I am going to break this argument down for you all because I am so tired of people making this statement to derail the conversation surrounding #Ferguson. This is for all of you that are outraged that there is no outrage when a Black person kills another Black person. I hear both the ignorant and the supposed scholars make this statement over and over again, and I just really want everyone to understand that when you bring this argument into the dialogue it is clear that you are unclear of what you are speaking on, yourself. I, being a Black female am certainly disheartened by occurrences of Black on Black crime, but we are not marching in the streets for this cause because these crimes are not racially motivated. They are not evidence of blatant racial bias and the poor practices of our justice system. Black on black crime is a result of proximity and poor economic situations. Individuals turn to crime when they have no legitimate path towards economic stability. Black people living in economically depressed neighborhood tend to kill other black people because those are the people that occupy the same space as them. If neighborhoods of concentrated poverty were more racially mixed than both the victims and perpetrators of these crimes would be racially mixed. I am assuming that most of you who bring up this argument want to hold peace talks and feel-good kumbaya sessions to get black people to stop killing each other as if black people kill each other for the sport of it. If you want to seriously address the issues of black-on-black crime, you need to take a look at the structural and institutionalized racial practices that pigeonhole black people into neighborhoods where there are no jobs, poor health care systems, and poor schools. You should want to address the policy makers and business developments that purposefully avoid neighborhoods of high poverty where people of color live. But, you should also want to address those blatant racists that are gunning down people of color based of the color of their skin, because it is their explicit racial bias leads to the structural racial bias that creates these economically depressed black neighborhoods that is the incubator for the black-on-black crime you care so much to end.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 19:18:05 +0000