Jeffries: "Black On Black Violence As A Hate Crime"

The Seton Hall University law professor and liberal writes:

"Newsweek reports that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are using hate-crime laws to prosecute Latino gangbangers for a series of racially motivated attacks on Blacks. The context may seem somewhat novel, but at a higher level of generality the claim is familiar: The Latino gangbangers allegedly attacked African-Americans in order to dissuade Black folk from moving to predominately Latino neighborhoods.

Reading the report, however, provoked another question: Why not use hate-crimes laws to attack Black-on-Black crime? Much of Black-on-Black crime, I’d submit, reflects the extent to which Black folk have internalized stigma-informed signals about their capacity and worth. Stigma suggests to Black folk that their humanity is less valuable than that of Whites. To that extent, stigma cheapens the value of Black life — perhaps to the point that, when internalized, the self-constraint Black folk might otherwise exercise when contemplating deadly force is nullified.

According to social scientists, stigma concerns a trait so thoroughly discredited that the existential character of those bearing the trait is called into question. Stigma therefore challenges the essence of the kind of being the stigmatized constitute. Largely because of stigma, our forebears readily reconciled liberal, democratic values with the gross inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow: If Black folk weren’t fully human, they had no right to human entitlements. Assuming stigma continues to represent a salient aspect of American society, the concept of Black-on-Black crime seems less a descriptive notion and more a normative one. To this extent, the racial identity of the victims of Black violence is a precipitating cause of the violence itself. That sounds precisely like the legal definition of a hate crime.

"My response: as much as I am tempted to view black on black violence as a hate crime, I must disagree. The stigma that Professor Jeffries mentions was vastly stronger during Jim Crow, but yet black folks weren't offing each other like nowadays. Today's crime stats are happening not because of stigma, but because some folks lack decent moral values...unlike older generations of far poorer black folks. The prevalence of fatherless homes is taking its toll, and that is where the focus should lie.