{"id":40692,"date":"2015-03-30T20:27:32","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T20:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=40692"},"modified":"2015-03-30T20:27:32","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T20:27:32","slug":"black-on-black-crime-and-the-peculiar-responsibility-of-biracial-positionality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=40692","title":{"rendered":"Black On Black Crime And The Peculiar Responsibility Of Biracial Positionality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black On Black Crime And The Peculiar Responsibility Of Biracial Positionality<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Magic Mulatto<\/a>
\n2015-03-28<\/p>\n

Brett Russell Coleman<\/strong><\/a>, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research
\nUniversity of Illinois, Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n

In this piece I am 1) making the argument that anti-blackness is pervasive, and 2) concluding that biracial (black\/white) people have a peculiar responsibility to confront anti-blackness.<\/p>\n

I come to that conclusion as a result of much experience and some study, and illustrate the argument with a small slice of that experience.<\/p>\n

First, let\u2019s think about what \u201cblack on black crime\u201d really means.<\/p>\n

When the topic of police violence against black people comes up, people often change the subject. \u201cWhat about black on black crime?\u201d they ask.<\/p>\n

This is what logicians call a red herring fallacy,<\/p>\n

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to \u2018win\u2019 an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cwhat about black on black crime?\u201d argument is a particularly effective red herring because 1) it seems relevant enough and 2) it is supported by an anti-black narrative that is always hovering in the air, even when you don\u2019t notice it.<\/p>\n

By presenting this different argument, people not only change the subject but they shift blame.<\/p>\n

Confronting the disproportionate killing of black people at the hands of the police means confronting systemic, culturally bound racism. Few people want to do this because if they confront systemic racism embedded in everyday life, they have to confront the racism embedded in themselves, in their everyday ways of thinking, talking and doing. This comes very close to blame, and no one wants to be responsible for \u201cbeing racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is much easier to change the subject, and shift the blame, to black on black crime because this fits nicely with our hyper-individualized culture that makes people solely and completely responsible for their own conditions of living. Then one needn\u2019t confront systemic racism, or one\u2019s own racism, because everything that happens to you is your fault.<\/p>\n

If you find it difficult to understand how insidious it is to change the subject from police killing blacks at disproportionately high rates to \u201cblack on black crime,\u201d ask yourself this: would you go to a lecture about fighting cancer and ask the lecturer why she wasn\u2019t talking about fighting AIDS<\/a>? That would be absurd, would it not? You\u2019d be chased out of the place.<\/p>\n

Changing the subject from police violence against blacks to \u201cblack on black crime\u201d is not only a red herring; it\u2019s also an example of the systemic, culturally embedded, anti-black racism that nearly everyone is guilty of…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black On Black Crime And The Peculiar Responsibility Of Biracial Positionality The Magic Mulatto 2015-03-28 Brett Russell Coleman, Doctoral Student of Community & Prevention Research University of Illinois, Chicago In this piece I am 1) making the argument that anti-blackness is pervasive, and 2) concluding that biracial (black\/white) people have a peculiar responsibility to confront […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[13674,13675],"class_list":["post-40692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-brett-russell-coleman","tag-the-magic-mulatto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}