Juneteenth — an annual holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States — was observed on Friday, June 19, 2020. Sadly, this year, it was closely preceded by the death of yet another black man, George Floyd, who died during a police arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His death, along with that of many other African Americans who passed under questionable, police-involved circumstances, is a painful reminder of slavery’s stifling chokehold on the black community. Indeed, we are still miles away from full racial equity.

However, we must rejoice at every kilometre of our progress. And, while we pause to do so this year, let us also reflect on our messy internal affairs. Black-on-black crimes should be the most glaring and egregious among the muddle.

Quite often we get upset when black-on-black offences are mentioned in the heat of our protests of racial injustice. We think such talks only aim to counter, trivialise, or invalidate our immediate concerns. But, truly, that is not my intention here. I just want our clarion calls to take on additional tones — ones that crescendo and rail against the ghastly horrors that we, too, have perpetrated against our own black brothers and sisters.

We may want to deny our self-inflictions, but the statistics are telling. Moreover, first-person memoirs such Isha Sesay’s Beneath the Tamarind Tree and Clemantine Wamariya’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads, have chronicled our long history of brutish self-harm.

Take a look at this. In 1967, there was an unspeakable black-on-black crime, the Nigerian Civil War. This two-year combat, enkindled by societal inequities, ended with the death of more than one million blacks.

Flash back to 1994 and you will also find that Hutus slaughtered over 800,000 blacks during the Rwandan Civil War. Many Tutsis and Twas died at the hands of their fellow blacks. In fact, “neighbours killed neighbours, and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives,” according to a 2019 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report.

Fast-forward to the 2000’s and you will see that the black-on-black injustice continues.

On February 24, 2014, for example, members of the Black Islamic group, Boko Haram, murdered 59 Buni Yadi Secondary School boys in Nigeria. These extremists later abducted nearly 300 black girls from a boarding school nearby. Many of these Chibok girls are still hostages, and others have, no doubt, been killed.

Today, black-on-black crimes pervade the world, especially in post-colonial societies that should have otherwise been united by their shared struggle and humanity. Right here in Jamaica, we, too, record more than a thousand violent deaths each year. These murders are not acts of white cruelty at all; they inarguably represent our own barbaric treatment of each other. Still, these wicked acts are often met with silence or short-lived uproar.

We cannot continue to cry foul when others wound or kill one of us, but then mute our voices when our black brothers and sisters butcher each other. We should be just as outraged, if not more, and our condemnation should go viral on social media.

Let us extend the scope of our protests and rail against black-on-black injustice, too. Black lives should matter to us, especially!

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