Hard truths about race and justice
Crime, poverty as deadly as cop shootings for blacks
Here’s a quick quiz: Which of these two statements is true?
1. African Americans are more likely than other racial groups to be shot by criminals.
2. African Americans are more likely than other racial groups to be shot by police officers.
They’re both true, of course. But in our hyper-polarized political environment, we have a hard time acknowledging both truths at the same time. And that makes reasonable discussion about race and criminal justice almost impossible.
People on the right harp on the first truth, coupling it with another one: The vast majority of black victims of gun violence are shot by other blacks. They trot that out whenever an African American is gunned down by police, as if to say: Why are you complaining about police shootings, when you shoot each other so often?
That’s a non sequitur, and a racist one at that. The fact that black males are disproportionately involved in criminal homicides does not justify the disproportionate shooting of them by the police. The basic principle of a just society is that public officials should treat everyone the same, regardless of race. Anything less renders some people secondclass citizens, as the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us.
But even if we eliminated every police shooting in America, black lives would still be imperiled. And that’s because of rampant unemployment, poverty, and — yes — crime in majority-black communities.
My fellow liberals know all of this, of course, but we’re often reluctant to admit it. We seize upon the second truth, about police misconduct, and downplay the first one. Talking about “black-on-black crime” seems to play into the hands of white racists. And it diverts us from the larger question of inequities in criminal justice, or so we say.
That’s a big mistake. The same principle that makes it wrong for black people to face greater risk of police violence makes it wrong for them to be at greater risk for criminal violence. If black lives truly mattered, no African American would have to grow up under threat for his or her life. And it wouldn’t matter where that threat came from.
Why can’t we all acknowledge that simple truth? We made a good start in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., shootings, when the mostly white survivors noted that black children have a much larger chance of dying from gun violence than their white peers do.
And we heard the same theme during last month’s massive March for Our Lives protest in Washington, D.C. Student speakers from Parkland were interspersed with minority youth, who reminded the crowd that their own lives have always been marred by guns. That doesn’t get nearly as much ink as school shootings, where victims tend to be white.
But then another unarmed black man was killed by police, and our politics returned to its polarized norm. Stephon Clark was shot at least seven times in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento. Police initially said that Clark had “advanced toward the officers” with what they thought was a firearm. But an autopsy showed that most of the shots that struck him were in his back.
And all he was carrying was his cell phone.
The news sparked protests across Sacramento, where the mayor promised a full investigation. He also acknowledged that blacks in the city “don’t feel safe,” and that all of us must “push aggressively to change what must be changed.”
True enough. But here’s what he didn’t say: Black safety is endangered by violence from criminals, not just from police. Of course we need to change the way that law enforcement officials are trained, monitored, and evaluated. But we also need to change the poverty and crime that menaces so many black lives, in so many cities across our land.
And it all starts with reasonable gun control, as the Parkland protesters correctly emphasized. The more we focus on police shootings — while diminishing the far greater
danger of civilian violence — the harder it becomes to sustain a bipartisan movement to regulate the scourge of firearms in our society.
Admittedly, no gun-control measure could have saved Stephon Clark from dying at the hands of the police. But because he’s black, Clark was at greater risk of being killed by a criminal as well as by a cop. And until we admit that, too, nothing will really change.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with Emily Robertson) of “The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press).