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As black Author Stanley Crouch wrote in the Village Voice in the wake of the Goetz shootings, some black perceptions nourished by the civil rights movement are changing. In automatically defending the black teenage criminal, suggested Crouch, blacks were also hurting themselves. "Race was one thing, crime another. It was no longer second nature for black people to take the side of the impoverished colored teenager who created so many of their own problems." There is a realization, compelled by force of circumstance, that blacks must look at themselves first as victims of crime and only second as victims of racism. To understand the crime is not to condone the criminal, suggests Silberman. "To excuse violence because black offenders are the victims of poverty and discrimination is racism of the most virulent sort; it is to continue to treat black people as if they were children incapable of making moral decisions or of assuming responsibility for their own actions and choices."
At the funeral of Ben Wilson, a promising young basketball player who was gunned down for no apparent reason in Chicago last year, Jesse Jackson took up the issue of black-on-black violence. "All of the murders that we didn't react to set the stage for this one," said Jackson in his eulogy. "We are losing more lives in the streets of America than we lost in the jungles of Viet Nam. We must be as serious about ending the war at home as the war abroad." Yes, black-on-black violence is a black problem. But above all it is an American problem. Segregating it from the rest of American life, treating it as an ill-kept secret that can be either ignored or rationalized away, is as damaging and insidious as segregation itself. "Crime is the same for all of us," says the noted black playwright Charles Fuller, author of A Soldier's Play. "We cannot abrogate our role as participants in American life."