"Open Letter to White People Who Are Obsessed With Black-on-Black Crime"

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What is your fixation with black-on-black crime? You repeatedly being it up as if black people aren’t aware of violence in our communities. Contrary to what you apparently hypothesize at the secret, global white people meetings after you share banana bread recipes and Pinterest posts, black people aren’t home cabbage-patching and clanking together champagne glasses filled with grape Kool-Aid every time another black man falls victim to a violent crime by someone of the same race. It bothers us, too, but here is the thing:

There is no such thing as black-on-black crime.

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The cornerstone of their argument rests on the statistic that 90 percent of black people who are murdered are murdered by other blacks. That fact would give me pause or make me feel ashamed if I didn’t know that the same 2013 FBI report (the latest year for which statistics are available) goes on to say that 83 percent of white victims of murder were killed by white people.

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Another Bureau of Justice Statistics report explicitly states that between 2008 and 2012, “Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).”

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That’s right. White people kill white people. Black people kill black people. I know what you’re thinking: Yes, but black people do so disproportionately. You’re right—even though white people commit most violent crimes (which means that due to the raw numbers, if we had a choice between eliminating white-on-white crime or black-on-black crime, confronting white-on-white crime would pay far greater dividends).

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