A man is stomped to death for no apparent reason by a gang of teenagers while his neighbors watched. My good friend, a college professor who has been preaching that professional African Americans cannot continue to abandon our communities, moves his family back into the city from the suburbs. Shortly thereafter, his home is burglarized by people who were watching his coming and going. The burglars have time to pry the iron gratings away from his front door. His alarm company summoned the police who never showed. My sister is an amazing woman who was faced with rearing her own two children and three brothers (including me) - at the age of twenty-five-alone and without going on welfare. Now in her seventies, living on a fixed income, she has to move from an already paid off home because mindless kids think it’s funny to throw bricks through her window. When I was twenty-one, my best friend, a Vietnam veteran, was shot to death by the woman he was trying to protect. Six years later, my brother was killed.
I’ve stopped watching Chicago’s local news. I can take only so many Black mothers crying over their slaughtered children.
There is no need to haul out the mind boggling statistics on crime in the African American community, or those on the astronomical incarceration rates of Black males. We all know that the crime in our communities would constitute an epidemic and some sort of call to action in any sane society. Yet the only response has been to build more jails. Our kids are committing increasingly nonsensical crimes, like flash mob activity, apparently for fun. Other than an occasional “March for Peace” there appears to be little response from the so-called leadership in the community
The reasons for this amazing crime rate are myriad, complicated and historical. They are also sociological, historical, psychological, economic, political, and intertwined to such a dizzying extent that I believe many so-called leaders have just thrown their hands up. (If you can’t march against it, what can you do?) Many of our young people have no sense of belonging to anything, let alone a people. For a people to exist as a people, there must be common language, culture and history. Ultimately, the crime rate, like just about all of the dysfunction in Black America is part of the legacy of slavery.
Black self hatred has been at the core of many of our problems since it was beaten into us during slavery, and maintained through Jim Crow and the modern media. The only thing that made us slaves-property, chattel, less than human –three fifths to be exact-utterly without rights of any kind- was our Black skin and features. All people of power and rights were white. Even GOD was white, and BLOND! Yet the further we get from slavery, the worse the self hatred issue has become!
This problem has grown exponentially for two reasons: the lack of an obvious external enemy and the complete amputation of any connection to our history with our young people. Historically, having the KKK right around the corner, ready to lynch for the least imagined social infraction, kept a lot of Black self hatred in check. We were part of a much larger struggle for survival and basic dignity. Today, forces far more powerful than the KKK continue to subjugate African- Americans: the same forces that developed the whole idea of race and White supremacy to maintain their hegemony over poor Blacks and Whites in the first place. But we cannot see these forces. They create conditions that foster Black on Black crime, but we only see the Black criminal, fostering even more black hatred among Blacks.
Our young people have become so completely disconnected from their history, that they fail to grasp its meaning, even on those rare occasions when they are confronted with it. With no understanding of their history, they think it is perfectly natural and normal to live in the often miserable conditions that exist in our communities. They also think it is normal not to aspire to live past twenty-five. They have no idea of who they are, so they become lost and rudderless. They kill each other over territory neither can own.
One of the many areas in which the Black community is underserved is that of mental health. The waiting list for mental health services is appalling. It can take months to get a kid in to see a mental health professional, and often those practitioners are woefully ignorant of the most salient facts of Black life in America. Given the reality of what Black life has been like in America, there is little wonder the mental health needs are so great. Mental health issues appear to be greater among those young men who are more prone to crime, than in previous generations.
Of course, the disintegration of the African American family plays the most fundamental role in Black on Black crime. Gangs take the place of families. Having worked for two decades in Child Welfare, I’ve seen the homes that have produced some of our young offenders. I once visited a fourteen year old, who had just been arrested for murder. The kid was so excited to see me, but not to share his remorse or express any form of hope for a better tomorrow. He was excited about the drama involved in the killing and his subsequent interactions with police. He really did not understand the meaning of taking another human being’s life. He was being raised by his mother and grandfather. Mom was a drug addict. Granddad was a drunk.
The wrong people are having babies for the wrong reasons. Girls who have never been nurtured have babies to “have somebody to love.” Male offspring often fulfill the role of the “man in their lives.” They become emotionally dependant on their own children, and therefore, could not parent, even if they knew the fundamentals to teach their kids. Children are growing up in conditions that are so bad, that incarceration may be seen as an improvement; the old “three hots and a cot.”
Ultimately, much of the crime is the existential screaming of invisible members of a marginalized people. We cannot get away from them. They have transportation and will travel to better neighborhoods. We’ve never really come to grips with the pain that is transmitted from generation to generation to generation. Understanding the root causes of crime, in no way excuses or condones it. In my next blog, I’ll try to provide some solutions.
