So-called black-on-black crime has decreased over the decades. In the past 20 years, black-on-black homicides decreased by 67 percent—a sharper decline than white-on-white homicide—and among black youth, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are the lowest in more than 40 years, according to Demos. Throughout the country, crime has continuously fallen since the 1990s. Plus, black-on-black crime is hardly unique. Most crime is intra-racial. Around 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black offenders, while white people kill each other at roughly the same rate. Black people are hardly oblivious of the crime within their communities. According to polling, African Americans are concerned about and organize against the crime that exists in their neighborhoods. The roots of crime in the black community are structural. Crime is caused by socioeconomic factors rather than cultural pathologies or inherent criminality, despite what peddlers of the black criminality myth would have you believe. Many studies have shown that poverty and inequality contribute greatly to crime and other social ills. Continuously high unemployment, entrenched poverty, bleak educational opportunities, racial segregation, economic inequality, generations of trauma, and societal neglect create the cycles of desperation that provide kindling for pervasive crime in black communities. One Oakland city official told me last year that many young offenders experience violence, neglect, abuse against them earlier in their lives, which leads to the victim becoming the victimizer. Yet public perceptions and biases associate black people with criminality—an association that dates back to slavery. Black African slaves were assumed to be inherently violent and immoral, a justification slave masters used to exert brutal control over them. These methods of control included torture, armed slave patrols that monitored, arrested, and violently beat free or enslaved black Africans, and lynching during the Jim Crow era. American discourse on crime is deeply politicized and influenced by racial and class bias. “Crime” is synonymous with “black.” In news reports and TV shows about crime, the criminal is usually a black person, especially a black male. But as legal expert and author Lisa Bloom points out in her book Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat it, many mass killings and heinous crimes — such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado that killed 12 moviegoers — are committed by white people. White people are also the ones most frequently arrested for crimes like rape, robbery, assault, forgery, and fraud. Yet unlike black people, white people are not collectively blamed for violent crimes committed by people who look like them.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 01:37:04 +0000