In the United States, a white person is almost six times more likely to be killed by another white person than he or she is to be killed by a black person. Yet, while the media obsesses about black on black violence we rarely if ever hear any mention of the problem of white on white violence. When media discussions talk about gang-related homicides, they invariably treat it as an almost exclusively African-American problem, yet according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for the period from 1980 to 2008, a majority (53.3 percent) of gang-homicides were committed by white offenders, and a majority of gang-homicide victims (56.5 percent) were white. When was the last time you heard a discussion about the white on white gang violence problem? The manifest benefit of white privilege is that any crimes committed by white people can be explained away as anomalies that are unique to the individual and that have nothing to do with race, but crimes committed by a single African-American or Latino individual are somehow attributed to the special pathologies of the “racialized other”.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 23:07:52 +0000
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