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In his text Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote,
“Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel (111).”
Here, Coates argues the root of intercommunal Black violence exists within the conditions created by white supremacy. To Coates, Black death must always be understood in relationship to the racist structures that are invested in our plunder. As a fifteen-year-old Black boy in a white high school, I felt seen by this quote. So, I paraded my Jesuit high school with activism evangelizing my community as irresponsible for our deaths. Coates made the idea of Black-on-black crime meaningless by arguing that we are not to blame for our peoples’ deaths because very few Black people love dying. But as a twenty-one-year-old Black queer person, in the midst of global political unrest, I am not sure I still agree fully with Coates or with my fifteen-year-old self. Why? Because now everyone knows white American violence is not color-blind. But nobody cares that all American violence hates trans people. As a Black person, Black intercommunal betrayal is our greatest sin. And Black intercommunal betrayal happens when we betray the people that we love the most, but won't love publicly.
In the wake of National Coming Out Day, I am coming out as Black. My Blackness in its very essence already encompasses a rainbow of colors. My sexual partners are my business. But despite the biology of my next sexual partner, Tony McDade is dead. Layleen Polanco has passed. The popularity of Breonna Taylor is now a means by which white folks can tell me they voted for Obama. Nina Pop is gone. Nevertheless, this year will be called and centered around the “George Floyd” protests. To that I ask, what about Black-on-black crime?
I am not asking for a rainbow flag to love me or save me. The pride and colors of the rainbow flag sometimes subjugate me. They bring me closer to invisibility, death, and shame. Violence didn’t just plan the projects or sell “red ink by the barrel.” Violence is sitting pretty in the pride of pulpits, family dinners, and presidential debates. If I go to church, the sound of hatred is as terrible as any other bullet. It is the sound of this intercommunal betrayal spoken in my own Black english that I fear the most. It is death by a beautiful Black man that I am most scared of. For many of the people suffocating under the weight of the American flag, the rainbow flag only can bring a lustful attraction. A deadly lust where a Black man comes but shoots you after he’s done. Black-on-Black crime or death by a lover?
