Chicago in conversations of race and police violence
- The Youth Activist Club
- Jul 30, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 24, 2020
By Chikamso Chijioke
Imagine this: you see a news article of protests about an unarmed black person being killed. The death angers you, so you tell your friend about it. They respond with, “I don’t know why they always get so angry. More black people died in Chicago over the weekend than police have killed this year. Why aren’t they marching about that?” I’ve heard variations of this line countless times. This is a common deflection tactic brought up when discussing police violence, especially against black people in America.
While the statement may not be statically false, its intentions are harmful. When someone says something like that, they’re trying to say that the Black Lives Matter movement is unwarranted. It is an attempt to diminish the movement, by saying it has the wrong focus. It’s saying that black people should not be mad at unjust killings of citizens by officers who swore to “protect and serve,” because the real murderers we should be worried about come from our own communities, amongst our own ranks. There’s a lot of things this type of rhetoric fails to address.
I don’t think it’s unfair to make the assumption that anyone who says that statement does not understand the workings of the movement. Never mind the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement was born against the violence and persecution black people faced from the state and those in power. Unless a change occurred that I was unaware of, black gang violence in Chicago is not enacted by the state. The organization was not created to deal with every form of harm to black people. It was not made to stop violence between black people in inner cities. It was not made to stop black people from getting abortions. It was not made to fix the single motherhood rate in the black community, It was made to combat police violence, period. You wouldn’t expect a plumber to file your taxes.
There are other organizations that fight against all those other harms, but Black Lives Matter is not one of them. Just because “it doesn’t fix everything” doesn’t mean it's a bad thing. Doesn’t mean they “don’t care about black lives”. In fact, Black Lives Matter has shown to be effective in bringing justice to black victims and restructuring the police state.
Another grievance the mode of flawed thinking fails to address is the fact that when police officers kill civilians, more often than not they don’t go to jail. In fact, according to Mapping Police Violence, cops who kill only get charged with a crime about 1.7% of the time, and the amount that faces jail time is even less, as the charges are dropped in many cases. However when a black gang member in Chicago kills another opposing gang member or a bystander, they are much more likely to go to jail. The movement says that police should be held to a higher standard than civilians. That they should know better. That they should face repercussions when they beat or kill someone unjustly, just as any other person would.
It’s time we stop trying to divert attention from a pressing issue because we don’t want to believe that our precious law enforcement system is capable of atrocities. Black lives have not been given the same treatment from the system as other kinds of people. We must remind the criminal justice system that black lives matter today, tomorrow, and everyday after that. And we must not stop until it acts like it.
Sources:
Comments