The unexplained killing of Trayvon Martin has provoked an outpouring of reflections on race, violence and criminal law in America, none more incisive than Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s April 6 New York Times op-ed “Playing the violence card” (reprinted in today’s American on A1). Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Muhammad first describes a widespread cultural pattern that is seldom pointed out: “When confronted with an instance of racially charged violence against a black person, a commentator draws attention to the fact that there is much more black-on-black violence than white-on-black violence.” This is what he defines as “playing the violence card.”
Muhammad does not deny that black-on-black violence is “an exceptionally grave problem” that merits public attention and response. However, we agree with him in objecting to the tactic of raising this real, but separate, problem when we are talking about a case like Trayvon Martin’s, which raises very distinct and disturbing questions about racial profiling, the acceptable uses of lethal force, and the discretionary powers of local police departments and prosecuting attorneys when race is a factor.
Moreover, we think Muhammad makes a brilliant, little acknowledged historical point about the deep-seated institutional racism lurking in the tactic of playing the violence card, “which perpetuates the reassuring notion that violence against black people is not society’s concern but rather a problem for black people to fix on their own.” He points out that a different tactic was employed in a previous century when the poverty culture provoking the violent crime wave was white. When European immigrants clustered in urban ghettoes and killed their neighbors, it wasn’t marginalized as solely the problem of a minority population.
Instead, it spawned a national progressive movement led by the social worker Jane Addams. Confronted by a wave of gang-related youth shootings that would be familiar on some of the streets of St. Louis today, with the proper racial substitutions made, Addams and other progressives mobilized institutional resources to address what was seen as a shared problem. “Violent white neighborhoods were flooded with social workers, police reformers and labor activists committed to creating better jobs and building a social welfare net,” Muhammad writes. “White-on-white violence fell slowly but steadily in proportion to economic development and crime prevention.”
By contrast, violence in black communities was met with a “blame the victim” mentality that marginalized the black community and criminalized the image of the black male to such an overwhelming extent that an unarmed youth can be mistaken for suspicious and dangerous merely because he is black, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and walking slowLY in the rain through a gated community. “Racial criminalization has continued to this day, stigmatizing black people as dangerous, legitimizing or excusing white-on-black violence, conflating crime and poverty with blackness, and perpetuating punitive notions of ‘justice’ – vigilante violence, stop-and-frisk racial profiling and mass incarceration – as the only legitimate responses,” Muhammad writes.
Trayvon Martin’s murder has polarized observers, but we believe that Muhammad’s argument shows a way forward. The next 17-year-old black male who is murdered by another black male merits the attention and compassion of the wider public that has been engaged by Trayvon Martin’s death because of its particular circumstances. To put it another way, the question should not be why black people don’t seem to be as upset by the murders in their own communities as they are by the death of this black boy in a gated Florida community. The question should be, why isn’t everyone of every background more concerned about black-on-black violence and more committed to understanding and addressing it? Rejecting it as a “black thing,” passing Stand Your Ground laws and massive incarceration clearly are not working. Enlightened self-interest compels the entire community to measure the economic and social costs of continuing to distance itself from problems created by violence in the black community.
