We begin with a focus on the issue of criminality, a discussion of the role and function of black criminals in the context of the larger society, and we will also discuss the role played by the larger white American collective community in fostering and maintaining black criminality.

In this era of individual accountability, what follows may come as a surprise to many, but collective accountability has been a difficult issue for the white American community. Indeed, white Americans are often blinded by the ideal of rugged individualism, and/or by the mythological interpretation of such a false construct. The American government has never so-much-as offered an apology for their murder, slavery, and physical abuse of Africans, African descended and Native American people. Those injustices were done under the banner of chattel slavery and manifest destiny. Nor has the white American collective community endeavored to create institutions to help minimize the debilitating psychological consequences of such treatment.

This failure remains as evidence of an ongoing denial, by the larger community, of the brutal and devastating consequences of oppression. One particular area of denial is the idea of the Black criminal. The high rate at which criminals are being created (justly or unjustly) is clear as the government races to house them, and in so doing make the prison industry one of the fastest growing industries in the United States.

The need to projectively perceive the black male as criminal, and to psychosocially and politico-economically condition his criminality is reflective of repressed white American guilt and criminality. The white American community needs to realize, though it will not admit it, that their crimes--the rape and robbery of nations, the murder of native peoples and exploitation of their lands, the slavery, racial discrimination and disenfranchisement of African descended and Native American people, all committed in the service of white American supremacy--infinitely outweigh the alleged crimes of African American men. Their ongoing defense of their continuing criminal subordination of African peoples is a key to the pathology of African American men. Their pathology is a variant of white American communal psychopathology.

The statistics on crime are important, but the far more important story represented by these figures is that the activities they depict are the reactionary results of a deliberate psychological and political campaign against the African American and Pan-African communities.

It may appear that many of us are dying by our own hands; however, the black on black violent criminal has an assigned role and function in this society. The primary causal factor in black criminality is white supremacy, which, by its very nature and intent, requires the continuing oppression, subordination, and sometimes the lives of African people. Subordination of a people requires the violation, dehumanization, and humiliation of that people as well as violence towards that people. The violently oppressed tend to react violently to their oppression. When their violent acts, which are usually reactionary, retaliatory, or defensive, cannot be effectively directed at their oppressors or applied to their self-liberation, it is then directed towards and applied destructively to themselves. Amos Wilson said, "Black men kill each other because they have not yet chosen to challenge and neutralize on every front, the widespread power of white men to rule over their lives". Continue on next page

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