When The Narrative Shifts To Black-on-black Crime, Tell Them This…

One of the nar­ra­tives that have been bandied about when­ev­er black peo­ple talk about the unlaw­ful police killing of black peo­ple, is the talk of [black on black crime].
I have said this before, peo­ple kill who they see, who they are around. In a video response to a social media post by Candace Owens in which she attempt­ed to reduce the killing of Ahmaud Arbery to some­thing that is not a [lynch­ing], I addressed that issue. She sought to ren­der the young man’s killing some­thing oth­er than a man just jog­ging but a man who through his own actions was arguably respon­si­ble for his own bru­tal murder.

Without re-lit­i­gat­ing the non­sense, I will speak to the ques­tion of why it is incor­rect to make a com­ment about black-on-black crimes, with­out first under­stand­ing or includ­ing the fun­da­men­tals of the insti­tu­tion­al­ized road­blocks that have been mount­ed in the way of African-Americans, result­ing in the soci­etal mal­adies that may be evi­dent in their com­mu­ni­ties today. After slav­ery was even­tu­al­ly abol­ished on paper, states and com­mon­wealths embarked on a sys­temic attack against the recent­ly freed men & women who had just got­ten their so-called “free­dom”.
I should hur­ry to point out that across the entire spec­trum where Black-African peo­ple were kid­napped from their homes and sub­ject­ed to unimag­in­able treat­ment includ­ing enslave­ment, no effort has been made to make them free much less to com­pen­sate them or their off­springs for the dehu­man­iz­ing treat­ment they suffered. 

There is a dif­fer­ence between set­ting some­one from & mak­ing them free.
I can set a per­son free in the mid­dle of the Sahara desert with no water, food, direc­tions, or trans­porta­tion and then claim that I set him free.
Without pro­vid­ing the tools men­tioned, I mere­ly set the per­son free, I did not make him free.
Without those tools, the per­son has almost no chance of sur­vival.
That has been the black expe­ri­ence in the west­ern world.
There were no forty acres and a mule the prover­bial promise made by the American gov­ern­ment to blacks which it imme­di­ate­ly reneged on.

Slave own­ers have been com­pen­sat­ed, all across the west­ern world in which the das­tard­ly act of slav­ery was prac­ticed. Yet, the peo­ple that suf­fered the most, “the enslaved peo­ple them­selves,” have been denied any attempt at a just sem­blance of com­pen­sa­tion, for what has been done to them.
No amount of mon­ey could begin to com­pen­sate for the geno­cide and enslave­ment that was vis­it­ed on black Africans, yet rather than mak­ing an attempt to air out what occurred and begin­ning a process of resti­tu­tion and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, west­ern nations, includ­ing the United States, has stead­fast­ly refused to address the issue.

Killing a child’s par­ents then laugh­ing at the child and berat­ing him for being an orphan requires some kind of bold-faced audac­i­ty. Yet is what those who would gaslight and weaponize black vio­lence seeks to accom­plish.
Even giv­en the priv­i­lege of white skin, remov­ing cer­tain basic ameni­ties from peo­ple, leads to dev­as­tat­ing neg­a­tive con­se­quences for them.
The so-called opi­oid cri­sis is one exam­ple of that.….Six states — Montana, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Oklahoma — actu­al­ly expe­ri­enced decreas­es in opi­oid death rates between 2007 and 2017. By con­trast, The Rust Belt suf­fered the largest increas­es in opi­oid over­dose death rates over the same time frame. Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio all expe­ri­enced increas­es in excess of 300 per­cent. According to the (Sentinel​.com).
The real­i­ty is that in over­whelm­ing num­bers, these deaths are white peo­ple in areas where fac­to­ries have closed and peo­ple have found them­selves with­out good-pay­ing jobs, or no jobs at all.

The sad irony is that when African-Americans suf­fered the strain of pover­ty, high unem­ploy­ment, police tyran­ny, sub­stan­dard schools, poor liv­ing con­di­tions, dirty drink­ing water, dirty air to breathe, poor health­care, and all of the oth­er struc­tur­al con­structs cod­i­fied into law by their own gov­ern­ment, and they end­ed up using crack cocaine that was plant­ed in the com­mu­ni­ties, they were char­ac­ter­ized as crim­i­nals, ani­mals, unwor­thy of atten­tion.
Instead of deal­ing with it as a social issue, the American gov­ern­ment dou­bled down by acti­vat­ing its so-called war on drugs.
The war on drugs end­ed up adding insult to the injury of the indig­ni­ty that 500 years of oppres­sion had wrought. It was no war on drugs, it was a war on black peo­ple designed to pack the for-prof­it pris­ons with black bod­ies.
With the fraud­u­lent war rag­ing on black and brown peo­ple, jail cells were filled, some with guilty some with the inno­cent swept up by the igno­ble system.

States then went ahead and passed laws mak­ing it impos­si­ble for a felon to vote, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for a felon to law­ful­ly own a gun.
So they took away one of the most fun­da­men­tal rights the black pop­u­la­tion had, the right to chose who rep­re­sents them polit­i­cal­ly, & then they went fur­ther elim­i­nat­ing their sec­ond amend­ment right to bear arms as well.
All this while whites in sub­ur­bia bought up all of the guns they need­ed, and binged on all the cocaine their lit­tle hearts desired.
Black Americans, users and push­ers were sadis­ti­cal­ly locked away and the keys dis­card­ed as a result of their new three-strikes laws, there was no empath or sym­pa­thy for nei­ther addicts nor their sup­pli­ers. Entire com­mu­ni­ties were dec­i­mat­ed. When they could not find enough crack addicts to fill the jails in their war on drugs they turned to pot sell­ers and smok­ers.
The over­whelm­ing black crack epi­dem­ic was crim­i­nal. The over­whelm­ing opi­oid abuse which is most­ly a white event, has been deemed a cri­sis.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
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