The Twitter World is urging more Black Celebs to comment on the injustice of the fatal shooting of an unarmed 18 year old African American boy, Mike Brown, at the hands of the Ferguson Police. The only problem is, some of these Celebs are getting slammed for their opinions. Tyrese and B.O.B. recently tweeted similar comments, making statements about “Black-on-Black” Crime:
See Tweets Below:
Black Twitter accused them of selling out and portraying the Black Race in a negative light. Their argument was that the percentage of “white-on-white” crime is close to that of “black-on-black” crime. To kill all of the debate, we decided to present facts straight from The Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2011.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) notes that most crime is intra-racial. Statistics show that 84% of White victims are killed by Whites and 93% of Black victims are killed by Blacks (BJS, 2011).
However, one thing to note is that the Black population is much smaller. Check out these facts below:
Black Americans are four times more likely to be murdered than the national average. What’s more, four out of five black homicide victims are killed with guns.
Nationwide, the black homicide victimization rate in 2011 was 17.51 per 100,000. The overall national homicide victimization rate was 4.44 per 100,000, and among white Americans, the homicide victimization rate was 2.64 per 100,000.
Based on these stats, there definitely seems to be a problem in the African American community. However, shouldn’t we be focusing on the injustice that took place in the Mike Brown incident right now? What do you all think? What side of the debate do you fall on?
