"Black-on-black crime" is not an excuse for why we cannot protest against systematic racism, oppression, and police brutality.
The fact that this needs to be explained still, should frustrate you, shoot, it frustrates me. So let's begin:
"Black-on-black" crime was never as big a problem to others before we started being more vocal about police killings. To say that we cannot protest about other people, especially the people who are assigned to protect us, who have been murdering us — us being in most cases today, Black people, but also White people, LatinX people, Asian people, Native American people, humans — is absurd.
That is like saying because someone may have flaws, such as a crooked tooth or a missing finger, that they don't deserve happiness; that is like saying when someone loses one battle in a war that they've lost the whole war. But wait, that makes sense, right? Right.
Brothers and sisters: do not allow anyone to succeed in silencing you when you talk about these issues. If "black-on-black" crime exists, in the way that people want it to, then it would act as a genetic disorder that only occurs in black people, as if it's our natural instinct to kill as animals do, as savages do, as unlike other human beings. Or does that prove the Ol' Slave Massah's point of us being only three-fifths human?
Speaking of which, let's kill the "statistics" factor for a second and think about this, going back to the when Europeans went to Africa and forced our ancestors onto slave ships:
On the ships, they were shackled like animals, raped, beaten, had to lie in filth and on top of your brother's dead body, day and night, and fed crap for food. When they left the ships finally, they were made slaves and work for nothing from dusk til dawn. Again, they were raped, beaten, used as food for animals, oppressed, depressed, stripped of their identities, and rejected. They were "set free" and once again, systematically, oppressed, depressed, segregated, used to work for little to nothing, and expected to shut up and be happy. Don't forget Jim Crow laws — we were still being killed. Fast forward, about 100 years later, physical segregation was abolished, and we were finally to be treated as "equals." European standards of beauty and mannerisms were thrust down our throats easily because of our lack of identity in a land somehow foreign to us, causing us to believe we are not beautiful, we are not unique, we are not worthy of being more. Fast forward to 2016 and we are still fighting for freedom and pleading to stop being killed because of what we look like, and there's still backlash. Centuries and centuries of evil done to a people can create a permanent hand-print on someone. Constant back-biting will cause scarring. Pushing us into corners of society and injecting weak education, which means they can't easily qualify for certain jobs, unhealthy food, toxic water, and "feel-good" escape drugs on every corner has its affects.
Just as any other group of people, when you're so close to people all of the time, and everyone in that section feels hopeless, or maybe people make deals and don't follow through, the tensions flare, and crime happens. Is it right? No. But just because a white person may have had trouble at home growing up, that excuses them more than a black person who may have had trouble at home growing up?
We are in pain too. Yeah, that'll cause a "savage" to lash out, just as the lone wolves we see on the news.
