I've now heard this one too many times to think there is not something behind this, perhaps a right wing radio show with which I'm not familiar. A new one, "he was no angel," seems to be just out of the deranged womb that spawned "black on black." Even on the "Dr. Drew" show, which I just turned on for a moment out of curiosity during a commercial break, what did I see? An apparently "white" woman making this claim. But the problem is, what is the claim? I have yet to hear anyone explain what their point is. Don't statistics tell us that whatever your "race"/ethnicity, you are likely to be murdered by one of your own? And aren't you more likely to be killed by someone you know rather than a stranger? If I think a relative of mine is a psychopath, should I strike preemptively?
Much more below.
Seriously, my guess is that the claim here is if you are more likely to be killed by a particular kind of person then before you protest against being killed by a different kind of person you should protest against being killed by a similar kind of person. Huh? What is there to protest? Do those people not usually get arrested for murder? Don't they usually get convicted? In fact, this makes such an argument one that supports the Ferguson protesters' point, that is, if "white" cops killing unarmed "blacks" or Hispanics is so rare, then the cases we know about, which almost always resulted in little or no prison time (Eric Garner, Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, bridge killing during Katrina, etc.) suggest that there is major injustice in the nation in at least this context!
Of course, there is also the possibility that this is a "tip of the iceberg" phenomenon, meaning that the killings only occur rarely but all kinds of other brutality and unfair treatment is quite common. What is required is a very good study, which none of the "black on black" proponents ever seem to produce. I asked one of them, a neighbor, if this person could tell me the name of one town that had a population of around 20,000 (or more), with about a two thirds (or more) "white" population, but with a police department that is over 90% "black." As you might expect, there was silence, and then I asked if this person thought there were other towns like Ferguson or if that was the only one in the nation with such a disparity. More silence.
When I was growing up, there were plenty of "white" police officers around (my father was one and then my brother became one at a young age). They seemed more interested in avoiding conflict (big city departments), and one cop who worked as my father's partner for perhaps two years was known as a guy you couldn't count on to back you up, actually. What I wonder is if since Obama was elected and the Tea Party, "birther," etc. crowd began to poison the minds of many police departments, generating an intense "us versus them" and paranoid quality. After seeing the Dan Page video on youtube, one has to wonder if there are some direct connections here!
In any case, getting back to the "black on black violence" claim, after hearing it on "Dr. Drew" (and quickly turning to another channel, as two people were just yelling at each other), my thought was, why not say "black on black" when someone brings up terrorism? Or natural disasters that are common to an area? Isn't a person much more likely to be killed by someone similar than by a foreign Muslim terrorist, for example? I guess it's easy to say "black on black violence" when you have no fear that what happened to Michael Brown will happen to your child! And I wouldn't be surprised if one is more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than anyone else. Should we tell the Ferguson protesters that they should be protesting against drunk drivers instead of a police officer who apparently decided to be judge, jury, and executioner because a teenager jay walked and ignored commands to go onto the sidewalk?
Perhaps drunk drivers should be held more accountable than they often are, and I'm reminded of the "affluenze" case, where the driver who killed people received no prison time, but isn't this one of the best examples of "apples and oranges" one can imagine? Aren't I allowed to walk and chew gum at the same time? Moreover, do the "black on black" claimants understand the notion of justice? If a person kills another and is arrested and convicted, almost everyone would agree that justice had been done, unless the sentence was very lenient. You can argue that there is no need for justice in the Michael Brown killing because you think the officer acted appropriately, but you can't demand that other people share your understanding of the concept of justice. That is the whole point of the right to protest!
If you think that "black on black" violence is an injustice, then why aren't you organizing a protest? This doesn't make any sense because it is a statistic (I'm assuming it is accurate), and one does not protest statistics but rather the conditions that at least some people believe are unjust and lead to certain statistics being generated. Most likely, if one studies this statistic, one would find that important factors are poverty, lack of economic or educational opportunities, etc., none of which are contentious, in that nobody is for those kinds of things. Does anybody support poverty or lack of opportunity? You don't need to protest that, but you might want to protest against racial discrepancies that appear to lead to such problems being pronounced among certain kinds of people. Or is it simply that most people who use such phrases would like to say clearly racist things but know that this is as far as they can go without generating outrage against themselves? When one of them decides to explain this notion, rather than simply parroting it, perhaps we will have a much better idea of what is meant.