by Paul Butler
4
Black Male Violence: The Chokehold Within
Many African American men asked me not to publish this chapter. They said that it would confirm the worst of the stereotypes about us. They said that no matter what I said in the rest of the book, this is the chapter that would get the most attention, for the wrong reasons. They said that writing about violent crime committed by African American men would undermine the cause of criminal justice reform, and make the grip of the Chokehold even tighter. But I had to write about the problem of violence by African American men because the problem has not received sustained analysis in the new discourse about criminal justice reform.
Murder is the leading cause of death of young African American men. In the past fifteen years, more black men have been killed in the city of Chicago alone than the total number of U.S. soldiers who died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 And contrary to popular belief, violent crimes—not drug crimes—have created mass incarceration. In 2013, only 16 percent of state prisoners were serving time for drug offenses.2 If no one was locked up for any drug offense whatsoever, the United States would remain the world’s largest jailer, and a large percentage of the people in prison would be African American. Until we stop using prison to treat black male violence, the United States will continue to have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
One reason African American men asked me not to write about this issue goes to the familiar fear, in any vulnerable community, of airing dirty laundry. The concern is that “inside” problems should not be exposed to the hostile outside world. But thinking of black male violence as an inside issue for the African American community to solve is actually part of the problem. This chapter makes the case that black male violence is as much a symptom of the Chokehold as brutal policing and mass incarceration. It is a plague that the United States has caused, and it will take the resources of the United States to cure it. Believing that African American men alone can resolve the problem is like thinking that they can, by themselves, end climate change.
In any case, African American men are already talking about this issue, in public, a lot. Our dirty drawers have been flapping in the wind for a long time.
Jesse Jackson (civil rights leader)3:
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.
Richard Sherman (professional athlete, National Football League)4:
We need to solidify ourselves as people and deal with our issues, because I think as long as we have black-on-black crime and, you know, one black man killing another . . . if black lives matter, then it should matter all the time. You should never let somebody get killed—that’s somebody’s son, that’s somebody’s brother, that’s somebody’s friend. So you should always keep that in mind.
A$AP Rocky (rapper)5:
Black on black crime. So, one cop shoots a black person, let’s march, let’s protest. But I feel like; if you’re not going to talk about the main topic, don’t talk about it at all. We have to do something first. That’s within us, internally. We can’t blame the police officers; that kind of shit is inevitable.
Stephen A. Smith (journalist, ESPN)6:
Where is all the noise about #BlackLivesMatter when black folks are killing black folks?
Jay-Z (rapper)7:
And we’re still killing each other. We need to understand that we are kings and queens. We are kings and queens and we’re under attack. A young man trying to make a way out of the hood. We can’t have it both ways. We say, “People, they leave the hood and never wanna come back.” When people go to the hood, they get killed. We can’t have it both ways. We gotta protect our own.
Kendrick Lamar (rapper)8:
But when we don’t have respect for ourselves, how do we expect them to respect us? It starts from within. Don’t start with just a rally, don’t start from looting—it starts from within.
James Pate is an African American artist. He has a controversial series of drawings called kin-killin’-kin that compare black-on-black violence to violence by the Ku Klux Klan. His artwork depicts young black men wearing KKK hoods and pointing guns at each other. When an exhibit of the work was shown at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the local chapter of Black Lives Matter protested. The group issued a press release that stated: “To equate the KKK to a group of people who have been enslaved, segregated, and degraded into second class citizenship is callous and outright offensive. Moreover, this exhibition fails to address the root causes of crime in predominately Black neighborhoods, which is that crime is a reaction to a lack of resources.”9
Pate responded, “We’re just hearing repeatedly people in my community say that we as black people have put the Ku Klux Klan out of business, so as an artist I decided I wanted to respond to that.”10
Clearly the cat is out of the bag. It’s impossible, in the age of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, to keep something within the community, if that were ever possible in a group as large and diverse as the African American community. I want to have an open, no-holds-barred conversation about why brothers are disproportionately at risk for violence, as victims and as harm doers, and how we as a society can make things better. In inviting this conversation my role is not so much truth teller as illuminator. It is crucial to put the issue in a broader context than the typical, simplistic “pull your damn pants up” critiques of black masculinity.
THE UGLY FACTS: PART 1
Black men are about 6.5 percent of the population but they are responsible for approximately half of all murders in the United States.11 Black men commit more murders, in absolute numbers, than Latino men, who slightly outnumber them, and white men, who greatly outnumber them.12
Because violent crime is mainly intra-racial, black men are also about 50 percent of murder victims.13 While overall violent crime is decreasing in the United States, in some cases to historic lows, the percentage of victims of homicides who are black males is increasing.14
Homicide Victimization Rate15
White: 3 per 100,000
Black men between 15 and 34: 80 per 100,000
Black men are also vastly overrepresented among violent felons other than murderers. According to U.S. Department of Justice statistics, African Americans committed 54 percent of robberies and 39 percent of assaults.16 Overall, blacks are responsible for 41 percent of all violent felonies.17 An urban myth is that the ten cities with the highest crime rates are the cities with the largest percentages of blacks. This is not true, but what is true is that since the Great Migration, urban areas in which the black population has increased have also experienced increases in crime.18
Sometimes we think of black-on-black crime as a new thing, a consequence of the woes of de-industrialization, or even integration. Most African Americans have listened to an elder wax romantic about a gentler time in black history where people treated each other with more kindness out of a shared sense of kinship. But the reality is that there never has been a golden age for black people in the Unites States. There are bad times, and then there are worse times. In 1950 black men were about twelve times more likely to be a victim of homicide than white men.19 In 2013 black men were about ten times more likely to be a victim of homicide than white men.20 The good old days were actually more dangerous for black men than now. And now is still quite bad.
The bottom line is that African American men commit a disproportionate share of certain serious crimes, including homicide, assault, and robbery, and are disproportionately victims of those same crimes. I’ll explain why I think these statistics are reliable and then break down why black male violence should not distract from also focusing on state violence by the police.
SHOULD WE TRUST THE DATA ABOUT BLACK MEN AND VIOLENT CRIME?
Some people just don’t believe the statistics. Certainly black people have good reason to be dubious that government data about crime is somehow neutral or colo
r-blind. Today most people know that “the war on drugs” has been selectively waged against African Americans. No one thinks that the arrests and incarceration rates for drug crimes reflect the actual rates of offending. Blacks are still the majority of people who are incarcerated for drug offenses, even though the evidence suggests that they do not commit these offenses more than other racial or ethnic groups. For drug crimes, African Americans are about 13 percent of people who do the crime, but about 60 percent of people who do the time.
So, considering the racialized enforcement of drug laws, it’s fair to ask how trustworthy the data is about violent crime. Is that data also the result of selective enforcement?
The best answer is “probably not.” Every year the United States Census Bureau performs the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). It asks a representative sample of residents of the United States (which included 82,000 households in 2010) about victimizations in the past six months and whether they reported them to the police.21 As Figure 11 demonstrates, a huge number of crimes are not reported to the police.
Obviously it’s impossible to know anything about the racial demographics of crime that is not reported to the police. But what we do know is that, generally speaking, the more serious the crime, the more likely it is to be reported (with the exception of rape, as I explain below). Indeed because African Americans are less likely to report crimes than white people, and most victims of black offenders are also black, the official statistics might actually underestimate the risk of violent crimes for African Americans.
For serious violent crime, the race of the victim makes the biggest difference in how the criminal justice system responds. Cases with white victims tend to be taken more seriously by police and prosecutors. The Supreme Court blessed this practice in a case called McCleskey v. Kemp.22 The Court was presented with compelling statistical evidence that people convicted of killing whites were more likely to get the death penalty, and that people convicted of killing African Americans were less likely to get the death penalty. A black convicted of killing a white was twenty-two times more likely to get the death penalty than a white convicted of killing a black. Still the Court said that the data did not demonstrate a “constitutionally unacceptable” risk. Some legal scholars have said that McCleskey is actually a worse case than the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson, the case in which the Supreme Court allowed “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation. In McCleskey, the Court actually permits an unequal “good enough for black people” kind of justice.
FIGURE 11: VICTIMIZATIONS NOT REPORTED TO THE POLICE, BY TYPE OF CRIME, 1994–2010
With the exception of rape, serious crimes are more likely to be reported.
Source: Lynn Langton, Marcus Berzofsky, Christopher Krebs, and Hope Smiley-McDonald, “Victimizations Not Reported to the Police, 2006–2010,” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 2012, www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf.
So, to be clear, it’s not that violent crime statistics are somehow immune from the Chokehold’s construction of the black man as thug. Rather, because white lives matter more in the eyes of the law and most crime is intra-racial, the police might actually be more invested in arresting those offenders who hurt white people—and those offenders are more likely to be white than African American.
THE RAPE EXCEPTION
African American men are less likely to be arrested for rape than for other violent crimes. In 2012, black men were about 31 percent of rape arrestees, as compared to about 56 percent of those arrested for robbery.23 According to the U.S. Department of Justice, at least half of survivors of sexual assault do not report the crime to the police. Susan Estritch was one of my criminal law professors at Harvard. She wrote Real Rape, a classic text about sexual violence against women that starts with an account of her own rape.24 The only reason the police took her claim seriously, Estritch writes, is because she is white and her rapist is African American. At the same time, African American women might actually underreport rape.25 We know that sexual victimization of black women, by men of all colors, remains a horrific problem. In the end, the data about rape is insufficient to make any reliable inferences.
FALSE EQUIVALENCE: POLICE VIOLENCE VERSUS BLACK MALE VIOLENCE
Some people say that racial justice activists should focus their attention on crime by African American men, rather than violence perpetrated against black men by the police. For example, Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, said:
Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. . . . I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to [Ferguson]. . . . What about the poor black child that was killed by another black child? . . . Why aren’t you protesting that? . . . Why don’t you cut it down so that so many white police officers don’t have to be in black areas? . . . White police officers wouldn’t be there if [African Americans] weren’t killing each other.26
The historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad calls this move “playing the violence card.” I’ll admit, if you just look at the numbers, the violence card has a certain rhetorical appeal.
Number of African Americans shot by other African Americans in 2015: 4,900 (approximately)
Number of African Americans shot by the police in 2015: 305 (approximately)
The problem with the violence card is that it misunderstands both African American history and the problem that black folks have with the police. African Americans have always been concerned about violent crime, even if, at times, we have tried to shield this debate from white people. You can’t sit through a sermon at a black church without hearing exhortations from the pulpit about the need for the brothers to stop smoking each other.
But there are crucial differences between the violence that the police do to black people versus the violence that African Americans do to each other. Cops are agents of the state. And when police shoot unarmed black people, they almost always get away with it.
Between 2005 and 2014, only forty-seven cops were charged with homicides. It gets worse. Of those forty-seven, only eleven were convicted.27 However, when African Americans commit homicide, they are usually prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to long years in prison. This is one of the main reasons U.S. prisons are filled with black men. There was a period in U.S. history when crimes that victimized African Americans were largely not prosecuted. There is evidence that even now, police do not take those crimes as seriously as they do crimes with white victims.28 But even so, African American men do not get the same kind of pass that police officers get when they kill—even when the cops kill unarmed people. That is the concern of activists. There is a categorical moral difference between antisocial conduct that is harshly punished, on the one hand, and authorized violence by the state committed with impunity, on the other hand.
Still, as I will discuss below, everyone concerned about black lives should do more to address holistically black people’s vulnerability to violence, as victims and as harm doers. This approach is entirely consistent with the activist critique of white supremacy; the focus is “both/and” not “either/or.” One of the ways that the United States has failed its African American citizens is by not providing them the equal protection of the law.
BLACK MEN AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF “CRIME”
Right or wrong, I don’t make the law.
—Erykah Badu
The idea that black violence speaks to the character of the people and is endemic while white violence is deviant and rare is disgusting.
—Touré29
Are African American men really more dangerous than other men? Or, on the other hand, is the way that we define concepts like “danger,” “crime,” and “violence” influenced by race?
There are certainly greater threats to the well-being of Americans than the harm caused by some black men. For centuries, many white men, sanctioned by the law of the land, enslaved, tortured, raped, and lynched black people, but we’ve conveniently started our narrative about who’s dangerous with the spike in
violent crime in the 1960s, a move that puts the focus on African American men. Today, we ought to be more concerned, some people say, about threats like pesticides in our food and lead in our water, radiation from nuclear power plants, or corporate greed that pays CEOs millions and not enough for an average worker to feed her family than about the threat posed by black men. Cars kill more people than black men do, but the local news leads with black suspects, not automobile accidents.30
We should take this claim very seriously. It reveals how the law really works and who it protects. It does not mean that we should ignore the conduct of African Americans who victimize others, but it should make us think deeply about the kind of antisocial conduct that we choose to punish, and the kind of antisocial conduct that is legal. Unsurprisingly this has something to do with race and class. The ways that rich white people victimize others are often quite legal.
The people who make the law get to decide what crime is. Conduct that results in the loss of life or the taking of property might not necessarily be criminal—it’s all up to lawmakers. And, as we have seen, the law is not blind to race and class. Thus it is not surprising that the law frequently insulates rich people from being called criminals—even when their conduct is very destructive.
In the years leading up to the housing crisis in 2008, greedy mortgage bankers provided loans to poor people that were virtually guaranteed to fail. Investors who bet against the loans being repaid got very rich, but millions of Americans lost their homes, or had their retirement savings decimated, or became unemployed due to the tanked economy. One of President Obama’s first major acts, upon his election, was to provide a $700 billion rescue plan to the banks. But no one has gone to jail for behavior that devastated the lives of millions of Americans. Yet when Eric Garner sold a single tobacco cigarette on the streets of Staten Island, he was arrested and put into a chokehold.