#  Brandon Terry (Harvard University) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 22, 2024** 

 12:00PM - 01:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **WJH 1550**  



 

 



 

**The Idea of Black-on-Black Crime: Explanation, Normativity, and Ideology**

Social scientists and other commentators have moved from rhetoric of “black-on-black crime” to the rhetoric of “community violence.” This shift is motivated by an analytical claim that gives priority to “place” over “race” *and* a related project of ideology critique that treats the use of “black-on-black crime” as racially pathologizing or cynically motivated to distract from legitimate justice claims. Yet this story misses something important about the historical popularity of “black-on-black crime” discourse among black intellectuals and within black communities. My hypothesis is that black-on-black crime talk must be understood as two overlapping, but analytically distinct families of thought. The first is *explanatory* in its aspiration, drawing on psychology and sociology to generate controversial hypotheses about disinhibition, aggression, and group disorganization to explain violence between African Americans. The other, however, is *normative*. For these thinkers, what they called “black-on-black crime” reflects a normative argument meant to fill a void opened up the unremedied effects of broader systemic injustice and social abandonment, intensifies forms of racial stigma that unfairly harm the broader group, and violates basic rights. Such conditions call into question the very legitimacy of the legal-political order as well as the duty to comply with law, property rights, and norms of cooperation. Without reasonable appeal to the legitimacy of law and order, many reflective persons wondered how could people be persuaded to respect each other’s basic rights, cooperate in struggle, and take pride in contributing to mutual survival and flourishing amidst injustice? Black-on-black violence talk, on this account, often entails an attempt to promote a solidaristic, superogatory norm born of shared oppression against behavior thought to hinder political resistance and social trust.

In addition to this work of historical and analytical reconstruction, I want to consider normatively whether black-on-black crime talk took seriously challenges that replacement discourses like “community violence” have failed to take up including (1) a critique of the legitimacy of the existing social and legal order and recognition of certain forms of lawbreaking as legitimate dissent, (2) recognition that any such critique discloses a crisis of normativity that is dangerous to social life and normative order, (3) genuine recognition-respect for the moral and political agency of the victims and perpetrators of violence, and (4) serious reflection on the scope of black solidarity in political life.



 

 



 

 

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