Yeah, That's It, Black on Black Crime Is the REAL Problem!

The reactions to the recent verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial that I've been seeing floating around on the internet really got me thinking.  Many of the things I've read have been unsettling, and my Facebook feed has been a particular source of frustration. Most of posts I've been seeing have been along the lines of "the jury made the right decision based on evidence," "the verdict was the fault of the prosecution, not our justice system at large," "this white teenager was killed and it never made it past the local news," and, the most insightful statement of all, "the real problem is black on black crime."

Overall, the attitude toward the George Zimmerman trial and Trayvon Martin's death has been one of dismissiveness.  Reading these prompted me to make the post "Some people are so naive, and so misinformed."  What surprised me is that while a handful of my black friends posted about being "sickened" or "saddened" by the verdict, the general air of dismissiveness around the George Zimmerman verdict has extended to white and black friends alike.  I haven't heard a single person around here mention any problems with Stand Your Ground laws, or deeper problems with racism in society.

The argument that "the real problem is black on black crime" irritates me more than most reactions.  The white folks who make this statement think they're being profound and trying to direct attention to the thing that really needs fixing in our society, but the statement carries with it such smug undertones.  They're basically saying, "see, it's THEIR fault, not ours!  They're the racists, not us!"  They often point out how many "black on black" crimes fail to result in prosecutions.  People who make this argument are also prone to using the absurd term "reverse racism" to claim they are the ones being discriminated by people of color, and not the other way around (note - racism is racism is racism, there's no such thing as "reverse racism," but I guess white folks need a special name for it to show that it's extra bad compared to anything they do).

The "black on black crime" people, along with people who make the other arguments I previously listed, are missing a distinct reality in the criminal justice system in America. The problem is the deeply institutionalized unfairness of access to justice for VICTIMS of color, along with law enforcement bias against black men in particular.  In the George Zimmerman case, police didn't even bother to arrest him despite the fact that he always admitted he pursued and killed 17-year-old Trayvon.  They saw nothing wrong with the fact that a man would consider a black teenager to be suspicious and worth following simply for walking down the street in the early evening.  It took over a month of public outcry and demonstrations for Sanford police to make the arrest.  How much of a chance does a prosecutor have of conviction in a situation where the police wouldn't even arrest the guy at first?

Some people would immediately point out that the "no snitching" culture contributes to the lack of justice for victims of color because the local communities won't help police with their investigations.  That may be true in some areas of the country, but it certainly isn't true everywhere.  Just watch a few episodes of "The First 48" and see how many of the arrests on that show are the result of tips called in by the victims' friends or family members.  In areas where this phenomenon does occur, we need to ask ourselves why populations of color have such little trust in police that they wouldn't even help by giving them information when someone they love is murdered.

The answer is not difficult to find - they view the police as an adversarial force in their communities, and do not have faith the police want to help them.  This mistrust didn't arise because all black people are thugs and criminals, but because of generations of experiences involving systematically unequal application of justice among communities of color than among white communities, particularly concerning law enforcement treatment of black men.  Not that long ago, a black man's dealing with the justice system less often involved a trial with a jury of his peers, and more often involved a lynch mob (my great-grandfather's biography includes a story of him as town magistrate of Wedgefield, SC, being too late to stop a lynching of a black man accused of murder - I couldn't even tell from the story if the man was actually guilty).  We've made some progress in that respect, but not as much as most white people would like to believe.

People too often mistake progress in societal race relations as proof we are conquering racism.  With people of color integrated across all levels of society, interracial marriages common even in the deep South, and programs like Affirmative Action seeking to continually advance the status of people of color, too many white people are able to look out from the perspective of their immense privilege and believe that institutionalized racism by white people is a thing of the past.  They have black coworkers in their white collar jobs, and some people in fields like medicine are surrounded by people of many different ethnicities, so they honestly believe that things have changed, and if they aren't personally racist, then they couldn't possibly be doing anything to perpetuate racism.

So when these people watch Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity talk about specters of "race riots" following a not-guilty George Zimmerman verdict, they truly don't understand how supporting people who make those claims actually helps others justify violence against people of color.  Separating the "thugs" that might riot from the black population at large in one's own personal thoughts doesn't mean anything when we have a justice system that has been shown time and time again to treat all young black men as a special category, as potentially dangerous criminals.

What they don't understand is they're perpetuating a paradigm that has existed for generations of the "dangerous black male." When looking at race relations in the post-Civil War South, there is a particular significance around the relationship between the black male and the white female.  This special relationship dynamic is the result of post-Civil War white males struggling to grasp onto the control they were losing as a result of society transitioning away from its traditional white Christian patriarchal power structure into a system that focused on equality for all.  If they couldn't stop black people from becoming citizens, the very least they could do is protect "their women" from the evil Negro "darkies" (this sentiment also played into the prohibition of marijuana, with the head of the Bureau of Narcotics Anslinger testifying to Congress, among other things, that "this marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes").  In addition to threatening their status in society, the idea of black men mating with white women struck these Southern white men to their biological core - it would leave fewer "pure" candidates for these men to select as mates to spread their seed, meaning they wouldn't have as much control over society.  As such, their fight-or-flight instincts quickly kicked in.

A narrative then emerged about the "predator" black male who likes to rape otherwise pure white women. This narrative served the dual purpose of inciting violence on black males while also exerting control over white women.  The white males discouraged white women from mating with black men, their direct biological and social competition, by making the women fear the sex-crazed Negros who want to rape them and take their virginity (requiring the preservation of virginity for marriage is just one other means of exerting control in a patriarchal society).

Why did white males choose the narrative of rape?  For one, they pulled an old trick used frequently by the far right - most recently, when the North Carolina legislature responded to unfounded fears of Sharia Law by attempting to pass Christian laws - and accused the other side of something of which they themselves were guilty.  Going back to the time of slavery, white male rape of black women was a routine phenomenon. Many slave owners saw it as their right to use their property however they chose, and even post-slavery, black women had little protection in this regard.  So they jumped at the first opportunity to transfer this rapist persona to black men, which was an easy story to make up since they knew it so well.  For another, they saw the rape narrative as the best way to discourage the behavior they most feared - white women mating with black men - by making it to be the thing that the WOMEN should most fear.  (Here we see another example of the inability of the far right to understand the distinction between "sex" and "rape," just like in modern debates on abortion restrictions).

This abhorrently racist narrative has persisted to the current day, where it forms the basis for the inherent suspicion of black males as violent, especially young, virile black men (ie the most likely to be uncontrollable sex fiends), although the black male/white female dichotomy is no longer as great of an importance to the narrative.  When you buy into the mindset that "the real problem is black on black crime," and race riots are a legitimate fear because black people are for some reason inherently violent, you are perpetuating the deepest kind of institutional racism that goes back to the foundation of our country, even if you have no personal racist intentions.  It's what keeps us in a society where Trayvon Martin was blamed for his own death, not the white-looking man who pursued and gunned Trayvon down because he thought he "looked suspicious." Laws like Stand Your Ground just add more fuel to the fire of a situation that already existed.  We need to recognize these truths together as a society if we hope to make real, lasting progress towards fighting the systemic racism that still plagues our great nation.