By Dayvon Love
There are two major dynamics that are central to the intra communal violence that exist amongst Black people in the United States.
The first is the dehumanizing propaganda of this society that deems Black people as inherently violent and inferior. Our youth are socialized in a pop culture environment that encourages them to equate their value as human beings to their capacity to be cool, aggressive, violent and sexually desirable.
The predatory capitalism that undergirds the financial incentives created by culture vultures to promote racist caricatures of Black performance to a White dominated mainstream result in the high circulation of narratives of Black criminality and inferiority. Black youth are injected with these representations and are exacerbated by the pain of the collective dehumanization caused by chattel slavery and all of its afterlives that show up in our community as deep feelings of worthlessness, sadness and economic depravity. In other words, it is the societal propaganda of mainstream American culture regarding Black people that produce suicidal and self destructive impulses amongst the most vulnerable elements of our community, that is externalized in the forms of violence against our own people.
The second societal dynamic that is central to the intra communal violence that we see is the abandonment of working class Black people by Black middle and upper classes. The radical elements of the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960’s and 1970’s forced major concessions by the White mainstream. The moderate wing of the Civil Rights Movement guided those concessions into the creation of limited opportunities for individual Black people to improve their own personal social status. This often came at the expense of investment in political and economic efforts of collective uplift. One indicator of this is the fact of class stratification in the Black community. In a 2024 article written by Jessica Paige called “Examining the Loss and Downward Mobility of African Americans” she cites analysis by William Julius Wilson that describes this class stratification.
Wilson is quoted as saying “that middle class African Americans benefited from Civil Rights era policies, such as affirmative action initiatives, that improved educational and occupational opportunities. In contrast, he argues that less economically advantaged African Americans were becoming more isolated in racially segregated inner-city neighborhoods with high poverty rates and limited educational and occupational opportunities.”
In the post Civil Rights era there has been an increase in Black people that occupy middle class status, while simultaneously the masses of Black people have gotten poorer and more demonized. Much of this demonization is done by Black middle class aspirants who promote racialized stigmas of Black people as inherently pathological in service of proving to White people that they are not like the rest of us.
There is a Hollywood, pop culture narrative that drug dealers and the so-called criminal element is responsible for the majority of crime. Just like the old White gangsters of the early 20th century that trafficked in drugs, alcohol, weapons and other illicit merchandise before they graduated to legitimate businesses, the violence that is the result of a “criminal element” in our community is not responsible for the majority of the violence in our community. It is a convenient explanation for a society that wants to promote the notion of inherent Black criminality.
In order to develop an effective violence prevention strategy there has to be an analysis of what the most significant causes of violence are. Drug trafficking and a “criminal element” are unspoken assumptions that are not based on any data. There is work to do in the world of academic research to get definitive and authoritative data on the question of what are the circumstances that are most frequently the cause of gun violence. The data that does exist points away from the notion that drug trafficking and a criminal element is responsible for a majority of violence.
On Jan. 17th, 2023, the director of Baltimore’s Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) presented data to the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee regarding violent crime in Baltimore’s western district. The western district has historically been one of the most violent districts in Baltimore. The data they presented indicates that only 14.5 percent of homicides in 2020 and 2021 were related to drug trafficking. 20.3 percent were related to on-going personal disputes, 18.8 percent were related to internal group disputes, 11.6 percent were sudden personal disputes. Studies done in other cities have found similar patterns.
If we are going to address the violence in our community we have to combat the forces that produce the pain and suffering that leads to violence. Instead, what Donald Trump, Republicans and many Democrats want is to demonize Black people into existential submission. This is not a violence prevention strategy, this is about scoring political points with a base of White folks who have deep seated commitments to the existing White supremacist social order.
Ultimately, addressing violence in our community is our responsibility. One of the major contradictions of the conservative right wing is that the people who are best positioned as credible messengers to prevent violence in our communities are the people who the political project of the political status quo is structured to demonize the worst. Black people who are formerly in street organizations, people who are formerly incarcerated, and others who spend most of their time and energy amongst this network of Black people are the people who are best able to address the internalized feelings of inherent inferiority and worthlessness. Major investments in organizations that are made up mostly of the aspects of the Black community that the White mainstream is most afraid of are the solution to the problem of violence in our community.