“In the United States, a white person is almost six times more likely to be killed by another white person than he or she is to be killed by a black person.”
“When media discussions talk about gang-related homicides, they invariably treat it as an almost exclusively African-American problem, yet according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for the period from 1980 to 2008, a majority (53.3 percent) of gang-homicides were committed by white offenders, and a majority of gang-homicide victims (56.5 percent) were white. When was the last time you heard a discussion about the white on white gang violence problem?”
The vast majority of homicides are male on male murders, but we hear little to no discussion of male on male violence, or the unique pathology that afflicts men. This is because, without any awareness of bias, crimes by white men are explained not by race or gender but by the unique pathology of the specific person whose race, being white, is therefore deemed irrelevant.”
“Black on black violence is a defamatory label that assigns special racial significance to crimes committed by one black man against another without recognizing the complex sociological variables that account for the violence. A black on black homicide could just as well be termed male on male murder, or heterosexual on heterosexual crime or American on American homicide. None of these terms would have great explanatory power in dealing with the complexity of reasons for committing a homicide, but they are no more foolish than the term black on black violence, which foregrounds race as if it is the one compelling explanatory variable for understanding the crime, when in most cases it is not.”
Thanks to Barbara Miller for link.