"Black on black crime" is a talking point that racists in the US absolutely love to toss around while totally ignoring the fact that drug laws have been used as an excuse to terrorize minority communities for decades
and your second (valid) point doesn't change by one iota the fact that black on black violent crime is extremely pervasive in these communities and also the cause of the vast majority of murders of african americans. The FBI Uniform crime statistics, derived in part from solved murders and other violent crimes bear this out too. What you say about racist policies may be true but no white outsider is putting a gun into the hands of certain blacks and making them shoot other blacks. One sound criticism of BLM has been exactly this, a complete aversion for political ideological reasons to placing any focus on things that black communities themselves can work to change internally.
> One sound criticism of BLM has been exactly this,
BLM is about the problem with policing, not just anything that impacts black lives in general so criticizing BLM for not talking about the very real problem of black people murdering black people makes about as much sense as criticizing them for not advocating for more high blood pressure screening.
Sounds like he's just saying that two things can be true. Police can be racist and blacks can kill the most black people. naturally three things can be true too and maybe he is racist. Seems like the kind of willful misunderstanding of BLM you'd see from racists. That kind of confusion (intentional or not) is another reason why BLM was a terrible name for the movement.
And those statements literally ignore the centuries of systemic violence and oppression used to keep African Americans poor and in the lower class. We have designed a system which keeps opportunities away from specific groups of people and then when they have strife and conflict that naturally arises out of these extreme poverty situations we have racist assholes who come along and say "oh but look at the black on black crime" while literally ignoring the fact that they continue to support policies and politicians that, while maybe not explicit, continue to support the systemic structures that have caused the situation in the first place
We live in a complex system with many moving parts and the majority of people are supporting the system that keeps poor people in poverty generation after generation. When people have no hope and are constantly shit on by the people who claim they help, I'll give you a hint (it's the police), yea they turn to crime and violence because they literally have no options to survive
All of that on top of our hyper capitalistic system which states that anyone can achieve the american dream where the ultra rich flaunt their wealth is just rubbing it in the faces of those living in abject generational poverty
Yea, if we design and support a system like that you're going to have problems. And racist idiots who can't understand these systemic effects are parading around talking about "black on black crime" like that's the issue at hand. Its not, not even close. The issue is systemic poverty and suppression which creates the situation in the first place.
Since I know someone is going to come along and say some crap about "making choices": we have less choice than people think and free will is an illusion. Our conditions, surroundings, and chance largely determine the path we take through life. If you want to see an explanation of why free will isn't real, I have a long recent comment on it as a reply to this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=feet#31945561
If free will is an illusion then racists have no choice but to be racist, and our system of systemic violence, poverty, and oppression can never be changed as a result of our will because (as evidenced by its existence) no one has any ability to make the choice to change it. If it ever does change, it will happen for reasons entirely outside of our control and therefore there's no point spending time worrying about it.
You seem to be saying that its wrong for us (white people) to hold a single domino (black people) responsible for falling on those in front of it, after we've spent centuries laying out the dominoes behind it that caused it to tip forward, but certainly those white people laying out those previous dominoes were themselves tipped forward by the dominoes behind them stretching back to the earliest humans. Every domino is as culpable as the one before it or the ones centuries ahead of it.
I'd reject the idea that we should ignore the issue of black on black crime, or that it's pointless to try to improve that situation, or that there's nothing black people can do themselves to further that effort.
I'd rather trust that people can make their own choices, while acknowledging that those choices will be significantly limited and influenced by a person's circumstances. We're all influenced by our pasts, our environment, and our abilities, but there's still room enough there for choice most of time I think. It's better to look into why and how people make the choices they do and to try to help people make the best choices for the situations they're in, than to throw up our hands in despair over choices we're powerless to change.
Either way, it seems we can still hold black people who commit murder to the same standard as racists who commit lynchings. In the end, it doesn't matter if they made that choice or it was made for them by a deterministic universe and the simple law of cause and effect. Either way we have no choice but to acknowledge the reality of what they've done and try to limit their potential to harm others in the future.
If you're correct that a person's biology and their circumstances can make it impossible for them to do anything except murder others, once we know how to identify the set of conditions that invariably lead to that result we could justify punishing people for crimes they haven't yet committed, but I think we'd need a whole lot more evidence before we go down that terrifying path. Right now the available evidence would suggest it'd result in a lot of marching into black neighborhoods and rounding up black children so they can't grow up and murder other black people.