Stanley Crouch: "Punks with pistols" kill black people
We are also familiar with the pop psychology "explanation" for this violence that is supposed to be a lack of self-esteem. The trouble is that murderers do not kill their victims because of a lack of self-esteem but because they feel that their victims lack the kind of esteem to them that would cause the killers not to shear away their lives. These are basically cowardly people who sneak up on one another and blow away their targets in imitation of Mafia gangsters. Punks with pistols and with shotguns or other heavy personal artillery.
For those who think these knuckleheads are truly rough customers, you may have noticed that, for all of the murder and mayhem caused by the street gangs of Los Angeles over the last three decades, there has not been one serious shootout with the cops, even during the 1992 riot. Talking stuff is one thing but firing a bullet at a man who has been trained to shoot back is another.
Here is a bit more information because James Fox, however up to date, is saying something that we should already have faced in this country but have failed to when the blood sticks to our shoes to the streets.
For instance, street gangs in the black community of Los Angeles have killed off far more black people than white racists did throughout the highest tide of racist murder. Young black men now become killers in turf wars and their targets are the same as white bigots and their resentments are the same. Gang members celebrate the coarse and the common as the "real" qualities of black people who have gone about "keeping it real" and not becoming "sell-outs." We find them consistently hostile to learning and refinement in black people, which is described as "trying to be white." Whatever respect these black gang members achieve in their world is commanded through the same terrorist methods of unapologetic racists or warring Mafia muscleheads—homicide, violence, and intimidation.
The social weight of this attitude is a condition of social terror shocking in its casualties. "Between 1976 and 2004," writes Spelman College historian William Jelani Cobb, "African Americans, who are 13 percent of the population, constituted nearly 47 percent of the homicide cases in the United States." A BET American Gangster episode that focused on Tookie Williams, a founder of the notorious Crips, said that the war with the rival Bloods has murdered nearly 15,000 between the 1970s and today. Since 1980, street gangs have killed 10,000 people in Los Angeles alone. This is three times the number of black people lynched throughout the United States between 1877 and 1900.
That earlier period resulted in the nation's highest number of racial murders, 3,000 victims, usually men. Now the lynchers are black and have replaced hemp with hot lead. As James Ahearn wrote in a sobering story about epidemic gun homicides in the April 11, 2007, edition of The (Bergen) Record, "Typically, shooter and victim are both black, male, young, with arrest records, uneducated, with dim life prospects. The killers act with careless indifference to the enormity of what they have done, or to the likelihood that they in turn will be cut down, in retribution..."
...Lower-class black people may not always know statistics, but they do know that the overwhelming majority of black people who are not economically fortunate do not murder, rape and brutalize other people. The monsters among us are always a decided minority, even within a minority, somewhere just above 1 percent. That is the hardest and most enduring fact, but the one that those who fear being called racist or sellouts never want to hear or look at; a few hard stares might make them realize that true compassion for the oppressed brings with it the courage to call out those who overtly oppress, terrorize. It is too late in the world to put all blame at the feet of "the system." Unfortunately such liberals and compassionate conservatives prefer to think of black people and Hispanics as windup toys who can make no decisions of their own. That is part of the burden and the tragedy of our time...
The complete article
For those who think these knuckleheads are truly rough customers, you may have noticed that, for all of the murder and mayhem caused by the street gangs of Los Angeles over the last three decades, there has not been one serious shootout with the cops, even during the 1992 riot. Talking stuff is one thing but firing a bullet at a man who has been trained to shoot back is another.
Here is a bit more information because James Fox, however up to date, is saying something that we should already have faced in this country but have failed to when the blood sticks to our shoes to the streets.
For instance, street gangs in the black community of Los Angeles have killed off far more black people than white racists did throughout the highest tide of racist murder. Young black men now become killers in turf wars and their targets are the same as white bigots and their resentments are the same. Gang members celebrate the coarse and the common as the "real" qualities of black people who have gone about "keeping it real" and not becoming "sell-outs." We find them consistently hostile to learning and refinement in black people, which is described as "trying to be white." Whatever respect these black gang members achieve in their world is commanded through the same terrorist methods of unapologetic racists or warring Mafia muscleheads—homicide, violence, and intimidation.
The social weight of this attitude is a condition of social terror shocking in its casualties. "Between 1976 and 2004," writes Spelman College historian William Jelani Cobb, "African Americans, who are 13 percent of the population, constituted nearly 47 percent of the homicide cases in the United States." A BET American Gangster episode that focused on Tookie Williams, a founder of the notorious Crips, said that the war with the rival Bloods has murdered nearly 15,000 between the 1970s and today. Since 1980, street gangs have killed 10,000 people in Los Angeles alone. This is three times the number of black people lynched throughout the United States between 1877 and 1900.
That earlier period resulted in the nation's highest number of racial murders, 3,000 victims, usually men. Now the lynchers are black and have replaced hemp with hot lead. As James Ahearn wrote in a sobering story about epidemic gun homicides in the April 11, 2007, edition of The (Bergen) Record, "Typically, shooter and victim are both black, male, young, with arrest records, uneducated, with dim life prospects. The killers act with careless indifference to the enormity of what they have done, or to the likelihood that they in turn will be cut down, in retribution..."
...Lower-class black people may not always know statistics, but they do know that the overwhelming majority of black people who are not economically fortunate do not murder, rape and brutalize other people. The monsters among us are always a decided minority, even within a minority, somewhere just above 1 percent. That is the hardest and most enduring fact, but the one that those who fear being called racist or sellouts never want to hear or look at; a few hard stares might make them realize that true compassion for the oppressed brings with it the courage to call out those who overtly oppress, terrorize. It is too late in the world to put all blame at the feet of "the system." Unfortunately such liberals and compassionate conservatives prefer to think of black people and Hispanics as windup toys who can make no decisions of their own. That is part of the burden and the tragedy of our time...
The complete article
Labels: Punks with Guns
posted by Rob Anderson @ 9:50 AM
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