September 6, 2007
- Issue 243 |
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The And False Assumptions of Black on Black Crime By Ryan P. Haygood Guest Commentator |
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I have a
confession to make. I assumed that those responsible for
the horrific murders in The study, recently released by the
department's Bureau of Statistics, showed that although Blacks comprise
only 13 percent of the In other words, more than 9 out of
every 10 Black murder victims die at the hands of another Black person.
I assumed, incorrectly, that the same was true here. And I was
not alone. It turns out, however, that those
charged with the murders of the three young friends are not Black folks.
They are Latinos, at least one of whom is in To be sure, many of The statistic above clearly demonstrates
that mass deportation of illegal immigrants would have virtually no
impact on the rate at which Blacks are murdered in communities like Consider this scenario: In the years between 1915 and 1970,
7 million migrants crossed Southern borders, bound for economic opportunities
in Northern cities like This is the story, not of the illegal
immigrants who are at the center of the current debate, but that of
the millions of Blacks who left the American South following the abolition
of slavery. Black people are this country's first
and only involuntary illegal immigrants. We were kidnapped from the
African coast and dragged to the American shores for decades after
the "legal" slave trade ended in 1808. In the cloud of historical
amnesia, and faced with this horrific tragedy, some of us overlook
the fact that the debate surrounding immigration today echoes the issues
that confronted Blacks in the recent past. The lessons taught by Black history
provide the strongest argument for rejecting forces that seek to weaken
all of us by dividing us. And division is precisely what focusing on
the irrelevant immigration status of perpetrators creates. In the wake of the tragic murders
of three of And we must do that together. Ryan Paul Haygood is a resident
of Newark's South Ward and a civil rights attorney in New York City
and an Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, Inc. (LDF). Click
here to contact Mr. Haygood. |
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