Writer for Blackgirldangerous Has Something to Say about "Black Danger"

http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/01/broke-broke-crime-black-brown-living-unity/

^This article by Kitzia Esteva-Martinez, posted by an excellent blog called Blackgirldangerous, illuminated a rarely-discussed (at least in dominant culture, and the politically radical spaces dominated by white people that I have access to) and heartbreaking aspect of black criminality. 
Martinez describes herself as a "community-organizer, artist, undocumented and queer immigrant mujer for Mexico," and recounts her experience being mugged in her neighborhood in Oakland. Much of this article, although it is the story of a woman walking alone and robbed at gunpoint by three black teenagers, flies defiantly in the face of the traditional narrative mainstream media loves to prey upon about black crime. 

In this piece, Martinez tries to reconcile her need for space to deal with the trauma of being mugged with her political and moral qualms about calling the police. She carefully re-tells her story to friends and family, wanting it to sound different from the thousands of other stories about young black men and crime. 

Martinez describes the result of the careful and deliberate racialization of crime that Muhammad so expertly details in his book. She insists "Justice would be a world where boys of color don’t have to mug me to survive, to be men. This work is more nuanced than calling the police, than calling for harsher sentences, than banning weapons. What is needed to heal the alienation between our communities, the isolation from each other, looks like economic justice that we fight for in solidarity and unity." She describes some of the isolation she feels when her ex-partner urges her not to call the police so as to not contribute to the prison industrial complex and the pain of the questions the police ask when she finally does call them: "what race were they? how dark was their skin?" 

This piece adds a level of complexity to the discussion of the criminalization of Blackness, and extends the narrative beyond the specter of black on white violence (which seems to have motivated many of the early "findings" by race scientists) to the issue of what Martinez calls "broke on broke" violence; between communities of color, in an effort to rearranges the few resources allotted to them under capitalism. 

I was hesitant to post this article, as it seems like our class is majority white or white passing, and I definitely want to focus the discussion on the root causes of these anti-black racist mentalities, how they are a product of white supremacy. That is to say, I don't want to draw attention away from the meat of Muhammad's text. I just thought this was a relevant result of the history we investigated with this text.