If you Google black on black crime you'll be bombarded by statistics detailing inner city violence, pictures of chalk outlines and countless stories about the lives that have been destroyed. What you won't find are many stories chronicling the history of the black bourgeois attacking poorer and less educated blacks. This form of black on black crime is used by reactionaries to validate the criminalization of blacks. The most tasteless form of these attacks are leveled by "elites" who seek to distance themselves from the negative imagery associated with black life. There's a very lucrative conservative media market for blacks willing to denigrate other blacks.

Every ethnic group has distinctions that can be used to create artificial hierarchies. The African American community has used skin pigmentation, hair texture, and eye color as in-group out-group signifiers. Many of these distinctions can be traced back to slavery where light skin and straight hair were thought to be a less threatening and more desirable condition of blackness. The wealth and status gained by blacks in the last half of the 20th century created a sect of black elites who choose to impose their sense of superiority on less fortunate blacks. Many dark skinned blacks in the bourgeois class used their education and wealth to combat the historical trauma associated with their dark skin. 

Spike Lee's movie School Daze opened my eyes to some of the rifts that exist in the black community. There were two dominant forms of black on black crime  in School Daze. The first type was class based- between the locals (who were often depicted as envious and jealous) and the students (who were mostly depicted as entitled and pretentious). The second type was race based- between the dark skinned Pan-African students (depicted as militant and angry) and the light skinned fraternity brothers (depicted as fake and sellouts). 

In the 25 plus years since School Daze was released the psychological warfare between segmented groups inside the black community has grown more vicious. Social media has given a larger platform to blacks willing to spread the seeds of fear, distrust and hatred. Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, Tommy Sotomayor, Pastor James David Manning and a slew of lesser known commentators are symptoms of this segmentation. You can find an almost infinite amount of blogs and vlogs by blacks making derogatory statements about other black people. Many of these critiques (mostly inarticulate and overly simplistic) are disguised as tough love, yet they rarely offer any serious solutions to the systemic or cultural problems facing the black community. They share a common ideology that blames black victims of racial injustice as the culprits of their own predicaments. Slavery, Jim Crow, inadequate schools, stop-and-frisk, mass incarceration and police brutality are all discounted as playing any part in black suffering.

The ironic and fatal flaw in the black bourgeoisie's worldview is that no level of self aggrandizement can separate them from their black skin. The black bourgeois are Just as susceptible to racial profiling and various forms of discrimination they dismiss or outright deny. My goal isn't to deflect or silence their criticisms, but to call into question those who have nothing but contempt for their own people. Instead of defining themselves in terms of their accomplishments, they choose to point out who they are in terms of who they aren't. The stereotypes they try to distance themselves from ultimately work to trap them inside a psychological prison built by self doubt.