Black-on-Black Crime and Police Brutality Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
I do not own the copyright/license to the digital media below. Its inclusion is not intended solely for personal gain, but for educational/demonstration purposes.
When we try to discuss Black-on-Black crime and police brutality as separate issues, we are really splitting hairs.
My academic colleagues do not like to acknowledge Black-on-Black crime, sometimes. And I understand why they do not like to talk about this issue. Turn on the six o’clock news, and it seems like a run-down of Black criminality only. At one point, I could tell whether or not the criminal were white: the news would not show pictures of white criminals in certain news markets. Only recently have there been pictures of non-Black criminals splashing across the screens in some areas.
Because humans are humans, I know that white people commit crimes. There are plenty of prisons in places like Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, and South Dakota. While the African American populations in those states are almost virtually non-existent, but there are plenty of people populating those prisons.
Because humans are humans, I know that Black people commit crimes. In fact, dozens of studies show that most violent crimes are crimes of familiarity. The many rapes, homicides, robberies and assaults that we see on the nightly news are not random occurrences as the news erroneously tells it. Most of these folk know one another. Get people piled up in one place — whether it is in a small town, suburb, reservation, or the inner-city — and there may be an explosion where even the innocent are hurt.
In every population of people, there are so many musical geniuses, so many painters, so many inventors, so many writers, so many doctors, so many scientists, so many community mothers, so many community fathers, so many gossips, so many ministers, and yes, so many criminals. The rest of us fall in the spectrum somewhere. There are some Black people and some white people and some Native American people and some Asian American people and some Italian American people and some Latino people and some Chicano people and some Polish Americans and some African people and some East Indian people and some Christians and some Hindus and some Muslims and some men and some women and some gay people and some lesbians and some transgender people who are just criminals plain and simple. Black criminality is a fact, but it tends to be more closely monitored and amplified by a hegemonic media with an agenda. BLACK PEOPLE ARE NO MORE CRIMINAL THAN ANYONE ELSE IN AMERICA, BUT THEY ARE ROUTINELY ARRESTED AT HIGHER LEVELS AND SEEN ON THE NEWS MORE THAN OTHERS!
As discussed in a previous post, police brutality is driven in part by media images of Black people as criminals.
A second driver of police brutality are the feelings that Black lives and property do not matter. If someone is a criminal in a run-down neighborhood, he or she is more likely to rob, rape, and assault in that neighborhood, because the criminal knows that the cops will not pursue him/her as vigilantly as they would in a white-dominated suburb. A Black rapist is more likely to rape a Black woman, simply because he knows that no one cares about her integrity, purity, or chastity. In fact, the dominant discourse has made rape of Black women okay since slavery. After all, according to racist stereotypes, Black women cannot be raped. After all, according to most current RAP lyrics, Black women ain’t nothing but bitches and ‘hos who even DESERVE to be used, bruised, and abused. These things have been in dominant discourse since the days of slavery.
If a criminal makes a calculation of which type of homicide carries the lesser penalty, he/she is going to choose to kill a Black man. Killing a white man carries a heavier penalty than killing a Black one. Statistically speaking, a Black male who kills a Black male may receive less jail time than a Black male who abuses a dog. I love dogs, so don’t come for me. I am making the point that dogs receive more consideration in our court system than Black male lives.
Black people have lived in this country for more than 400 years, and it is absolutely absurd to think that some Black people have not internalized and do not replicate the dehumanizing discourse that always-already shapes and forms attitudes towards people of color. This is explicitly true in the Black criminal element. I once read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. I shuttered when I read the lines that he raped Black women as simply practice for that grand day when he would rape a white one. Black women were not fully human to him that way white women were. My skin crawls every time I read Native Son, and Bigger kills Bessie. Then Bessie’s Black woman body is rolled in court as “evidence” of Bigger’s animal instincts. I shuttered once again when a Black woman was put on display in a nationally televised hearing and thought about Bessie and Sarah Baartman and all of the Black women who were put on display for public consumption.
I digressed into another posting, but let me get back to the post at hand.
Codification of Black people as less than deserving of equal protection under the law existed BEFORE America became a separate democracy. Slavery and dehumanization grew up right alongside the ideals of Enlightenment and humanity that inform the Constitution. The Constitution is a beautiful document: it just did not and does not apply equally to Black folk. Just ask Kaepernick.
When some people fear the criminal element among them and they know that they and their property do not garner full and equal protection of the law, they take the law into their own hands. While there laws against vigilantes, can we blame the Black mother who shoots at another micky-ficky for harming her son? She knows that if she calls the cops, the cops may misread the situation and kill her son rather than the perpetrator. If a thief breaks into a Black household in the middle of the night, can we really trust the cops to help that family? Finally, if a Black woman is raped, particularly by a young white man, can we really trust the cops to give a full investigation? How can we guarantee that they won’t say, “Boys will be boys,” and give the perp a slap on the wrist even when he is caught? Can we even trust the police to have updated and functioning rape kits in predominantly Black areas? In Memphis, a city where the population is 67% Black, rape kits were unkempt, unorganized, and expired. For years. The majority-Black police force had not bothered to check these NEEDED law-enforcement tools, and I do not believe they would have if the news had not dug into the story.
There are criminal elements in Black society, white society, Native American society, Asian society…etc. who take advantage of legal codification and practices of inequality. When mainly Black male faces are splashed across our screens every morning, every noon, and every night, their pictures are linked to stories of individual moral failings (and some of this is). We never have the deeper conversation. We never have that SERIOUS talk that we need to have. Criminality is left to the people on the screen only, and the people are mainly Black and male. We need to answer this one serious question: are our police practices the result of the legal codification of Black inequality since before the United States became a Democracy? I think we all know the answer here. The police — regardless of race, sexuality, or gender — enforce and practice what they have been given liberty to do via contemporary legal thought and hegemonic discourse. Both legal thought and the dominant discourse shouts that Black people and Black property are less than.
As always, if you like this story, press the hands and clap back. Or, I could see you in class. This particular post comes from and upper-level African American literature class. We were discussing racism, up North style, and reading Native Son. By the way, my Chicago students did not know that Chicago was and is the world’s most segregated city.
