Who’s Allowed to Say What About Black-on-Black Crime?
Written on Thursday, July 9, 2015 by Benny Huang
Andrew Young’s take on the Confederate battle flag controversy was unexpected, to say the least. As the nation’s first black ambassador to the United Nations and former member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), you might expect Young to condemn the flag in the harshest terms. Instead, he urged his fellow blacks to get some perspective on the symbol and to turn their attention to more pressing matters.
“I would never trade the [Confederate] flag for a single job,” said Young to a local television reporter. “The problems we face don’t have anything to do with the flag. The fact is that 93% of black people killed are killed by other black people. So black lives matter. Let us start believing that we matter.”
It’s become something of a cliché on the Right, in the wake of the many black deaths involving police, to point out that far more black people are killed each year by other black people than by cops of any color or by racist terrorists like Dylann Roof. It’s a valid point, and one that I think most blacks understand, even if they’d prefer not to hear it from conservative white people. That’s unfortunate because the arcane rules of who’s allowed to say what are truly counterproductive, not to mention racist. Truth is truth, regardless of the speaker.
The facts are shocking and undeniable. FBI crime statistics reveal that 2,491 black people were murdered in this country in 2013, the latest year for which statistics are available. A full 90% (2,245) were murdered by other black people. That statistic is not an anomaly. A study of murder statistics in the thirty years between 1976 and 2005 found that 90% of black murder victims were killed by other blacks. Furthermore, blacks are eight times more likely to be murdered than whites. Black people murdered by other black people represented about 39% of all murders in the United States in 2013, despite the fact that blacks represent only about 13% of the population.
And black people know this. Even the pompous “Reverend” Jesse Jackson has admitted his fear of blacks. Said Jackson in 1993: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Black-on-black violence was the subject of the critically acclaimed 1991 film “Boyz N the Hood.” Its director, John Singleton, then a twenty-three year old just out of film school, was honored with an Oscar nomination for “Boyz.” Be forewarned—the movie is not a conservative crowd pleaser. It begins with a clever cinematic swipe at Ronald Reagan and strikes an anti-military tone. One message that reverberates throughout the film is that the American Dream is inaccessible to black people and thus a hypocritical lie.
Yet the film still has value because it takes an unflinching look at black-on-black crime. In one scene, the leading characters, all young, black, and male, are hanging out on Crenshaw Boulevard, a favorite haunt for young blacks to show off their cars and meet girls. A tense verbal confrontation erupts between two groups of black men. One character, played by Ice Cube, flashes a handgun tucked at his waistline as a warning to the opposing group to back off.
A young black woman then speaks aloud the question that has plagued the black community for so long: “Can we have one night where there ain’t no fight and nobody get shot?” Her question is answered a few minutes later when a gang member from the opposing side peppers the sky with an Uzi submachine gun. Everyone scatters and the good times are over.
Despite the director’s obvious anti-violence message, the debut of “Boyz” turned movie theaters across the country into crime scenes. In a testament to the fact that art often imitates life, members of the audience beat, shot, and stabbed each other. From the Los Angeles Times: “A lethal rash of violence that marred the opening of ‘Boyz N the Hood,’ a movie depicting the struggles of growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, prompted several theaters Saturday to cancel the feature and many others to increase security amid fears of a repeat of Friday night’s bloodshed. Eleven people were wounded, one critically, as gunfire erupted in and around three Southern California theaters. Elsewhere, a Chicago man was killed, a Sacramento woman was severely wounded and many other people suffered injuries in at least 25 violent incidents as the film opened in more than 800 theaters nationwide.”
And that was just opening night!
It seems that black people can’t even have a rally against violence without somebody getting a beat-down. Just this month, a celebrity basketball game intended to promote non-violence turned violent when rapper Lil’ Wayne attacked a volunteer referee. Yes, that really happened.
In January of this year, a fight broke out backstage at an anti-violence hip hop and R&B concert. Performer August Alsina showed up late, to the displeasure of the event’s promoter, Loose Cannon Slim. Angry words were exchanged and the two came to blows. Friends of both Alsina and Slim jumped into the fray and melee ensued.
But don’t make the mistake of assuming that anyone can discuss black-on-black violence just because blacks themselves do. It’ still racist when you do it. It’s important to punish any white (or non-black) person who speaks out of turn. Otherwise, people might start to get the idea that associating black people with violence is rational.
If racism is the irrational fear of another race then rational fear cannot be racism. This is important to keep in mind when discussing, for example, the “white flight” phenomenon of the 1960’s and 1970’s. According to popular mythology, white people couldn’t tolerate living in “diverse” neighborhoods because of an irrational fear of The Other so they fled to the suburbs. That’s a deliberate distortion of what really happened. Yes, middle class white families sold their homes in droves, to the detriment of the cities they left behind, but those people wanted to stay in their neighborhoods. They were driven out. Urban America’s white refugees just didn’t want to spend their lives in an endlessly looping scene from “Boyz N the Hood.” Who can blame them?
Plenty of people, actually. Some of them are even white liberals who themselves live in the poshest of suburbs, but many are black. If you don’t want to be a white minority in a violent black neighborhood, you are an insufferable bigot, or so they say.
Black-on-black violence is no secret among blacks. It’s white people who feel the most uncomfortable discussing it, always looking over their shoulders to see who’s listening. There is a stiff social penalty to pay for white people (or non-black people) who engage in candid discussions about race and violence. Afraid of being called a racist, people pretend that violence is a commodity evenly distributed among the population. It’s a coercive mass delusion that demands all non-black people join in.
Read more at
http://patriotupdate.com/articles/whos-allowed-to-say-what-about-black-on-black-crime/
