CUE RANT.
Why is this still even a topic that comes up? I'm going to say what a lot of other people are saying right now but which apparently not everyone is willing to grapple with: so-called "Black-on-Black crime" is not a disparate thing that can be accurately delineated from any other kind of crime. It's just another spin designed to correlate Blackness with violence. What people who trot out this argument fail to also acknowledge is the fact that *intraracial* violence is the standard- white people kill white people, black people kill black people, etc. This happens organically, based largely on proximity (which because we are such a segregated nation often means people of similar race/class backgrounds live near one another) and is often over allocation of "resources" (whatever those resources may be). To divert attention from the issues at hand (which include police brutality, excessive force, racial profiling) by insisting that the REAL problem is intrinsic to the community which in this case is the one being victimized/targeted is just another way to deny culpability and enforce white supremacy. We NEVER TALK ABOUT- indeed have never even named- "White-on-White" crime. You know why? Because it too is not a thing even though pretty much all white-perpetrated violent crime is committed with other white people as victims, and even though WHITE PEOPLE ARE JUST AS VIOLENT AS ANYONE ELSE, INCLUDING BLACK PEOPLE, EVEN *gasp* BLACK MEN. The extent to which white privilege permeates our culture is glaringly reflected in this missing verbiage. That is to say, we don't call it "white-on-white" crime, ostensibly because we are individual snowflakes and so nothing we do reflects on other white people. We are not a collective or a monolith, but we are quite certain that black people are.
One woman quoted in this article tweeted accurately: "Dear Rudy Giuliani, when talking about police shootings of blacks, changing the topic to Bad Stuff Black Folks Do Too is beyond offensive."
**Also (sort of an aside but it's something I have been thinking about): If we are not a fundamentally white supremacist culture (as many would like to believe in modern times) then how is nothing made of the fact that basically all serial killers in the history of America are white men? Why is there no mass hysteria regarding how "scary" white men are, considering they are the ones most likely to commit planned, heinous, sadistic crimes? How do we collectively not recognize how intellectually disingenuous it is to name one thing but willfully ignore the correlative other thing? It's astonishing, really: the extent to which white supremacy is ingrained in our culture and how readily we accept it as truth, when really, one critical question begets another critical question and before you know it, the whole thing unravels and underneath is a giant pile of bullshit.
End rant.
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