The Idea of Black-on-Black Crime: Explanation, Normativity, and Ideology

• In Event: In the Shadow of Democracy: Theorizing the Dark Ghetto

Abstract

Social scientists and other commentators have moved from rhetoric of “black-on-black crime” to the rhetoric of “community violence.” This shift is motivated by an analytical claim that gives priority to “place” over “race” and a related project of ideology critique that treats the use of “black-on-black crime” as racially pathologizing or cynically motivated to distract from legitimate justice claims. Yet this story misses something important about the historical popularity of “black-on-black crime” discourse in black communities. My hypothesis is that black-on-black crime talk can essentially be split into two overlapping, but analytically distinct families of thought. The first is explanatory in its aspiration, drawing on psychology and sociology to generate controversial hypotheses about disinhibition and aggression. The other, however, is normative. For these thinkers, what they called “black-on-black crime” reflects the unremedied effects of broader systemic injustice and social abandonment, intensifies forms of racial stigma that unfairly harm the broader group, and violates basic rights. Such conditions call into question the very legitimacy of the legal-political order as well as the duty to comply with law, property rights, and norms of cooperation.

The political and moral void opened up by this critique, however, is frightening. Without reasonable appeal to the legitimacy of law and order, how could people be persuaded to respect each other’s basic rights, cooperate in struggle, and take pride in contributing to mutual survival and flourishing amidst injustice? Black-on-black violence talk, on this account, is an attempt to promote a solidaristic, superogatory norm born of shared oppression against behavior thought to hinder political resistance and social trust.

Normatively, black-on-black crime talk took seriously challenges that replacement discourses like “community violence” have failed to take up: (1) a critique of the legitimacy of the existing social and legal order and recognition of certain forms of lawbreaking as legitimate dissent, (2) recognition that this critique discloses a crisis of normativity that is severely dangerous to social life and demands normative refounding, (3) respect for the moral and political agency of the victims and perpetrators of violence, and (4) the rightful scope of black solidarity in political life.

Author

• Brandon M. Terry, Harvard University