Ol Black on Black Crime: The Myth That Divides…

by Staff October 7, 2015 1 Comment News Opinion Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) As an undergraduate creative writing major, a lot of my writing focused on inner city violence and the violence that I witnessed in my childhood living on the westside of Chicago. Inner city Chicago violence was a topic that was so fresh in my memory and something I thought of importance. I soon learned that many of my classmates in college did not share the feeling of importance of the countless lives lost due to gun violence. And one comment in particular from a classmate cut deep and spoke loudly to me.

My classmate, a white male, criticized me for writing about “things no one cares about“. While frustrating and hurtful to read at the time, years later I can process what this meant and understand some of the truth in his comment. It is the same feeling I felt as a child watching a man take his last breaths as he laid helplessly, injured from multiple gunshot wounds. Minutes passed with no sign of help coming to save this man from death. I thought at that time that no one cares.

It is the same feeling I felt when business carried on as usual after classmates’ lives were lost or I witnessed gunshot wounds. School carried on with no grief counselors to aide me or my classmates through the trauma we may have witnessed. It was apparent to me that no one cared.

I get the same feeling when I see that there have been 2,322 gunshot victims in Chicago since January 1, 2015. Babies are dying, grandmothers, college bound students, mothers, and fathers, but in the larger society, business resumes without a collective uproar of the tragedies happening on U.S. soil–a continuing war. It sends the message that no one cares.

So it is understandable to me why my classmate felt that no one cared about inner city black communities being plagued by gun violence. His parents probably didn’t care, nor his grandmother, nor his great grandfather, nor ancestors before. He inherited an overall attitude that black lives are not valuable and that the plight of black people is a problem separate from mainstream society concerns. It is an attitude systematically perpetuated by years of injustice.

One of the biggest rebuttals to Black Lives Matter is this cliché myth of black on black crime. I cringe when I hear the words because I have a hard time grasping what this means. It seems that the term diminishes lives being lost because it focuses more on the race of the person doing the crime than on the human being affected by it.

I cannot imagine hearing of lives lost of someone of a different race than me and brushing it off as “their” problem. As a nation, citizens being affected by violence and having to live in unsafe communities is an American problem, not a black problem. Inner city Chicago gun violence is a collective problem, even if life affords us the comfort of not being directly affected by it. Are gunshot victims in Chicago among the things that “no one cares about” because the majority are black? Do we continue to pass down the ethos that black lives don’t matter? Or do we acknowledge the problem and accept collective responsibility, sending a message to children, mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers in inner city communities, depressed and traumatized by horrific scenes, that they do matter?

Written by Rasheena Fountain

Official website; http://www.twitter.com/rasheenacharee

1 Comment

James Davis says:

October 8, 2015 at 9:56 am

State Sanctioned Killing Of Blacks Is Wrong!

Here is the problem with your analysis and with the analyses of all those who have attempted to minimize, dilute, marginalize or in anyway redirect attention away from the killing of blacks by the State, by connecting it to the issue of black on black crime in Chicago, Detroit, or any other big city. There is no connection! They are two different and separate problems. When a person who is supposed to represent law enforcement chokes a man to death after that person has said he cannot breathe eleven times, we as a society can see who caused this action to be taken and can take immediate corrective action to prevent that from happening again. It was that so-called policeman who choked Eric Garner to death in New York, and he was out of line. He and he alone committed that heinous act. If he had use more discretion by momentarily releasing his choke hold on Mr. Garner, Mr. Garner maybe alive today. With or without the slogan, Black Lives Matter, citizens of this country should be outraged when the State goes to far in aggressive policing.

The same thing was true when Mr. Scott was shot in the back numerous times in South Carolina as he ran away from another person representing law enforcement. We know who killed Mr. Scott and we as men and women, not cowards, should confront the State and hold it accountable for having these people on the tax payers payroll representing law enforcement. There are literally thousands of different types and various types of law enforcement agencies across the United States. When citizens turn their backs and accept sloppy and inexcusably bad policing that results in the lives of our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters being lost even among one out of control police department, we send the wrong message. State sanctioned killing is wrong and needs to be addressed every time it happens and in every city it happens.

Black on black crime has many facets to it. I know this because in my community I sponsored a program to bring black on black under control. It took me knocking on doors, passing out handouts, asking my neighbors to come to meetings, sponsoring a billboard campaign, and a radio and television campaign to highlight the issue of black on black crime. We learned that if we established active neighborhood watches in our communities and worked with the police, becoming informants about criminal activities in our communities, and holding the police accountable for following up on the information we gave them that black on black crime decreased. We also learned that we had to be continuously vigilant, watchful and alert to ensure once the black on black crime rate started decreasing, that it did not come back.

Additionally, we learned that when residents have a stake in the community, such as a high rate of home ownership, that the neighbors in that community were more likely to be active in fighting black on black crime. The neighborhoods in our cities where there is a high concentration of rental properties are least likely to establish active neighborhood watches and least likely to talk to the police as informants when it comes to criminal activities. To make sure you don’t get communities where there are high concentrations of rental properties, with no stakeholders, you have to confront and deal with your city governments. City governments can reduce the amount of concentrated rental properties in poor black communities by enforcing codes when comes to rental property upkeep and create plans that lead to home ownership.

Again, State sanctioned killing of black people is wrong. It is just as wrong as the white racist mob lynching of blacks in the early 20th century.

http://www.thefixthistime.com

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