People Asking Black Lives Matter to Show Outrage over ‘Black Crime’ Says So Much About Their Ignorance

Is it possible that we really don’t understand the difference between acts of criminality by Black people and police violence on Black people?

Could we be so compassionless as to not see that the former is grounded in historical violence and discrimination and the latter is the enforcer of that discrimination?

While I don’t belong to the Black Lives Matter movement and I don’t speak for its members, I find them to be provocative, courageous, profoundly committed to anti-racism and successful in moving the needle on larger societal understanding of issues that harm the marginalized, writes Shree Paradkar.  (Chris So / Toronto Star file photo)

Do we see the lack of equivalence, the power differentials between the shooting in the Annex on Monday, say, or the weekend shootings in North York and the allegations that Barrie police in June beat, tackled and Tasered a Black man reaching for his ID after they asked for it? That man, Olando Brown, is now dead.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) group organized a rally seeking justice for Brown on Wednesday.

A response I hear far too often is: where are BLM when Black people are killing each other?

This is a question often repeated on social media. I’ve heard journalists ask this. And on Sunday, in response to a Toronto Sun reporter’s tweet on “Black crime,” an elected official from Markham, Unionville ward councillor Don Hamilton, responded:

“Why haven’t we heard from the Black Lives Matters group? Its Blacks killing Blacks and so far we haven’t heard a peep from them.”

BLM isn’t the only representative of Black people, but it is the most visible and therefore also feared and reviled. While I don’t belong to the BLM movement and I don’t speak for its members, I find them to be provocative, courageous, profoundly committed to anti-racism and successful in moving the needle on larger societal understanding of issues that harm the marginalized.