Another week, another white police officer caught "policing" the black community with coercion, not consent. The narrative this week is: If you're young and black in America, not even a pool party is safe. Subsequent protests have forced former Officer of the Year Eric Casebolt to turn in his badge and gun — it seems you really can mess with Texas.
But in all of the tallying of police shootings and talk of watching the watchmen, we neglect the real issue — the phantom menace of internecine violence among young black men.
Police killed about 150 black people in 2013, the last year data are available. Black people killed 6,501 black people that same year. If "black lives matter," why are we ignoring so many black lives lost?
Public silence on this issue has led some to argue that "#SomeBlackLivesDontMatter." But this is another reductionism. Homicide and violent crime are up this year in several major cities, including Minneapolis.
Baltimore, the city that in popular culture exemplified the bleakness of poor urban places, then in real life collapsed under the weight of Freddie Gray's death in police custody, has suffered a staggering 128 homicides in 2015. There were 43 killings in May alone, the highest one-month total in 40 years.
Of the 128 Baltimore victims this year, 110 — or 86 percent — were black. Admittedly, 60 percent of Baltimore city residents are black, but the scary thing is that over 80 percent of those killed are under the age of 34.
We're witnessing the systematic elimination of a significant part of a racial-ethnic group — its younger generation. And this is genocide from within because most homicides are intraracial.
It's true that white people are also more likely to kill white people. However, black people kill each other at six times the rate of whites. This doesn't just happen in places like Baltimore. In Minnesota, where blacks comprise less than 6 percent of the population, 40 percent of all homicide victims and offenders are black.