Rudy Giuliani, in discussing the case of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri, made the following statement, “I find it very disappointing,” he told [Chuck] Todd, “that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. … I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.” In case one is wondering what is the basis of his fallacious analogy, Giuliani made it clear that he is wrestling with some deeper pathologies when he admonished his African American interlocutor, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.”

Like many conservative pundits, Giuliani throws up this analogy to essentially say, “Why are you so upset by the occasional white cop killing a black man (or boy), far more blacks are dying every day at the hands of other blacks.” This line of reasoning is deeply flawed because it ignores the fact that most victims of crime are victimized by members of their own race. This is so because most people in this country live in largely or entirely racially-segregated communities, and most crimes are crimes of opportunity or committed against acquaintances.

Giuliani’s logic hides the fact that eighty-four percent of white homicide victims are killed by other whites. For example, over ninety percent of those killed by the white shooters in Columbine High School were white. There was a single African American victim. This would be expected as the school is in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood and its student body was overwhelmingly white.

The issue of racial privilege and a sense of innate superiority is found in the fact that we never hear events such as the Columbine shooting or other violent crimes [including the two World Wars] perpetrated by whites against other whites described as “white-on-white crime.” It is just plain crime. Only inferior, savage blacks prey on each other in such a distinctively inhumane manner that their actions deserve the uniquely racist designation of “black-on-black crime.”

In reality, the issue of “black-on-black” crime, brought up in this context, is a red herring that distracts from the real issue. Namely, white cops killing black men, young and old, at an appalling rate. It is a national disgrace that approximately every thirty hours, somewhere in America, a black man is killed by a white police officer.

To reiterate, the comparative context here is not how many black citizens are killed by other black citizens. Were that the context we would compare that number to the percentage or number of white, Latino, or Native American citizens killed by their own. The percentages in all cases, as we alluded to above, would be very high.

The context here is how many blacks are killed by white cops as opposed to how many whites are killed by white cops, or by black cops for that matter. This is where you would find gross differentials in the comparative numbers and percentages. No one reading this post can immediately recall hearing of a black cop killing an unarmed white citizen. This is not to say that it has not happened, it is just to say that it is too rare to recall. Similarly, although it has happened, no one reading these words can recall a case of an unarmed white man being shot by a white cop, owing to its rarity.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, “Normality and Tamir Rice,” the time has come for this nation to get about the difficult work of having a serious conversation around this and similarly racially-charged issues, and then initiating long overdue corrective policies. This ugly cancer on the body of American society has festered far too long, and now its malignancy threatens to devour the very soul of the country. Each and every one of us should be asking ourselves, “What are we going to do to arrest it?”