AspE wrote:
If anyone is interested in what the leaders of the BLM movement think about the subject, why not read their own words?
Common Misconceptions
1. The movement doesn’t care about black-on-black crime. The idea that black-on-black crime is not a significant political conversation among black people is patently false. In Chicago, long maligned for its high rates of intraracial murder, members of the community created the Violence Interrupters to disrupt violent altercations before they escalate. However, those who insist on talking about black-on-black crime frequently fail to acknowledge that most crime is intraracial. Ninety-three percent of black murder victims are killed by other black people. Eighty-four percent of white murder victims are killed by other white people. The continued focus on black-on-black crime is a diversionary tactic, whose goal is to suggest that black people don’t have the right to be outraged about police violence in vulnerable black communities, because those communities have a crime problem. The Black Lives Matter movement acknowledges the crime problem, but it refuses to locate that crime problem as a problem of black pathology. Black people are not inherently more violent or more prone to crime than other groups. But black people are disproportionately poorer, more likely to be targeted by police and arrested, and more likely to attend poor or failing schools. All of these social indicators place one at greater risk for being either a victim or a perpetrator of violent crime. To reduce violent crime, we must fight to change systems, rather than demonizing people.
Yes, exactly! As a Black Chicagoan to whom this thread applies, I appreciate your saying this. Citing black-on-black crimes as one of the tenets upon which BLM is based is spurious at best, and slanderous at worst. Granted, intraracial crimes within the Black community exist, but they take place in other races, too. Furthermore, continual broaching of black-on-black crime as a rejoinder to the acknowledgement of BLM trivializes the struggle and pervasive fear with which Black Americans, like me, are faced. It's especially hard when you're a Black autistic person and in the face of a police officer, and you don't know how to respond or if you'll even survive.
12 Mar 2017, 4:35 pm
