The frequently-used "Blacks kill blacks, and it's overlooked" argument (Black Lives Matter)

Whenever the Black Lives Matter issue is brought up, one is likely to encounter an argument along the following lines:

“In America, there are many black people who are killed by other black people. The BLM folks are silent about this, in comparison to the furor when a white cop kills a black person.”
I think both sides have a point.
On the one side, yes, it’s true, there are many black people in America who are killed by other black people. Black vs. black violence does indeed cause a substantial number of deaths. And it’s true that black vs. black homicide doesn’t seem to generate anywhere near the furor that white vs. black homicide does.

And - it is true that, technically, a life is a life, and a black person killed by another black person is just as dead as a black person killed by a white person. So an outside might argue, if black lives matter, then isn’t a black life lost to a homicide committed by a black killer, just as important as a black life lost to a homicide committed by a white killer?
But on the other hand, it is true also the people tend to emphasize things more if there is malice involved, and specifically if it is malice from an outside group, or “the other side.” When more than 2,000 Americans were killed in 9/11, it got far more attention than the thousands of Americans who die in car accidents or of diseases that year. When a white person kills a black person, there is definitely an element of race and “them vs. us” and “this is an attack on us from an outside group” that is not present when it is a black person that kills a black person.

So all said and done, is there validity to the argument that the Black Lives Matter does not put enough focus on black vs. black violence, or is a homicide indeed different when it is a matter of one race vs. another race, as opposed to homicides committed by members of one race against other people of the same race?

There doesn’t have to be a good side and a bad side. Cops aren’t all good and blacks aren’t all good. Cops aren’t all bad and blacks aren’t all bad.

Cops shouldn’t be pulling over cars just because there’s a black person driving. Cops shouldn’t go nuts when the word “gun” is mentioned any more frequently when dealing with a black person than a white person.

Blacks shouldn’t kill each other more frequently than other people in similar circumstances.

In these instances both sides are bad. Both sides have some work to do.

How does black people killing black people have any relevance wrt the fact that cops, doctors, judges and so on demonstrably seem to have little regard for the lives of black people, exactly ? Imagine this : a black guy kills a white guy. On trial, he tries to defend his crime with “weeell, yeah it’s bad but white people sure kill a lot of white people. World war 2, the Holocaust, Manson and every serial killer or postal shooter ever… Seems like white people don’t value white lives so why should I ?”
How would that fly, exactly ?

Especially given that so-called “black on black crime” is mostly a byproduct of blacks being forced into ethnic ghettos through economic and social pressures, economic mobility being a myth in modern day America for the most part and impoverished people regardless of their skin colour being drawn to crime, and poor criminals more often than not preying on their own poor neighbourhoods rather than rich ones because a) it’s cheaper and b) rich neighbourhoods actually have security and shit to drive the poors out ?

Black on black violence is a white guy’s deflection.

It also rather ignores the point that there are and have been substantial efforts to address black-on-black violence. It’s not remotely “overlooked”.

Yes and no. From what I understand (… mostly from watching The Wire) society and its administrations don’t exactly go out of their way to prevent or punish ghetto murders. Which, yanno, is not on the ghetto either.

Don’t they? There’s an awful lot of black men in prison for murder and they didn’t all kill white people.

But I was thinking more along these lines.

I’m aware that such things don’t get noticed in certain circles but there are plenty of government and grass-roots initiatives on this particular issue.

This argument is one of the reasons why I think that the discussion of police - black interaction is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, it’s true that blacks kill each other blacks in astoundingly high numbers, the end result of communities that are economically and socially fractured. But how did it get to be this way? This is the product of centuries of race-based subjugation.

One of the things that people use to discredit black victims of police abuse is to point to their prior criminal history or the fact that they were breaking the law at the time of their encounters with police. In the case of Philando Castle, for example, people say, “Well come on, the guy had 80 citations.” And that might be true. But more than half were thrown out. Moreover, when someone gets ensnared in the legal system with minimal resources to dig themselves to navigate its treacherous waters, they get more citations, fines, court rulings against them. Before long, they are no longer being punished for their own misdeed, they are being punished for their lack of awareness of the legal system’s complexity and potentially onerous ramifications.

In the case of Alton Sterling, people will say “Well he had a gun on him, and he was a convicted felon.” Maybe so, but he was also hustling to make some cash in a dangerous part of Baton Rouge that is known for violent assaults. As someone who carried cash on him, he knew he was a target. Illegal, yes, but again, why was Alton Sterling reduced to being a hustler? Probably because he grew up in a community that has for centuries been cut off economically, socially, politically from the white mainstream that has all the power.

Blacks end up breaking the white man’s law because they have been put in communities where it is difficult for them to join the mainstream economies. They feel pushed into participating in the underground economies that lure them with quick cash, but then end up getting ground into a pulp by a legal system that over time rules out the possibility of ever having the hope of meaningful employment. So they end up hustling to make cash, which in turn itself leads to more encounters with the police, who became not the protectors against other black criminals but are instead viewed as the most visible and direct representation of black oppression.

Here’s the biggest concern that I have with the line of argument that was referenced in the OP. What do we want the standard for using deadly force to become? Do we want it to be fear of what someone in custody might do, or do we want it to be reasonable fear for one’s safety based on a clear and present danger? I think if we allow police to kill someone simply because they felt afraid, that is setting the bar dangerously low. It’s also incredibly vague. We live in a society where people can carry firearms openly or legally conceal them. In some states, it’s legal to keep a firearm in your glove box, where we might also tend to store our auto registration and proof of insurance. Is one furtive move justification for the use of deadly force?

Which brings me to my final point: Black people see an unequal standard being applied here. The FBI waits out a bunch of armed lunatics who take over federal land in Oregon and brings them into custody alive. They brought Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 165 people in a federal building, into custody alive. They bring the Charleston church shooter into custody alive. But if you’re a black guy simply hustling on the streets like Eric Garner in NY or Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, you get killed for not obeying a policeman’s orders. So we’re dealing with the initial insult of inequality of a system that creates community dysfunction, and then the inequality of a system that treats suspects in two different communities differently as well. Until white America understands this, don’t expect a black person to take seriously the lectures about how blacks kill other blacks. Even if the message is valid, the messenger lacks credibility. And I say this as a white man.

This is a complete non-sequitor. The OP does not remotely claim that white on black murder is ok.

I’d like to know what “the white man’s law” is…

Yeah, but the question isn’t race there, as I see it. As far as anyone knows, did McVeigh or Roof resist arrest? I can’t remember there being any mention of it in the media at all- I’ve always had the impression that both of them surrendered non-violently and were treated much the same as anyone would if they didn’t resist.

Garner and Sterling chose to resist, in whatever fashion, and the cops escalated. Incorrectly, in Garner’s case, and in Sterling’s case, the investigation isn’t over yet, so I’m not going to opine just yet.

In either case, that’s not quite “getting killed for not obeying a policeman’s orders”- it’s more like not obeying a cop and escalating the situation to the point where something unfortunate happened.

Both sides need to be responsible; it’s not at all uncommon to see videos of black guys like say… Eric Garner acting in ways that I, as a white guy woudn’t dream of doing, because you know, that’s liable to get me a beat down, or worse from the cops. So if a middle-aged white guy from the suburbs knows better, why in the world is a black guy from a rough part of town doing exactly that sort of thing? It’s kind of inexplicable and baffling.

That said, the cops need to de-escalate in most cases, rather than go nuclear.

Society and politics and media do not ignore black crime. They just paint it as endemic and routine and intractable and expected and no-longer-a-tragedy.

That is a different question from whether the same black leaders who fight police abuse also organize around anti-crime efforts. They do. The media and white society just doesn’t care.

(Also, since I’m promoting it in every other thread, there’s an excellent book written about the OP’s topic called Ghettoside by Jill Leovy. Highly recommended.)

To me, it’s not about a “white killer”, it’s about a white killer who is a cop. A cop who swore an oath.

It’s nonsensical and illogical. More blacks are killed by other black civilians than by police. More whites are killed by other white civilians than by police. So? When civilians kill each other, it’s murder. It’s being done by criminals. We expect criminal civilians to murder people. It’s what they do. We don’t expect policemen to murder people. Their crimes are not justified by the existence of civilian criminals.

IIRC, in both the cases of white and black people, both groups (and hispanics too for that matter) tend to kill others of their ‘race’ more than they do other races. I.E. a black is more likely to be killed by another black, and white by another white, and a hispanic by another hispanic. Generally, unless those killings are particularly spectacular or gruesome they go relatively lightly unreported. The killings that capture the headlines are when a black person kills a white person, or a cop (of any race, but particularly a white cop) kills a black person or a hispanic (you don’t often get a lot of furor when a cop kills a white person, which is the majority of killings by cop, though the percentages verse population means blacks get killed disproportionately higher by cops than whites or hispanics).

I think that the BLM folks are mostly silent on crimes that involve individuals killing each other, and focus more on establishment figures such as police killing black people because this tends to show that black people are being targeted and profiled more by cops than other races…and, as noted above, are killed at a disproportionately higher rate wrt the percentage of the population than other races, including hispanics. THAT is the issue they are trying to bring to peoples attention and focus on, so it’s not surprising that when these things happen, as opposed to individuals killing each other, they tend to come out and protest…it’s what they are wanting to address, after all, and the situation they want the public at large to see and understand.

It’s not purely a cop vs. civilian issue though. When person of Race A kills a person of Race B, it is indeed given more coverage and attention than when person of Race B kills a person of Race B.

It’s what they have in White America, dontchaknow.

Of course not. But people who do respond to “black lives matter” with “yeah ? But what about black on black crime ?!” implicitly do. That, or they’re making their own non sequitur.

Black criminals kill black people. Is that the standard the citizens in this country feel the police should be measured against?

I think a lot depends on the values of A and B.

Bolding mine and that’s the heart of it right there.

The argument in question is stupid and is only used to distract from the issue at hand, IMO.

We specifically pay police to protect us, not to kill us.