Quote:
Originally Posted by TonyB06
And yeah, while I support this protest and the pressure it's bringing, I'm equally troubled that we --Black people -- don't roll out like like this when intra-racial shootings occur, leaving other Black mothers to grieve their children. Let's protest and fix that.
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I was waiting for someone to say this.
The attention and outrage will be different because the majority of person violence for all racial and ethnic groups is intraracial. Whites are more likely to be violently victimized by whites; Blacks are more likely to be violently victimized by Blacks; Asians are more likely to be violently victimized by Asians; Native Americans are more likely to be violently victimized by Native Americans; etc. That is about the victim-offender relationship in highly racially and social class segregated societies such as North America. The reason why interracial violence receives the attention that it does is because it is much less common than intraracial violence.
It is the equivalent of responding to public outrage over a murderer who identifies as Christian and who murders someone who identifies as Muslim by saying "I wish we would respond like this when Christians kill Christians." No, we would not because in North America, the majority of offenders and victims identify as Christian. When that is not the case, based on the relatively small percentage of Muslims in North America and the relative difficulty in the average North American Christian to have extensive exposure to Muslims in North America, there is a question over what motivated the offender to target and therefore victimize a nonChristian. That is one of the foundations for hate crime legislation because the person's group membership is what motivated the crime rather than what typically motivates offenders. In addition to a different motivation for crime, it typically takes more time and effort to target and victimize members of groups with whom the offender has relatively less interaction.
Similarly, males are most likely to be both the victim and the perpetrator for all crimes except for sexual assault and rape for which females are more likely to be the victims. Yet, people respond differently when a male offender robs a female than when a male offender robs a male. The outrage and fear for safety is not the same when discussing male-male violence and victimization. In fact, males report an extremely low fear of crime despite having the highest victimization for crimes except for sexual assault and rape.
If people want intragroup violence to be as shocking and appalling as intergroup violence, that's fine, but that requires an understanding of victim-offender dynamics. It is about much more than "Black people aren't outraged when we harm each other" as though that is completely accurate and unique to Black people.