Homicide is the leading cause of death in Black men* aged 20-44. While any federal data collected by the state on us should be taken with a grain of salt, in 2015, Black men committed 36% of all government recorded homicides, and were 52% of murder victims.
Considerable danger lies in how media, political institutions, and even philanthropic foundations interpret and address this substantial number of Black men who are perpetrators and victims of homicide. These assumptive logics manifest as harmful legislation, such as the Biden/Clinton-backed 1994 crime bill, which helped propel the mass incarceration of Black men, and as anti-Black consensuses across the political spectrum.
Calls from recent uprisings have made clear an abolitionist desire to undo and reimagine “public safety.” Straw man arguments presented by both the Right and the alleged Left in opposition to these demands highlight the persistence of homicides as a key obstacle to a society without police. These arguments ultimately pathologize the actions of poor Black men, reading them through lenses of conventional Western ethics, morality and theories of political economy — as opposed to a lens of Black radical tradition.
For example, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms recently responded to the likely accidental but no less devastating killing of Secoriea Turner, an 8-year-old girl riding by in a car at a protest for Rayshard Brooks, by placing the blame on Black people as a whole. “We are doing each other more harm than any police officer on this force,” Bottoms remarked, implying that an individual member of the Black community’s actions can weaken our collective case for not being murdered by police officers.
Conservative thought leader Candace Owens would agree, as she also highlights “Black-on-Black crime” and the “demise” of the nuclear Black family as a way to dismiss the significance of state-sanctioned violence against Black people. These common conceptions are weaponized to suggest Black criminality as uniquely deviant.
But Black men’s “senseless” acts of violence are much more sophisticated in nature than both the liberal and conservative anti-abolition culture of poverty argument would have one believe. Ultimately, interpreting Black men’s actions as the result of failed political-economic systems ignores the fact that all Black people are capable of acting out of ingenuity and not merely instinct.
This is true regardless if our methods feel good against someone else’s morality or are palatable enough to one day be incorporated by the state, the university, or white people. Black struggle isn’t simply defined by what appeals a Black person makes to or demands from “them,” but also what a Black person reclaims on their own terms. These methods and ways of being emerge by simply living and dying Black.
This call for complexity regarding Black violence should not be confused as a co-sign, especially where the harm of Black children, elders, women, and queer and trans people is involved and needs to be addressed. This shift in interpretation does, however, insist that Black men deserve to be engaged in our fullness, free from pathology, in order to lessen that harm.
Contrary to what Bottoms or Owens might suggest, genuine mourning and care around the loss of Black life exists in Black communities. We don’t need to dismiss the significant rates of Black male perpetrated homicide as an issue of misleading statistics that don’t account for segregation in order to justify our fight against police violence. Currently, organizations such as Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings and the Community Action Justice Fund are confronting the layered issue of interpersonal gun violence in their neighborhoods.
OG’s in the barbershop even warn us against this violence, reminding us that killing each other is what “they” want us to do. Their work reveals that our bravest efforts do not involve fighting for our right to transgress one another at “equal” or even “lesser” rates as other racial groups. Instead, these efforts showcase a desire for Black folks’ lives to be affirmed, at minimum, by one another in an anti-Black world.
It’s quite concerning that much of the imagined possibility to affirm one another is contingent upon the state admitting and addressing its many “failures” (ironies/paradoxes are more precise framings). Progressives and even some anarchists routinely point to inadequate education, a lack of affordable housing and the inability to move up in or maintain class status as causing traumatic stress for Black men. Well-meaning advocates consider these conditions to engender apathy between Black men that causes “senseless” intra-racial (and intra-sexed) homicide.
This rationale prevails even though CDC data (albeit another source deserving of skepticism) suggest Black men are not any more hopeless than white men. While our causes of hopelessness certainly differ, it’s dangerous to suggest that the difference in cause (for which the state is accountable) has led to Black men resolving the ethics of killing without rhyme or reason. To do so would imply a violent pathology and disregard Black men’s agency and ingenuity.
Data on murder concentration within specific clusters and social networks of people makes clear that the majority of people living in high-poverty areas are not perpetrating gun violence — regardless of circumstances. “If single parent families, or poverty, or easy gun availability were the main drivers of gun violence,” David Kennedy, a white researcher at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, explained in an interview with the Guardian, “that should result in vastly more violence than there is.”
Kennedy coming to this conclusion as a white man is likely wrapped up in a desire to make mockery of U.S political theater, but dead clocks are right twice a day, and this observation can be retooled and used to different ends.
Much of the advocacy offered to Black men is undergirded by a logic modeled around a lacking, disenchanted, and destitute subject who has been “failed” by various systems and thus acts “immorally” and “senselessly” amongst all those they come in contact with.
This framework enables the paternalistic reforms Black men endure, such as Bloomberg’s 2011 Young Men’s Intiative, a public-private partnership that invested $127 million into programs for youth and was ignited by a report compiled by philanthropic leaders that suggested New York City, among many other things, begin “encouraging more fathers to be involved in the lives of their children.” Of course fatherhood is important, but there is no plausible way that the city could be the ones genuinely concerned with the separation of our families, while also being responsible for it.
Our ancestors knew this type of paternalism in ways we often ignore. Slaves in route to the New World routinely attempted and died by suicide as an act of rebellion. Historians say that captors would try their best not to allow slaves to die willingly, catching and reincorporating them to the ship if they tried jumping — even as grim as they knew their own intentions to be.
In 1803, slaves rebelled on the Wanderer, drowning captors and successfully grounding the ship at what is now known as Igbo Landing. When on land, some chose to walk into the water intentionally and drown themselves. This tradition may seem distant from the homicidal violence we see in our communities today, but it’s no coincidence that, for example, Black male perpetrated homicide involving gangs (which are surely sophisticated social groups) are also considered by policy makers and influencers as expressions of suicidal tendencies. In both cases, Black people are positioned to be “rescued” and told that we shouldn’t be able to set the terms for how we live and die.
CDC data shows Black men aged 20-44 are two times as likely to die from heart disease than we are suicide, making heart disease third-most killer for Black men in this age group. The field of public health shamelessly concedes that economic conditions such as inefficient diets, a lack of transportation to quality food, and unaffordable health care causes heart disease and kills Black men in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Under this irony, gang warfare and dying via acquaintance, supposed transgression, and beef over intergenerational disputes and sovereignty of complex territories — instead of avoidable heart disease — could also be read as a radical refusal of the state’s mapped out methods of death for Black people, but it isn’t.
How might we understand the persistent refusal on behalf of Black male homicide perpetrators in gangs and otherwise to die on the state’s terms? What do they gain from their rejection of incorporation into this system? How are they denying Biden-ism and the unending lesser of two evils fallacy? Can “Black-on-Black” homicide be considered a radical act of refusal?
These were pressing questions I had as I watched Bastards of the Party, a 2005 documentary on the history of L.A gang culture. The film makes clear how easily the first gangs of L.A can be understood as a part of a Black radical tradition — they rallied and fought fiercely against white folks, protecting their communities and “opening up” parts of the city to Black people previously deemed inaccessible and unsafe. The film marked the early 1970’s as the onset of a rise in inter-communal homicide. The media at the time of course played a huge role in shaping our interpretation of these matters, specifically focusing on the killing of a 53-year old man for his leather jacket as unruly and barbaric.
But I understand the sum of these gang activities (even ones that upset my own moral and striving political boundaries such as gendered violence against other Black people) as being responsive to the social, political, and economic fabric of the United States.
Black male homicide perpetrators in gangs reimagined geographies with deadly consequences — just as cities and corporations do with environmental racism, forcing Black folks to live by toxic oil drilling rigs in South L.A. They retaliated for lost loved ones and clearly defined justice and reconciliation for themselves within the carceral state of California, with its prison population of about 120,000 people. They took an innocent life over a leather jacket — a luxury good made possible by global capitalism — as Pakistani residents die from a variety of disorders and malignancies from polluted water, air, and soil caused by the production of leather.
It’s clear that Black male perpetrators of homicide, the silent subjects of “Black-on-Black” crime, are much more than neglected by-products of an economic experiment gone wrong. Perhaps they’ve instead long begun reorganizing ethics, adjusting their faith in the state as something salvageable, disassociated with modernity’s prescriptions, and most importantly, refused anti-Blackness as a type of social death without rhyme or reason. The outcomes, rather it be the be “criminal” acts that make them more vulnerable to carceral capture—or consequences of patriarchy such as violence against queer and trans people—require an inter-communal reckoning that shouldn’t share the anti-Black way of pathologizing them with the state.
Those made intimately familiar with the everyday mechanisms of anti-Blackness have always refused it and recaptured life (and death) on their own terms in ways that the state would never give them credit for — lest it say goodbye to its old self and acknowledge a world within, and outside, of a world already.
*Editor’s Note: Although most of the referenced data refers to “Black males” we are using the term “Black men” in this essay. We understand that not all people identified in this data are men, but considering that “males” is not a term based on consistent science, and so not all identified in this data would be considered “males” either, we made this decision for readability.
Suggested Reading:
Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson
Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Bastards of the Party, Cle Sloan
Jacques P. Lesure is an advocate, striving truth-teller, and Ph.D student from the eastside of Atlanta. He researches and writes on topics connected to race and education. Find more of his forever-evolving work at jplesure.com.
