The Brother War

Our communities are bloody battlefields

THE BROTHER WAR

Our communities are bloody battlefields

John Washington

As a black man, I must say plainly that there is a war going on in America, one without mobilization, without strategy, and without acknowledgment. Few even admit to its existence. Yet over the last ten years, this war’s death toll has surpassed that of the 58,220 American deaths in the ten-year-long Vietnam War in which I fought as an infantryman. Because silence, denial, and detachment surround our current war’s horrific events, nothing is being done about it—not even naming the scourge. So, I will take that honor and call it the Brother War, for it is an abattoir of black men and boys slaughtering fellow blacks.

(Statistics from the FBI’s database)

The additional horror of this war is that the 87,085 black souls slaughtered over the past decade make up over half of all murder victims in the U.S. and come from a population, us, that represents just 12 percent of the population. If you do the accounting not just for the past decade but for the first quarter of this century, you’ll find that roughly 234,000 black Americans have been murdered, overwhelmingly by other black Americans, since 2000.

Many in our communities see these killings as isolated crimes, unaware that each incident is part of a nationwide battlefield. And yet prominent black voices—who surely recognize the scope—remain silent. This is a taboo subject, one buried under a collective hush, despite the well-documented fact that most murders in America occur within the same racial group. Blacks kill blacks, whites kill whites, and so on. The killing stays within the tribe. And let’s be honest, if we were killing whites or if whites were killing us at these rates, public outrage would have put a stop to it long ago.

If we use U.S. Justice Department data, which finds that about 93% of black victims were killed by other blacks, then of the 87,085 dead, 81,000 died at the hands of their brothers.

One night in the late 1970s, I witnessed this war firsthand in a small corner grocery, the kind that existed before convenience stores took over. It was in an all-black neighborhood in the western hills of Asheville, North Carolina, early in the rise of black-on-black slaughter.

When I entered the store, a heated argument was already underway. The clerk, drunk while on duty, had miscalculated a customer’s total. Their shouting backed up the line, and by the time I joined it, about ten frustrated people were waiting.

“Alright,” the clerk finally said, conceding the mistake. But instead of bagging the man’s items, he swept his arm across the counter, sending them flying. As they hit the floor, the customer whipped out a pistol and fired six rounds into the clerk’s chest. The clerk rocked for an instant, eyes glassy and vacant, before collapsing behind the counter, knocking items down off the shelf behind him.

The line exploded in panic. People screamed, stampeded for the door, knocking down and trampling over an elderly woman who was on her way in. Another man and I stayed put. Having seen combat in Vietnam, I was hardened to violence and could tell the killer had no further intent. The shooter calmly looked down at his victim, tucked his gun into his back pocket, and walked out with the self-satisfied air of a man who had just proved something to himself.

It struck me immediately: this was about manhood. The killer, clearly a lower working-class man, had finally done something that made him feel powerful. And I think that for many of our young men today, that same hunger for manhood, unmet through constructive means, finds its outlet in violence. In a world where masculinity is measured by wealth, they are left with the gun as their only symbol of power. This article will in no way offer an alibi to excuse this fact.

This struggle has haunted black men since we first began arriving on American soil. Slavery and Jim Crow stripped us of masculine identity and agency. The earliest opportunities to reclaim it came through military service: 5,000 black men fought on the side of the Patriots in the Revolutionary War; 170,000 fought for the Union in the Civil War, 10,000 of whom died in battle; and after emancipation, others continued that service as Buffalo Soldiers and in all the other wars up to the present. Through war and sacrifice, we have demonstrated citizenship and manhood.

Frederick Douglass understood this when he wrote:

“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”

I know exactly what he meant. After completing high school in the South in 1963, I was blocked from good working-class jobs and lacked money for college, so I joined the Army. There, I became part of the warrior class and, in my mind, a full man. Throughout history and across societies, the warrior has been the most trustworthy symbol of manhood, and I had made the ranks.

But that path is now largely closed to many young black men. Two significant barriers, namely criminal records and poor academic performance, block the traditional routes to advancement through the military or higher education. The modern military runs largely on brute strength, but owing to its integration of technology, intellect has become essential, and too many of our young men fail to meet its academic entry standards.

Meanwhile, black women are moving ahead. They’re earning more college degrees, including advanced ones. And black women now serve in the military at almost twice the rate that black men do: 31 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

Moreover, and tragically, in 44 percent of black homes, it is courageous black women who are raising our children, without fathers.

This reversal of fortunes must deeply wound some black male egos. While some white men struggle with white women achieving parity, imagine the blow some black men must feel watching black women surpass them in every category, even one that has always been unquestioned as male territory, the military.

And yet it is not black women’s success that is the problem. That success is to be celebrated. Instead, the problem is the stagnation of black males.

I don’t want to hear excuses about racism being the leading cause. When I left high school in 1963, racism was enforced by law. I stayed out of trouble, supported my family, and built a decent life. I’ve been told to my face, “We don’t hire your kind.” I’ve seen “Whites Only” signs and newspaper job listings that magically stayed open after I was told the position was filled. Those barriers have been removed, and though racism has not evaporated, blacks can accomplish and do anything in America that they want. Want to fly a jet plane? That was challenging in my day in the 1960s, but black people can do so now at any time if they acquire the necessary credentials. The rejections I faced in my youth hardened me and made me more determined—not destructive toward my own brothers.

I think that the problem some of us blacks are having is that we go through life looking at all of the things that are wrong with America, missing the positive. That was my thinking for some time, but when I woke up, things changed. I learned that thoughts, both positive and negative, manifest in physical reality.

Too many of our young men channel their frustrations into violence instead of discipline. A gun in the back pocket or a gang membership becomes a substitute for dignity and manhood.

And this is compounded by the collapse of the black family. Seventy percent of our children are born out of wedlock, and forty-four percent grow up without fathers. Without fathers, boys are more likely to suffer low academic achievement, poor self-control, violence, and imprisonment.

One day as I took a run through some woods, a white woman approaching from the opposite direction jumped way off the trail to avoid me. That reaction angered me, but when I thought about it later in terms of these dysfunctional stats, I understood her. This has become the image we project out to the world.

To return to the 1970s and the corner grocery: when the ambulance arrived, the other guy, who had not run, and I were on our knees, urging the clerk to hold on. A gurgling sound came from him as he gasped for air. When the EMTs cut away his shirt, I could see blood bubbling from one of the holes in his chest as he fought weakly for air.

It was a sucking chest wound. I had heard it before, in Vietnam, in a firefight, when one of my buddies was ripped across his chest by machine-gun fire. I listened to the medics talking about sealing the chest holes with the plastic wrapper from a bandage to prevent his lungs from leaking all their air. But by the time they managed it, he was gone.

The clerk died just as quickly. The smell of the clerk’s blood sickened me, reminding me of a hog killing on my grandfather’s farm that ruined my appetite for lunch. It was the same reek I’d known on battlefields—blood mingled with burnt gunpowder, scorched earth, and the charred roots of trees torn up by artillery fire. That store stank of war.

This is how our young men die every day. And yet from our community comes only silence. Occasionally, there are protests with hand-painted signs and chants of “Stop the violence,” but they fade quickly, maybe returning after another slaughter, but usually not. Local politicians call for more police and recreation centers to keep our boys and young men busy. The mayor in my town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I now live, has established a youth curfew to assume the black family’s duties of keeping our young males temporarily in check. But all these measures stop short of addressing the root cause—toxicities in our culture that emanate from the breakup of the black family that started in the late 1960s.

The old line was that police were locking up our innocent young men. Now, in order to deflect, people talk about how crime is falling, which is true. Yet the graves keep filling to levels that surpass the Vietnam War. According to the FBI’s crime database, from 2023 to 2024, the black murder rate fell from 9,760 to 8,373. You don’t even have to get a calculator to see that that is still a yearly death toll that dwarfs that of Vietnam.

I think the primary motive is still the same one that I saw in that killer’s proud sway long ago: the desperate search for manhood. That 9mm in the pocket props up the hollow shell of a man who has not awakened to the fact that a clean criminal record and good academic scores are the key to finding his true manhood.

I had to testify at the trial some months later, where the gunman was found not guilty, owing to the defense’s claim that the clerk had reached under the counter for a weapon.

And the Brother War goes on.

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John Washington is an octogenarian who has earned his daily bread, first, as an Army paratrooper and then, later in civilian life, as a computer support technician, two careers from which he has now achieved a double retirement. In and around these occupations, he fed his family with janitorial work, factory labor, and long-haul trucking, while also managing the completion of 2 years of college during the journey. Though he is not academically credentialed, he feels his short school life expanded his ability to think broadly and enhanced his analytical thinking skills. As a center-left liberal, he holds firmly that values like family commitment, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility are not merely conservative but also deeply liberal ideals. He has published in Quillette and has two previous articles in the Journal of Free Black Thought: “Black Culture and the Euro-American Collective Brain,” “Blaming Racism Won’t Cut It,” and “The Unraveling of the Black Family.” He lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.