Hello readers, I have a problem, there’s a lot of talk about cops murdering black men and extreme excessive force on black men and women, sometimes resulting in the victims death. But my problem isn’t so much with those situations -at least not in this post- but with the uproar of community outrage over these deaths, now don’t get it twisted I’m not mad that these communities are upset and speaking out, but I do have a problem with the notion that any other race or (white controlled entity) should care that Black Lives Matter, when our lives don’t seem to matter to us first.

Donald Trump released a statistical sheet sometime ago, comparing the percentage of Police related Black shootings to other shootings acts performed against Black Americans, he shows Police at 1% and Black on Black at 97%, and while his data wasn’t collected by the U.S. census bureau, it’s not that far off from my personal experience, in fact my experience would make Donald’s data seem kind, because I don’t personally know any black person that was murdered by a white person, let alone a Police Officer. Where I’m from (Philadelphia,Pa) every black friend, student, acquaintance, and family member, who was murdered, was murdered by another black person.

So, when I saw the “Black Lives Matter” movement, I took pause, because while I agree, it makes me sad that this type of outrage doesn’t extend to the behavior of our own brothers and sisters that we see every day. I work in the Philadelphia School District and none of the violence I see happening to black students, comes by the way of a racist white person or a Police Officer (School or City), it’s black on black. Out of the 14 years that I’ve spent working for the district, I’ve lost 23 students to violent deaths, and nearly half of those losses are from incarcerations of students that committed murders – the murders of the other half of that number.

As of this writing there have been 277 homicides in Philadelphia, many of those are black people murdered by another black person, and while Philadelphia is a great example, it’s sadly not an exclusive one nor the latter. For example according to CNN (2016) 762 people were killed as of December 2017, putting homicides up by 54.6% over 2015, in this example they had more black homicides than Philadelphia had total homicides, this is our reality and the biggest problem currently facing our community.

My grandmother raised me with the saying “if you want anyone to respect you, you have to first respect yourself”, so if this is true- and I believe it is- then my community has some work to do if we ever want to be seen as the strong, beautiful, God fearing, compassionate, people that we are, yes black lives do matter, but black people need to lead by example.

Citation: A. Ansari and R. Flores, Chicago’s 762 homicides in 2016 is highest in 19 years, Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/01/us/chicago-murders-2016/