Notes on The Origins of the Phrase 'Black-on-Black Crime'

Overview

The CityLab article by Brentin Mock (June 11, 2015) analyzes how the term “black-on-black crime” originated, became politically charged, and calcified into American racial discourse.
It contrasts how the phrase is used across different actors: President Obama’s contextual use (sometimes signaling solidarity in black churches or HBCUs), social media repetition without context, and inside-safe black discourse spaces where community members discuss safety and harm.
The piece argues the term is largely a myth and that what’s often labeled as black-on-black violence is a by-product of residential segregation and concentrated poverty, not a racial characteristic of crime itself.
Writers like Jamelle Bouie and Natalie Hopkinson are cited for exposing the term as deceptive and misleading about the drivers of urban violence.

What the term does and why it endures

The phrase is deliberately charged and easily weaponized in political debates: it can deflect attention from systemic factors to individual pathology.
It obscures the real causes of intra-community crime, which are linked to segregation, poverty, and unequal access to opportunity rather than an intrinsic black-on-black propensity for violence.
The line that “Black homicide offenders don’t kill people because they have dark skin, like a Klan member would” highlights the misframing of the issue.
The myth persists despite a broader understanding that crime in black communities is tied to structural conditions, not the race of offenders or victims.

Early origins (1970s) and key articulations

December 1970: Warner Saunders, a Chicago Daily Defender columnist, writes about a seminar on black-on-black crime and interviews a neighborhood hustler named “Fast Willie.”
- Willie’s retort emphasizes proximity and opportunity: crimes are committed against those nearby because that’s where the offender is and where police are less likely to intervene.
- Quote: “We go where the business is and where the man ain’t looking. Can you see me going up to Deerfield, black as I am, trying to stick up? The man would be on me so fast I couldn’t get a chewing gum wrapper. Out here the man is too busy whooping them Panthers and giving tickets to mess with me. Any way, he don’t care if niggers get ripped off. But you can bet he’s watching his ‘thang’ back in his own ‘hood.’”
Deerfield context: a historically white, northern Chicago neighborhood (today about 96% white).
Jesse Jackson’s response: criticized white officials and mainstream media for silence and ineffectiveness in addressing the black-on-black crime crisis; praised the Defender for challenging the narrative.
Jackson highlighted a paradox: criminal offenses in black neighborhoods, yet the justice system treats black victims and offenders differently depending on whether the victim is white or black.
The “killing of more than 70 black youths” in that period is cited to illustrate the visible crisis and the demand for intervention.
The broader claim: black neighborhoods are underpoliced in some ways and overpoliced in others, contributing to a perception of crime that centers the black community as inherently dangerous.

Legal benchmarks and scholarly reception (early 1970s)

1971: Cook County Judge Saul A. Epton sentences two black men to the same 100- to 150-year terms in murder cases—one with a white victim, the other with a black victim—to counter the notion that sentences were lighter when the victim was white.
1972: Alvin F. Poussaint’s Why Blacks Kill Blacks (with introduction by Jesse Jackson) addresses the issue in scholarly terms, signaling a shift from black leaders chastising white officials to direct critique of conditions within black communities.
Ebony editorial (November 1973): “The black criminal must be told in no uncertain terms that his assaults and his thievery and his dope-pushing and his murders will no longer be suffered in silence.”
Context: white landlords and real-estate developers had long exploited black communities; the discourse around crime intersected with urban housing policy and white flight.

Structural context: segregation, housing, and real estate

The article notes that decades of white flight and housing policies created segregated, under-resourced black neighborhoods.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Beryl Satter are cited for documenting how landlords and developers exploited black communities and how segregation persisted in Chicago and other cities.
The emergence of the term coincides with these structural dynamics, making the phrase a shorthand for a broader system of racialized urban policy.

NAACP stance and the 1980 resolution

1980 NAACP resolution on black-on-black crime: opposed to the perpetration of criminal activity regardless of who commits the crime.
Acknowledges contributing factors such as high unemployment, poor academic training, and inadequate housing, but maintains that crimes by blacks against blacks are equally unlawful and undesirable.
The resolution marks an attempt to separate the discussion from overly simplistic racialized explanations and to emphasize accountability within the community.

How the term evolved in the Reagan era and mass incarceration

David Wilson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) argues that the 1980s period saw the term become a potent tool in the rise of Reaganism.
Well-intentioned Black leaders introduced the term to policymakers, which contributed to its cultural stickiness and “calcification” in American public consciousness.
Wilson asks why the term could not have been framed in terms of economic or societal causes (e.g., “oppressed youth-on-oppressed youth” crime) rather than racialized framing.
The phrase aided a political climate that supported punitive policies and the War on Drugs, helping to normalize harsh measures that disproportionately affected Black communities and contributed to mass incarceration.
The line of argument implied that urban crime was a Black problem, diverting attention from systemic inequality and policy failures.

Historical antecedents: longer arc of racial criminalization

Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness (2010) traces the idea of crime as a marker of Blackness back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The period saw white scientists and some Black thinkers manipulate arrest and imprisonment data to depict Black people as inherently criminal, a frame used to police Black migration to northern cities.
In the 1930s-1937, quotes from prominent Black thinkers illustrate early anxieties around order, respectability, and crime:
- Haley Douglass (Frederick Douglass’s grandson) describes attempts to protect property from perceived criminal threats as cities and coastal resorts for elite Black Americans.
- W. E. B. Du Bois (1937) questions the gaps between Black respectability and the fear of criminality in Black communities.
These historical reflections show that “good guys” vs. “criminals” debates are deeply American and have long framed Black social life.

Migration, segregation, and the long arc of urban inequality

The Great Migration and continued internal Black migration to northern cities reinforced segregation and the conditions that later fed the black-on-black discourse.
As Black middle classes grew, communities still faced underinvestment and constrained mobility, which sharpened concerns about safety and criminality within Black neighborhoods.
The Brown University American Communities Survey (2011) emphasizes structural roots: even when Black individuals achieve higher incomes, they often cannot translate that into meaningful residential mobility due to segregation and unequal access to opportunity.
- Quote: “The low incomes of blacks are not the main source of either residential segregation or disparities in the resources of the neighborhoods where they live. A central new finding is that blacks’ neighborhoods are separate and unequal not because blacks cannot afford homes in better neighborhoods, but because even when they achieve higher incomes they are unable to translate these into residential mobility.”
Gary Younge (The Nation) argues for a more honest term: “A more honest term than ‘black-on-black crime’ would be, simply, ‘crime.’”

Contemporary assessments and cautions about terminology

The National Institute of Justice and Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety released a report urging the media to stop using the term because, while statistically accurate, it is simplistic and emotionally charged for political, policy, and policing rhetoric.
However, the report notes that the discussion around segregation is not explicitly named in the 24-page document, highlighting a gap between statistics and structural analysis.
The CityLab policing and public safety committee reframes the issue, noting that most urban homicide is driven by intra- and inter-gang conflicts, drug networks, and other organized criminal activity, which involve small fractions of city populations. It states: "Research has consistently documented that violence driven by conflicts within and among gangs, drug- selling crews and other criminally active groups generate the bulk of urban homicide problems" and that these groups are typically a small share of the population (e.g., 1 percent of Boston’s 14-to-24-year-old population in gangs involved in gun violence in 2006).
The conclusion: "Black-on-black violence" is not the correct framing; the problem is violence within systematically segregated communities.

Black Lives Matter and internal community healing perspectives

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, emphasizes that the movement is not only about police killings but also about addressing harm inside Black communities.
- Cullors: There are many Black people over the past 40 years who have been figuring out how to deal with harm inside our communities.
- The broader aim of Black Lives Matter is to foster spaces where communities can secure what they need to prevent harm, rather than relying on policies that destabilize neighborhoods.
- She frames Black Lives Matter as a new approach to fighting for freedom that includes internal community accountability and healing.
The linkage between policy drivers and attitudes toward crime is complex, making it difficult to disentangle structural roots from cultural perceptions.

Implications, connections, and takeaways

The term “black-on-black crime” obscures the structural drivers of urban violence: segregation, concentrated poverty, housing inequality, and underinvestment.
Historical mischaracterizations of Black criminality have reinforced punitive policies that contribute to mass incarceration and the criminalization of Black communities.
A more accurate discourse acknowledges that violence in Black communities is often a function of systemic racism and policy choices rather than an intrinsic racial trait of crime.
Policy implications include prioritizing housing justice, economic opportunity, education, and community-led safety initiatives over racialized framing of crime.
The ongoing scholarly and public discourse urges accuracy in language to avoid reinforcing stereotypes and to better address real-world patterns of violence and inequality.

Key figures and sources mentioned

Brentin Mock (CityLab), author of the CityLab piece (2015)
Jamelle Bouie and Natalie Hopkinson (journalists who highlighted the term as a myth)
Warner Saunders (Chicago Defender, 1970s)
“Fast Willie” (neighborhood hustler quoted by Saunders)
Jesse Jackson (civil rights leader and commentator on race and crime)
Saul A. Epton (Cook County judge, 1971)
Alvin F. Poussaint (Why Blacks Kill Blacks, 1972)
Ebony magazine editorial (Nov. 1973)
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Beryl Satter (historical analyses of housing and exploitation in Black America)
NAACP (1980 resolution on black-on-black crime)
David Wilson (University of Illinois, Inventing Black-On-Black Violence, 2005)
Khalil Gibran Muhammad (The Condemnation of Blackness, 2010)
Haley Douglass (Frederick Douglass’s grandson; 1930s reflections)
W. E. B. Du Bois (1937 op-ed, Pittsburgh Courier)
The National Institute of Justice and Harvard Kennedy School (Executive Session report on policing and public safety)
Gary Younge (The Nation; criticism of the term as a misnomer)
Patrisse Cullors (Black Lives Matter co-founder)
Tupac Shakur (early-1990s commentary on crime and community dynamics)
The 2011 Brown University American Communities Survey (racial segregation and mobility findings)
Boston case referenced in CityLab report (1% of 14-to-24-year-olds in gangs in 2006)

Connections to broader themes

The role of media framing in shaping public perception of crime and race.
The tension between solidarity with criminal justice reform and concerns for community safety.
The interplay between public policy, urban planning, housing policy, and crime dynamics.
The importance of distinguishing between descriptive statistics and normative policy implications when discussing crime and race.
The value of internal community conversations (as highlighted by Cullors) in guiding responses to violence without destabilizing neighborhoods through over-policing or punitive policies.