If you have read my blog before, you know I have expressed the idea that black on black crime does and does not exist.
It does exist in one way because crime is intraracial in the black community.
But you can say black-on-black crime "doesn't exist" in that black on black crime isn't any more intraracial than white-on-white crime or latinx-on-latinx crime. Specifying "black on black" crime is like saying "the round wheels on my car are great" as if there are some square wheels or triangular wheels that might be better. Crime is intraracial. White-on-white and Latinx-on-Latinx crime exist too and usually at rates above 84%
Intraracial crime in the black community was most famously given the special, little, catch phrase-y name of "black-on-black crime" by President Ronald Wilson Reagan during speeches for the purposes of making black people look dramatically more pathological than white people.
Mission Accomplished: There are tons of black people ashamed of the black community for black-on-black crime to this day. And they focus on black unity instead of black poverty, using pseudo black failure as a reason to turn away in disgust while saying to themselves "I'm glad not I'm not like that"Even though intraracial crime isn't any more intraracial for black and brown people than it is for white people, it does occur at higher absolute numbers because crime usually happens with more frequency and violence where people are poor.
When black and brown and first nations people are abandoned and segregated from the rest of the population in places where there isn't industry or jobs, a large portion of the community is poor and a small section becomes desperate. And where there are poor and desperate people without much hope for better, there's more crime.
And where there's poverty, desperation, and white supremacist assumption of black inferiority, there is a ready made excuse for the police to not do very much policing of the 10%(?) that are doing ALL of the crime, to just sit and watch violence explode in places like Chicago. In fact, deFacto Segregated Chicago perfectly demonstrates this.
Black people fled the south and Jim Crow during "The Great Migration" from 1915 to 1970. Thinking they were leaving racism behind and fleeing into jobs they settled, in large numbers, in places like Chicago. And when the poor blacks moved in those that owned everything and did the hiring and firing everywhere, the white people, took to doing their white flight routine.
And when some 80% (?) of the population, the white population, in mid to late 20th century, refused to live in any area that was more than 7%(?) black, that ensured property values dropped down to nothing. A ghetto with low property values and therefore low property taxes and therefore bad schools was created. (Book / Paper Recommendation: AMERICAN APARTHEID )
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| MOST RECENT DOT CENSUS MAP OF SEGREGATED CHICAGOGREEN DOTS = BLACK PEOPLE YELLOWISH DOTS = LATINX PEOPLE, BLUE DOTS = WHITE PEOPLE AND RED DOTS ARE ASIAN PEOPLE |
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| Violence Of Poor White People Is Glorified |
When a population of men cannot execute their "provider role" with ease, some become violent because they are looking for other avenues to prove masculinity. In America a man can prove masculinity by
- competition -earning a lot more money than the next guy
- competition - doing better at sports than the next guy as a kid or as an adult making a lot of money
- competition - being physically stronger and / or scarier than the next guy
- competition - the sexual conquest of women, getting more women than the next guy
The black population has a poverty rate that is usually 2.5 to 3x that of white people at any given time since 1970s or so. Therefore black men cannot use (1) to prove masculinity like upper middle class white guys and rich white men like Donald Trump do.
This means that black men are more often left with (2) (3) and (4) as ways of proving masculinity. Black men that aren't extra talented sports stars are left with (3) and (4). And if a black man is living in a place like de facto segregated Chicago, where there aren't jobs that will let him earn enough money to be THE provider and he is also willing to deal drugs, then he's back to (1) (3) and (4) as ways of proving masculinity.
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| MALE UNEMPLOYMENT AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE GRAPH |
Turning to crime isn't the only thing that men suffering from frustrated toxic masculinity do. When men get angry with themselves and can't prove masculinity via a provider role, the other thing that they do is beat women.
In the graphic to the right, you can see unemployment increase as a result of the near depression the banksters took us into in 2007 and 2008.
And beating women when frustrated about not being able to get a job is not unique to American men either. This is a world wide phenomenon.
This article makes this tendency of men to beat women when economically frustrated about their provider role sound new, but authors like Chester Himes were writing about this happening in the black community decades ago.
A man wanting to be THE provider doesn't sound like much of a threat to the black community in general and black women specifically. And it isn't until it intersects with poverty and white supremacy based segregation --a segregation that usually means being segregated from a location where jobs are plentiful.
Some men are able to go to work at McDonalds, be way underpaid, and combine their income with 3 or 4 other adults to pay rent on a one bedroom hovel in the inner city. Women do this all the time. The accept that they were work hard, barely be paid, and maybe sexually harassed to boot. But men can swallow being underpaid less frequently because they are supposed to be "the provider"
Anti-feminist men, and a lot of anti-feminist women too, are taught to see the financial condition household, good or bad, as a result of the grown male's effort rather than a team effort of everyone in the household -- like black families probably did in days closer to slavery.
A black feminist would not allow this kind of pressure to be put on "the man of the house," would not enable the thinking, in son or husband, that masculinity must be proved using some combination of (1) (2) (3) and (4). A feminist would not allow this because a black feminist with common sense knows that good men can be pressured into becoming criminals in the patriarchal system of masculinity creation.
Central Park Five Example:
In 1989 five black and brown teenage boys were arrested for the rape of a well-heeled white woman in Central Park. Rapes of Puerto Rican and Black Women in Central Park had gone unchecked and unmentioned in the news in the 1980s. But when this white woman was raped, her story went national, and was on the front page of a lot of newspapers -- when the powers that be really don't give a damn about the rape of women, even white women. The black and brown boys were tricked into confessing and went to jail for years before the real rapist, already in jail, confessed to raping (a) the-white-woman-that-mattered and (b) a number of black and Puerto Rican women that he raped before and after THE white woman.
Before The Central Park Five's innocence was established, one of the accused got out of jail and couldn't get a job because of being labeled an "ex-con" His pride was so hurt over being unable to get a job, he was so ashamed of eating at his father's table without being able to "provide" anything, he started dealing drugs as a way to get money. He wound up going back to jail.
A woman in a parallel situation would have been able to participate in her parents household (or a new husbands household(?)) by cooking, cleaning, taking care of children etc. A man would be able to also if it weren't for hard gender roles and toxic masculinity.
In fact, if black men who saw women as true equals and what's been called "women's work" as dignified work, then throughout African American History, black men would have been able to work in the home when it was financially advantageous to do so -- instead of abandoning their wives and children because they were ashamed of not-being the provider. With masculinity shaped as it is currently, by men, the most of the men willing to stay home and not work for a wage are the ones willing to take advantage of a woman, the ones who wind up doing nothing -- not even the cleaning, not even the cooking, not even the changing of diapers in the middle of the night when she has to work and not taking kids to school, band practice, or the doctor.
Even though it was the Puerto Rican member of the Central Park Five that went back to jail for a while, to me this proves the point that toxic masculinity combined with poverty drives decent men into crime. Furthermore, proving masculinity using (3), being tougher, is the thing that adds violence to the alternative economy of drug dealing etc.
In conclusion, I'd say that higher absolute numbers of intraracial crime in black neighborhoods and the attending violence of so called "black-on-black" crime, would be more accurately described as TOXIC MASCULINITY on TOXIC MASCULINITY crime.
Furthermore, toxic masculinity on toxic masculinity crime is the reason 1.5 million black men are missing. TM-on TM crime is also the reason why there is so much more black single motherhood than is healthy for a community -- TM at high levels, even without crime, means that black single mothers are often better off raising a child alone if they cannot find a feminist minded man.
White Toxic Masculinity with money means that a white woman that's a lazy princess or a silly drudge can get by --until she's divorced, raped, or in a custody battle with someone that's rich.
Black women don't have the white female luxury of finding out TM has been kicking them in the teeth until they are 25 and raped or 40 years old and being raked over the coals by an attorney. Black girls start being told they are less than black boys, almost from birth. In tears, I've read at least four stories this year where black girls raped at college or high school apologized for even thinking about reporting a black male rapist.
The Black Lives Matter movement was started by black women and black women still can't get any respect. It's galling that #SayHerName had to be created to add black women BACK to Black Lives Matter and that for the most part it's really not working.
It's mother *$^%^$%! unacceptable that Alton Sterling, a black man straight executed by white police officers, was a sexual predator who was probably raising male children to think like he did, has garnered more outrage in the black community than the shooting of Korryn Gaines herself and Korryn Gaines's child when all the Baltimore police had to do was w a i t l o n g e r, just 1/10th the amount of time they waited for the wackos holding white children in David Koresh's cult.
We cannot afford the black male version of toxic masculinity. It's killing us all.
Tomorrow: How "ONLY BLUE LIVES MATTER" is another form of Toxic Masculinity on Toxic Masculinity Crime.
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