But What About Black-on-Black Crime? Part 2

Most people work ordinary jobs and live ordinary lives. That reality is especially important when discussing how entire communities are portrayed.

Working-class Black people make up the majority of the Black population. There are also working poor communities, middle-class communities, and a much smaller percentage in wealthy or elite spaces.

Yet mainstream media and entertainment frequently emphasize a different image: the criminal underworld, gang culture, drug activity, and the most extreme examples of dysfunction.

Those images are repeated so often that they begin to stand in for the whole, even though they represent only a small fraction of the broader population.

In reality, the vast majority of Black people are law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who are not involved in violent crime.

Even if one imagines a small percentage engaged in criminal behavior, that small percentage should not be used to define or justify harm against the overwhelming majority who are not part of it.

This is one of the core problems with broad public narratives around race and crime: they blur the line between the few and the many.

Many high-profile victims of police violence were not hardened criminals, gang members, or active threats. They were ordinary people, often working class, trying to live their lives.

Some had minor infractions or nonviolent records. Others had no widely reported serious criminal background at all.

Yet media coverage often finds ways to mention unrelated past records or minor history in ways that subtly shape public sympathy and imply moral justification where none should exist.

If a person is not committing a violent crime in the present moment, then unrelated issues from the past should not be treated as moral justification for lethal force.

But in public discourse, past arrests, prior charges, or old controversies are frequently inserted after the fact to damage the image of the victim.

This tactic changes the conversation. Instead of focusing on whether the present act of violence was justified, it shifts attention toward whether the victim was “good enough” to deserve sympathy.

This selective framing is not limited to anonymous people. It is easy to imagine the same logic being applied to public figures if they were placed in similar circumstances.

The media often reaches for past incidents, old charges, or controversial moments not because they are relevant to the event itself, but because they help construct a narrative the audience is more likely to accept.

Once again, the focus shifts from the immediate question of justice to a broader attempt to recast the victim’s character.

Another common diversion is the use of unrelated violence elsewhere to avoid talking directly about a specific case.

Bringing up unrelated crime in other neighborhoods, cities, or social contexts does not answer the question of whether a particular act of police violence was justified.

It simply moves the conversation away from the case at hand and toward a different topic that is emotionally charged enough to distract people.

At a certain point, the contradiction becomes obvious. If someone lives a law-abiding working-class life, then pointing to unrelated criminal behavior by others does not logically justify harm against that person.

And if the public would reject that logic in other contexts, it should reject it here as well.

The challenge is to see through the framing and return to the basic question: what happened in the moment, and was it just?

Most people are not what the media’s most repeated images suggest. Most are ordinary, working, surviving, and trying to move forward.

That is why it matters to separate the majority from the stereotype, the present from the past, and the actual case from the distractions used to frame it.

Once that distinction is made, the conversation becomes much harder to manipulate.