“Black on Black crime”, the new normal (op-ed)

As of May 6, 2016, the New York Times reported President Barack Obama passed a little-noticed milestone: He has been at war longer than any other American President.

The Pentagon described the situation as “the new normal”.

The earliest usage of the phrase “black-on-black” in print was found in the Chicago Daily Defender during the 1968 race riots. It said when stabbings, muggings, and rapes were “black-on-black” they were “canceled out in the mind of a white precinct commander”.

The concern here was the absence of justice for black victims due to the criminal neglect of police departments. This happened before the riots, but there weren’t phrases like “Negro on Negro” or “Colored on Colored”, because it was common sense that criminals of all ethnic groups in segregated or urban confines victimized members of their own ethnicity. (Indigenous tribes knew that before 1492 without the aid of social science statistics)

The phrase “black-on-black” was birthed when a new generation disassociated themselves from inferior labels such as Negro/colored and embraced being black. This generation also embraced black self-determination and black solidarity, so “black-on-black crime” was an oxymoron that would no longer be accepted as the norm in the new black community, regardless of what other ethnic groups did to each other.

The phrase highlighted low priority policing, but it was also a moral directive for self-policing out of black solidarity making the initiators of “black-on-black crime” the new Uncle Toms.

Overtime police departments made “black on black violence” one of its highest priorities, but justice still eludes a disproportional amount of black homicide victims. The older generation still refers to this reality as “black-on-black crime” and it’s still unacceptable. It was also unacceptable to the next generation of African-Americans, but it wasn’t until the Black Lives Matter movement appeared that the phrase “black-on-black crime” became divisive.

How did that happen?

The Black Lives Matter movement was criticized for its silence on “black on black crime” and their supporters responded by criticizing the phrase and accused their critics of using the phrase to divert attention away from structural racism.

Recently at a house judiciary committee hearing on police reform a black representative questioned a black sheriff about his comment that “black on black crime” was an alarming statistic. The representative agreed black on black crime was a problem, but dismissed the alarm. The representative said, “83% of whites kill whites” and demanded to know from the sheriff how come white on white crime wasn’t a problem. The sheriff attempted to explain the difference in rates, but the representative continued, “The rates are roughly equivalent in terms of context of people who live next to each other because of housing segregation patterns … ethic or racial violence tends to occur within the same group … so elevating it (singling out black on black crime as a problem) beyond that fact is irresponsible.”

It appears all lives matter in a comparative analysis of homicide statistics to make black on black crime and the resulting unsolved murders “the new normal” in order to defend a movement that has canceled out the problem like white precinct commanders during the 1968 riots.

First Published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 7/27/16