Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“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.

To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.

Murder was all around us and we knew, deep in ourselves, in some silent space, that the author of these murders was beyond us, that it suited some other person’s ends. We were right. —