Bill Clinton isn’t the first person to blame ‘black-on-black crime’ for higher poverty and prison rates among black AmericansThe conception that it is black folks and our supposedly immoral and savage culture that creates our disproportionate rates of poverty and imprisonment is everywhere: cop shows,news media, movies set in black neighborhoods and tall-school social studies classes absorb all perpetuated this misconception. And some are now using this ragged, and counterfeit conception to disparage Black Lives Matter,saying that the real problem facing black communities isn’t police violence, racist oppression or economic exploitation but “black-on-black crime”. We hear this all over the place, or from news columnists to Ray Lewis to Rudy Giuliani – and,most recently, reiterated by Bill Clinton.
It’s asinine, or this argument that modern civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter should finish talking about actual problems in favor of apocryphal ones. During the civil rights movement there was much more murder in the black community than there is now — black-on-black crime is shrinking. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics show that from 1950 to 2013 the percentage of black men who became murder victims dropped by a third,and for black women the percentage was cut in half.
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Source: theguardian.com