomaly. All races suffer from intra-violence but there appears to be a targeted rhetoric when considering black populations. According to the UK Race and Criminal Justice System’s statistics of 2016 (p.23) 94% of white suspects killed someone from the same ethnic group, compared to 55% of intra-murders within black suspects . So why is it that we do not talk about the statistically much bigger issue of white on white crime in the UK?
Historically, white people have committed crimes against each other on a great scale. Let’s consider the historically tumultuous relationship between the English and the Irish. They both consist of white people. Would you ignore all the nuances of British Rule, religion and simply reduce the conflict to their whiteness?
What about World War II?
The Battle of Hastings?
No? Well, perhaps it’s time to assess the use of “black on black crime” and how this reductive perception of black people perpetuates a harmful and racist narrative.
