What Would W.E.B. Du Bois Say? Black Brigands Waylay White Man in Saint Patrick's Day Attack

It would appear that our long George Zimmerman's national nightmare is about to be over continue. While in lockup, I know that there are many brothers who are eager to make Zimmerman's acquaintance and show him some "love."

The Trayvon Martin murder has encouraged many good white conservatives to come out of the woodwork and confess their love of black people. The former are now obsessed with "black on black" crime as they plead and prey for our salvation. They ask, "where are Al Sharpton and other such 'trouble-making' 'race hustlers' when white folks are attacked by black goons?" "What of fairness!" "Who is protecting us?"

In the theater of the racially absurd that was inaugurated by the election of the country's first black president, white people are now victims; as such, white conservative reactionaries cry and plead for black and brown allies who will stand in the breach with them against White Victimhood.

Of course, these White concerns about black crime, criminality, and intragroup violence are based on a specious and dishonest type of empathy and care. These voices are silent except when white racism is obvious as a motivation in the shooting down, murder--and lackadaisical investigation of such crime by the police--of black and brown people by Whites (and those who overly identify with them).

Moreover, "the black people need to look in the mirror before they talk about anti-black violence crowd" are also deeply invested in both White deflection and White denial of White racism as a social reality. Here, if they can find one example of bad behavior by blacks against long-suffering white folks, all claims of structural inequality and white privilege are rendered null and void. This is a very neat heuristic. It is also one that is shallow and anti-intellectual.

A few folks have asked me what I think about the Saint Patrick's day mob attack by a group of black teens and young adults on a white tourist in Baltimore, Maryland. I generally do not engage such questions because to do so risks legitimizing a narrative where appeals to black criminality are used as a means to avoid critically engaging structural White Supremacy. Outliers become immunizers; hate crimes become not a habit of whites against people of color, but rather a trend of white suffering and oppression. I try not to legitimate such foolishness with a response.

However, and especially given how there are many new readers to We Are Respectable Negroes, I will offer up an answer that is old hat for those who have been here from the beginning. One can be a critic of white supremacy and still be deeply invested in the politics of black respectability, dignity, and success. The street brigand troglodytes who attacked this innocent man deserve to be put under the jail.

By implication, how any fair or keen observer can seriously suggest that black folks tolerate the criminal classes, remains a mystery to me.

Apparently, those people who traffic in the fiction that the vast majority of African Americans love black hooligans, have not spend any time actually talking to us. And most certainly, these same dim types have not conversed across the color line, or sat in on our churches, mosques, barbershops, hair salons, dens, or living rooms, where during private moments the punishments for street urchin mouth breathers that we discuss would (likely) make Hammurabi shutter and look away.

More than a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of America's greatest intellectuals, made the following observations about black crime. He was a historian, sociologist, political scientist, poet, science fiction writer, cultural critic, and activist. And lest we forget, elder god Du Bois was also a criminologist.

The street beast highwaymen make few distinctions about the color of their victims. They are not to be protected--as black folks often and reasonably did for some among the criminal classes during the reign of the lynching tree. Respectable negroes, the vast majority of black people, want black ign'ts imprisoned, just as we want killers like George Zimmerman to be treated fairly by the law when they shoot people dead in the street. Justice ought to be blind.

As the miner's canary, Black and Brown Americans only want the rules applied and enforced fairly across lines of race and class. We also want the causes of criminal behavior engaged and dealt with just as readily as the crimes themselves.

The Souls of Black Folks captures this perfectly:

So great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades.

Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not occasion surprise...

Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination.

For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks.

It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of in- justice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.

When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the color-line: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.

On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic development often impossible

But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.