Black-on-black crime is a
sensitive subject in this increasingly polarized nation. While covered in
academia and occasionally addressed by talking heads on television, some
believe it rarely, if ever, receives the type
and depth of attention it deserves. Instead, critics
argue that this national tragedy is usually swept under the rug by powerful
interest groups and individuals more concerned with elevating their own
racially-driven agendas than addressing the real issues at hand. The Trayvon
Martin case is only the most recent example of this grim hypocrisy.
Indeed, statistics support a
very different narrative than the one usually offered by “race hustlers,” as
Pastor C.L. Bryant calls them, who routinely portray an America where members
of the black community are selectively targeted and brutalized by white
racists.
A 2007 special report
released by the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, reveals that approximately 8,000 — and, in certain years, as
many as 9,000 African Americans are murdered annually in the United States.
This chilling figure is accompanied by another equally sobering fact, that 93%
of these murders are in fact perpetrated by other blacks. The analysis,
supported by FBI records, finds that in 2005 alone, for example, African
Americans accounted for 49% of all homicide victims in the US — again, almost
exclusively at the hands of other African Americans.
To put these number in
perspective, recall that over 6,400 U.S. service men and women have been killed
in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over the course of a decade-long war fought in
those nations. During the Vietnam War, which lasted nearly 13 years, some
58,000 Americans were killed — nearly 13 percent of whom were African American.
Extrapolating black-on-black
crime data reveals that, by comparison, approximately 100,000 African Americans
have been killed on our own streets at the hands of other African Americans in
roughly the same stretches of time. It is difficult to find anyone who would
white-wash these mind-numbing statistics.
Equally as startling,
the same study reveals African Americans were victims of an estimated 805,000
nonfatal violent crimes in just one year alone.
What’s more, blacks comprise
roughly 12.5 percent of the U.S. population.
While fatalities persist in
every major metropolitan area across the nation, there are of course certain
cities most impacted by violent crime. Take Cincinnati, for example, where,
after the fatal shooting of a young black man by a white police officer in
2001, a wave of riots ensued. Since that time, Cincinnati has set the
record for the number of murders carried out each year, with a persistent
violent crime rate at a staggering 88 percent.
The now all-too-familiar
statistics reveal that black males are killed far more often than any other
demographic: “The vast majority of people being murdered are African American
in the City of Cincinnati,” said Hamilton County Prosecutor, Joe Deters
in an
interview.
“The vast majority. Well outside the 40 percent of the population
it should be. In 2009, the City of Cincinnati did not have a single white
victim of a homicide. (That) tells me that we have a subset in the underclass
of Cincinnati which is committing a lot of violent crime and they tend to be
black. And the reality is, you almost always commit murder within your racial
classifications. So when we’ve got a young black man up in the coroners office,
it’s almost always a result of another young black man shooting him.”
That same year, 2009, no
white men were killed in Cincinnati, but 44 black males and 11 females
were the victims of homicide in the city.
Chicago
One city that
has perennially come under fire for racially charged violence is
Chicago.
In just the span of three days alone — March 16th-19th of this
year — 41 people, mostly African-American, were shot and killed in Chicago. Ten
were killed in President Obama’s former neighborhood.
Incredibly, these
atrocities on our very own streets barely received a turn of the head by
activists, nor did they receive any media coverage.
In response to President
Obama’s decision to raise the profile of the Trayvon Martin case, T. Willard
Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, recently told The
Daily Caller that
the “the outrage should be about us killing each other, about
black-on-black crime.”
He asked
rhetorically, “Wouldn’t you think to have 41 people shot [in Chicago]
between Friday morning and Monday morning would be much more newsworthy and
deserve much more outrage?”
More than 500
people under
the age of 21 were killed in Chicago in 2008. This figure fell only slightly in
2009 and 2010 and, of course, does not represent the many others who have been
shot or injured as a result of these attacks. Records reveal that nearly 80
percent of youth homicides occurred in 22 black or Latino communities on
Chicago’s South and West sides.
In just the first three
months of 2012, 109 people have already been murdered in the city of Chicago.
So rampant are the killings in fact, that crime in the President’s adopted
hometown was even the focus of an April 5th report featured on The
O’Reilly Factor:
In
the poignant words of one man interviewed for the segment, “We’ve got
to stop referring to people as African-American, Hispanic-American.”
“These are American kids and they are being slaughtered by other American
kids.”
An epidemic
According to recent studies,
Illinois isn’t the only state in the Midwest to see a marked rise in the number
of African-American homicide victims over the course of just the past few
years. A study conducted by the Washington D.C. based Violence Policy
Center revealed that for the third time in the past five years, Missouri is vying for
Cincinnati’s role, leading the nation in black on black violent crime.
Perhaps surprisingly, Wisconsin, too, is ranked as
one of the top ten states with the highest percentage of black murder victims.
Spanning the rest of the country, the other nine states found to have
the highest murder rates among African-Americans include Michigan,
Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, California and
Nevada.
Where is the outrage?
Recently, The Blaze featured
a report on Rep.
Corrine Brown,
who, after professing in an interview to care about “all the children” who fall
victim to murder, could not remember the name of a little girl from her
district who was murdered and then dumped into a Georgia landfill. While Brown
fumbled to find the words, she ultimately could not recall Somer Thompson’s
name. She did, however, have much to say about racial profiling and how Trayvon
Martin was selectively targeted for his race. For some reason, Brown and others
who have followed suit in this case have failed to address or acknowledge the
epidemic of murders occurring within their very own communities.
But Brown is not alone. Not by
any stretch.
Which begs the questions: where is the outrage from prominent
members of the African-American community? Where are the words of condemnation
and sorrow from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, or Rev. Al Sharpton, over the fact
that members of their own communities are summarily executing each other?
Critics believe that acknowledging the unfortunate, irrefutable statistical
truth negates the left’s narrative about a black community selectively
exploited and targeted by white racists. Some might also argue that fanning the
flames of racial discontent, especially in an election year, serves a useful
and powerful campaign purpose.
Thus far, hundreds of
thousands of African Americans have been slaughtered at the hands of each other
since the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. Is this the
realization of Dr. King’s Community of Man?
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