by Paul Butler
We know that some crimes were created specifically to target people of color. In 1971, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an aide to President Nixon, wrote a memo to the president identifying African American men as public enemy number one:
The incidence of anti-social behavior among young black males continues to be extraordinarily high. Apart from white racial attitudes, this is the biggest problem black Americans face, and in part it helps shape white racial attitudes. Black Americans injure one another. Because blacks live in de facto segregated neighborhoods, and go to de facto segregated schools, the socially stable elements of the black population cannot escape the socially pathological ones. Routinely their children get caught up in the anti-social patterns of the others.31
The president agreed. “[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman, his chief of staff, wrote. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”32 Soon thereafter, the Nixon administration implemented the “war on drugs.” Years later, in 1995, John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon, explained the rationale:
Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue . . . that we couldn’t resist it.33
Thus, one need not be paranoid to think that subordination of black men is deeply embedded in American crime and punishment. Too often the concept of danger as embodied in the criminal law is being used not for public safety purposes but to do some other kind of work—controlling black men.
The Chokehold means that many people see African American men through the lens of crime. As we have seen, people tend to overestimate their chances of being a victim of crime.34
One study showed that the number of blacks in a neighborhood affected whether residents perceived it as disorderly.35
Even the way that we think of a concept like “gun violence” is raced.
It is well known that there is a huge problem of gun violence among African American males. But less well known is the fact there is also a huge problem of gun violence among white males. Figure 12 illustrates the issue.
When a black man takes a life, it is most often the life of another black man. When a white man takes a life, it is most often his own. Today, the black male homicide rate is close to the white male suicide rate. Black men kill each other. White men kill themselves. Blacks are less likely to kill themselves. White men are less likely to kill someone else. Because there are many more white men than black men, many more white men die of suicide than black men die of homicide.
So both black men and white men are at similar risks when it comes to guns.
A black man is as dangerous to another black man as a white man is to himself. I am not suggesting that we should use the criminal justice system to treat the problem of suicide (although people who survived suicide attempts used to be prosecuted in some jurisdictions). We correctly recognize the problem as one requiring a public health intervention. I think the same thing is true of many people who use guns against other people rather than themselves. The problem might be better solved with a public health approach rather than a criminal one. One reason that that concept is hard for many people to grasp is because the Chokehold makes punitive approaches to black male issues seem natural or intuitive.
FIGURE 12: DEATH RATE PER 100,000 POPULATION
When white people use a gun to take a life, it is most likely to be their own.
Source: “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Quickstats: Annual Age-Adjusted Death Rates for Suicide and Homicide, by Black or White Race—United States, 1999–2010,” April 5, 2013, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6213a7.htm.
IS “BLACK-ON-BLACK” CRIME A THING?
Some people say that “black-on-black” crime is a racist concept, because most crime is intra-racial, but there is no corresponding analogue called white-on-white crime. As Figure 13 demonstrates, most homicide, not just African American homicide, is intra-racial. The phrase “black-on-black crime” is a trope, designed to deflect a holistic conversation about the root causes and structural racism, and to emphasize the Chokehold construction of black men as thugs.
At the same time, it is legitimate, and indeed crucial, for activists and policymakers to devote time and attention to the problem of black male violence. The African American community’s risk for violence is of a different magnitude than, say, the white community’s or the Asian American community’s. A black man is ten times more likely to be a homicide victim than a white man.36
Here are three reasons why people concerned about racial justice should lead the discussion of black male violent crime:
1)There is an overlap between the root causes of black-on-black violence and police violence against black people. They are different points on an axis of African American vulnerability. In a neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, neighbors were alarmed to see children fighting outside of a school. They were also alarmed to see police gathering outside of the school to respond to the fight. In both instances they were concerned that people might be needlessly hurt. The neighbors ended up calling a local church to send somebody to break up both the fighting children and the gathering police officers.37
FIGURE 13: MURDER: RACE AND SEX OF VICTIM BY RACE OF OFFENDER, 2012 (SINGLE VICTIM/SINGLE OFFENDER)
For whites and African Americans alike, homicide is typically intra-racial.
Note: This table is based on incidents where some information about the offender is known by law enforcement; therefore, when the offender age, sex, and race are all reported as unknown, these data are excluded from the table.
Source: “Murder: Race and Sex of Victim by Race and Sex of Offender, 2012 [single victim/single offender],” Crime in the United States, 2012, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Criminal Justice Information Services Division, 2012, ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2012.xls.
2)The debate about how to respond to black vulnerability to violence should not be ceded to conservative “law and order” types. The movement for black lives has brought a new energy and creativity to the struggle for racial justice. We need those bright minds fashioning solutions to the violence crisis that don’t involve locking everybody up and throwing away the key.
FIGURE 14: STATE AND FEDERAL PRISONERS BY OFFENSE, 2010
The fact that most federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes is misleading. Because most prisoners in America are incarcerated at the state level and most state prisoners are serving sentences for violent crimes, violent crime rather than drug crime is actually fueling mass incarceration.
Source: E. Ann Carson, “Prisoners in 2011,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2012, tables 10 and 11, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p11.pdf.
FIGURE 15: STATE PRISONERS BY RACE AND OFFENSE, 2010
Violent crime, not drug crime, is fueling mass incarceration.
Source: E. Ann Carson, “Prisoners in 2011,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2012, table 9, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p11.pdf.
3)As shown in Figures 14 and 15, violent crime, much more than drug crimes, is fueling mass incarceration.38 Right now African Americans make up about 37 percent of state and federal prison inmates.39 If no one were incarcerated for drug crimes, blacks would constitute about 36 percent of America’s prisoners.
OK, SO WHY DO BLACK MEN DISPROPORTIONATELY COMMIT VIOLENT CRIME?
First, let’s define a term. Is it black men who commit crimes, or black male criminals? Most African American men do not commit violent crimes. Indeed most African American men wil
l never be incarcerated for any crime. It’s true that far too many black men do have criminal cases: among black men in their twenties, one in three is either in prison, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial.40 Among some other segments of the black male population, for example high school dropouts in their forties, most of the group is incarcerated.41 But as a group, the majority of black men are law-abiding.42
The more precise question that this section explores is what it means that, among all violent offenders, black men are greatly overrepresented. To say that men kill more than women (91 percent of murderers are male) does not mean that all, or most, men kill; it just means that men as a group kill more than women as a group. The same is true of African American men compared to men of other races in the United States.
The question explored here is whether there is something about black males—something that happens to them, that is done to them, and/or something they do or believe (in that sense, their culture)—that contributes to their disproportionate involvement in violent crime.
Before I describe different ideas about why African American men disproportionately commit violent crime, an important disclaimer is necessary. The most accurate answer to the question of why anyone commits a crime is “we do not know.”
At best, we have a series of correlations. Even analysis of the correlations is unsatisfactory because we do not know why most people with a certain set of attributes do not commit crime, but some do. For violent offenders, the most consistent correlation is gender. Men are much more violent (in the corporal ways that concern the law) than women. The gender effect outweighs the race effect: a larger percentage of white men, for example, are incarcerated for violent crimes than African American women.
Another correlation is age: violent offenses tend to be the work of the young. Males between fifteen and thirty years old are most at risk of becoming perpetrators or victims.
BLACK MALE CULTURE AND BLACK MALE VIOLENCE
A community of victims, unaware of its history and unable to control its destiny, tends to victimize itself viciously.
—Frantz Fanon43
We’ve all seen them or heard about them. The black boys wilding out on the subway. The teen on the front page of the newspaper for robbing the elderly woman. The brawl at the high school football game in the hood. The drive-by shooting at the hip-hop club.
What is going on?
Some commentators have emphasized the influence of black male culture. They attribute violence and lawbreaking to moral failures of African American men. There are conservative and progressive versions of this critique. The right-wing pundit Bill O’Reilly said, “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African American family. . . . Raised without much structure, young Black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that. Again, it is a personal decision.”44
Don Lemon, a black anchor on CNN, responded that O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough.” He admonished African American men to “Please, pay attention to and think about what has been presented in recent history as acceptable behavior. . . . Pay close attention to the hip hop and rap culture that many of you embrace, a culture that glorifies . . . thug and reprehensible behavior.”45
President Obama expressed the same sentiment: “There’s no contradiction to say that there are issues of personal responsibility that have to be addressed, while still acknowledging that some of the specific pathologies in the African American community are a direct result of our history.”46 On the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, Obama stated:
And then, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior.47
Do brothers really make excuses for criminal behavior? How much should we blame black male culture for perpetrating the violence? How fair is it to demand that they improve their outcomes, and how much can we expect them to do on their own?
These are important questions, because the structural causes described below are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. If another route to reducing violence and incarceration is following Don Lemon’s five-point plan (black men should “hike up” their pants, finish school, not call each other “nigger,” take care of their communities, and not have children outside of marriage48), that would seem to be in everyone’s best interest. I understand the strong lure of black self-help, but in the end that is not going to solve the problem. Still, because the behavioral critique of African American men has so much resonance, with everyone from Barack Obama on down, it is important to interrogate it.
Some old-school discussions about causes of crime create a false distinction between “culture” and “environment.” Now sociologists understand that it’s impossible to discuss those as separate and distinct entities. Culture is determined by environment in significant ways.49 This is a key insight in order to avoid the Chokehold’s dynamic of blaming African American men. I am making the commonsense observation that when a group of people are treated with disdain and fear every time they enter a public space, this impacts what they believe and how they interact with the world.
Scholars don’t agree on one single definition of culture but many say that it includes values, frames (ways of understanding how the world works), and coping systems. The question of whether black male culture exists and, if so, how it informs things like propensity for violence and lawbreaking, is in part empirical. There is not much research on whether black men hold common values and beliefs and, if so, what those values and beliefs are.
I want to make some tentative assertions about black male culture as it might relate to violent conduct. These are evidence-based, but this does not mean they are irrefutable. They are also experiential. I was raised a black man. By that I mean, as I was growing up the people around me taught me what it meant to be African American and to be a man, and at the intersection of those things, what it meant to be an African American man. My “acculturation” is in accord with the stories of many other black men, and that gives me some confidence that the idea of African American male culture is a coherent concept.
One construction of masculinity is that it is a violent performance. This isn’t limited to African Americans—in the famous phrase of the black revolutionary H. Rap Brown, “violence is as American as apple pie”—but African American men might be particularly susceptible to it. After all, for most of American history, blacks have been the target of brutal violence: first during slavery, then during the convict leasing that replaced slavery in the South, followed by lynching and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The sociologist Michael Eric Dyson notes, “[T]he notion of violent masculinity is at the heart of American identity. The preoccupation with Jesse James and the outlaw, the rebel, much of that is associated in the American mindset, the collective imagination of the nation, with the expansion of the frontier. In the history of American social imagination, the violent man using the gun to defend his family, his kip and kin, becomes a suitable metaphor for the notion of manhood.”50 Just as elements of American culture glorify some outlaws, elements of African American culture glorify some African American outlaws, including those who use violence for self-defense or to attain wealth.51 The genre of hip-hop music known as gangsta rap frequently presents approving narratives of men who get rich through illegal means.
BLACK MACHO: THREE THEMES
BE HARD: Acting hard (tough) is a coping skill employed by many black men. The rapper Fat Joe said, in Byron Hurt’s documentary Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes, “Everybody wants to be hard. This is one of the flaws . . . of being from the hood. . . . I’m wondering why can’t we just walk around and smile at each other.”52 In high-poverty areas it may be seen as a survival skill. Men who do not act hard
may be perceived as more vulnerable. The historian Jelani Cobb notes, “There’s a whole lineage of black men wanting to deny their own frailty and so in some ways, you have to do that, like a psychic armor to walk out into the world every day.”53
PROTECT YOURSELF: A black man has to take care of himself and his family. Being willing to fight is part of being hard. The hip-hop artist Mos Def notes that as a kid he was a “nerd” and a “bookworm” but “when shit got critical, you know you can’t be no punk. I know how a lot of young black men is growing up, how I grew up. You got to be a limit. You got to let niggas know, like yo, I’m no pussy. And you will get tested.”54 In some communities, having access to a gun is a way to communicate that one is hard. It is part of a performance of masculinity. This does not mean that everyone approves of guns, only that having one makes one more masculine.
DEMAND RESPECT: Being respected is a big deal. Being disrespected is an even bigger deal.
These are frames that many black men tell themselves about how the world works. I don’t want to be overly judgmental about these attitudes. That’s not easy for me as a former prosecutor. When I was going after someone for a violent crime, I loved working myself up in a frothy-mouthed closing statement about what an evil dude he was. In retrospect I think that I, like most prosecutors, was assigned a task—holding African American men accountable for crimes—that I simply did not have the skill set to do. I relied on a sense of morality that was itself hypocritical: I prosecuted black men for marijuana possession, a crime that I had stopped committing myself only because as a law enforcement officer I was subject to drug tests. Ultimately, though, understanding the appropriate response to antisocial conduct by black men requires a depth of knowledge about economics, psychology, sociology, U.S. history, and brain development that virtually no prosecutor has.