by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier
Critics of Black Lives Matter pointed out that the number of Blacks killed by White police officers accounted for less than 1 percent of the 7,000 Blacks killed annually. Then, the critics accused BLM of not condemning “Black-on-Black crime” with the same zeal they condemned police brutality.
Black opinion writers jumped to BLM’s defense.
They argued the term “Black-on-Black crime” was a racist myth created by White people to stereotype Black neighborhoods and keep Blacks incarcerated at disproportional rates. According to FBI data, Black people are murdered by other Black people 90 percent of the time, but 83 percent of White people were killed by other Whites.
The data proved murderers normally murder people of the same racial makeup.
Since Whites killed Whites all the time and no term “White-on-White crime” was ever invented to describe these killings, the Black opinion writers concluded there should be no term called “Black-on-Black crime” to describe the same criminal behavior. This is a valid point if White people invented the term “Black-on-Black crime”.
But they didn’t.
The earliest use of the phrase “Black-on-Black crime” can be found in the Black newspaper, The Chicago Daily Defender. During the 1968 riots, there was a huge disparity in police response to crimes. The report revealed that when stabbings, muggings, and rapes were “Black-on-Black”, these crimes were canceled out in the minds of White precinct commanders, but the police investigated these crimes when the victims were White. In this context, “Black-on-Black crime” pointed to the systemic neglect of Black victims.
With that said, the previous argument has a fundamental flaw.
By demonstrating Black criminals killed Blacks at around the same rate White criminals killed Whites, the Black opinion writers reversed the focus of “Black-on-Black crime” from the victims to the criminals.
This reversal ended up making racial disparities in the criminal justice system a top priority in order to make America more “equitable” for Black Americans. Meanwhile, from the victim’s perspective of “Black-on-Black crime”, the disparity is far worse. Blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population, but over half of all homicide victims are Black. In 2019 there were 14,414 total gun homicides in the United States, 7,590 Black males were murder victims along with 1,000 Black females, 2,261 murder victims were White males, and 1,955 murder victims were Hispanic males. That year, Blacks were over 60 percent of homicide victims.
Does this data reveal a racist myth, or does it reveal the neglect of Black victims?
This brings us to the White supremacist shooting in Buffalo that left 10 Black people dead. New York is one of several states that have abolished the death penalty. Once convicted, the White supremacist will receive a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
The death penalty has lost support over the decades.
The latest Pew Research Center data revealed that 60 percent of U.S. adults still favored the death penalty for people convicted of murder. That is a 15-percent drop since the turn of the century.
Is this gradual decline in support of capital punishment a sign of progress and moral maturity? Maybe. Most Americans, even supporters of capital punishment, are concerned with how it is administered and worry that innocent lives could be lost in the imperfect process. But public opinion didn’t influence the states that abolished the death penalty.
It was a matter of cost.
Time magazine reported that across the country, state governments are wrestling with tight budgets. Aging populations mean a rising demand for health care and retirement benefits. When more is spent to meet those commitments, less money is available. The death-penalty system is so slow, inconsistent, and inefficient that it costs far more than the life-without-parole alternative. Legislators understood the need to cut costs, but some wanted to restrict the death penalty to extreme cases like the murder of law enforcement officers, child rape and murder, and acts of terrorism.
Historically, what determined whether one received a death sentence was the race of the victim. The majority of people on death row were convicted of murdering a White person. Today, the majority of murder victims are Black, just as they were in the Buffalo White supremacist shooting, but the death penalty has been ruled out because it’s too costly.
Is that a sign of moral maturity or a sign of neglect of Black victims?