Summary

Being Black in America: Our Own Worst Enemy? In this chapter the author, still referring to the reader as “beloved,” discusses the argument that instead of focusing on the killings of black people by white police, black people should focus on black people killing each other. The author contends that this argument is primarily presented by those who refuse to acknowledge the statistics related to white-on-white violence - specifically, numbers that prove more white people than black people kill white people, and that white people are more responsible for other kinds of crime than black people. The author acknowledges the problem of black-on-black violence, describing his own encounters with it and his understandings of the reasons why it occurs: poverty, desperation, and the pain of living under the control of whiteness. He calls on the reader to gain some perspective on white-on-white...