Where's the outrage over black-on-black killings?
By DeWayne Wickham

BALTIMORE — A couple of days before Christmas, I phoned Patricia West, an old friend I hadn't spoken to in years. It was a call I didn't want to make — the kind of call no one should ever have to place.

It was a brief conversation, a few minutes of aimless chatter that quickly went from awkward laughter to muffled crying. I called her to say how devastated I was to hear that her son had been killed. His death was reported in the final paragraph of a short crime story in The (Baltimore) Sun that gave the bare facts of his demise.

(Illustration by Alejandro Gonzalez, USA TODAY)

"The other homicide victim, Kevin West, 39, of the 9000 block of Meadow Heights Road in Randallstown, was found fatally shot shortly after 8 a.m. Saturday by officers investigating reported gunfire in the 2800 block of Virginia Ave., police said."

Kevin West's murder was the 260th homicide this year in Baltimore — a city in which virtually all of the murder victims and those arrested for murder are black. On the same day that he was gunned down, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched down Fifth Avenue in New York to protest the Nov. 25 killing of another black man. Sean Bell was felled by a hail of police gunfire moments after he and two friends left his bachelor party early on the morning of the day he was to have been married.

Just why the cops fired on the unarmed men is unclear. Bell's death drew the scorn of civil rights leaders and black activists, many of whom took part in the march. West's killing has generated no such attention.

And that makes me made as hell.

As troubling as it is that Bell's life might have been cut short by the unlawful actions of some rogue cops, it bothers me more that most of this nation's black murder victims are killed by other blacks. And despite this chilling fact, nowhere have tens of thousands of people taken to the streets recently to protest this carnage. Not in New York, or Baltimore, or Atlanta, or Detroit, or Chicago. Nowhere.

Of the country's 14,860 homicide victims in 2005, 7,125 were black, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. And of the 3,289 cases that year in which a single black was killed by a single assailant, the FBI says, 91% of the killers were black.

Let me put this another way: The number of blacks killed in 2005 in this one homicide category alone approaches the total of all the blacks lynched in this country from 1882 to 1968, according to records maintained by Tuskegee University.

So why aren't black leaders taking up this fight? Why do so many turn out to decry the death of one black man at the hands of some cops, but no mass rallies take on the deaths of thousands of blacks who are slaughtered by other blacks?

"I think it's because we know it's our fault, and we're constantly looking for someone else to blame," says Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm, who, like me, grew up in Cherry Hill, a poor black neighborhood on the city's south side.

Hamm says most black leaders are afraid to address this issue, afraid to confront the apathy, fear and indifference that allow many poor black neighborhoods to become killing fields.

He could be right.

But whatever the reason, it's time for black leaders — activists, preachers, educators, politicians, business and community leaders — to say enough is enough.

It's time for them to be as aggressive, and as demanding, in combating the black murder rate as they are in fighting for an increase in minimum wage or an expansion in health care.

The ripple effects of black-on-black killings have turned many inner city neighborhoods into urban wastelands, chased businesses from those communities, fueled a growth in other crimes and sapped the resources of local governments.

As mad as black folks have a right to be over the killing of Sean Bell, we ought to be angry over the failure of black leaders to be equally outraged over the murder of Kevin West — and the thousands of blacks who are killed each year by other blacks.

DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.

Good question

Good question

Very good article. Also check out the pointless killing of American Football player Darrent Williams on New Years Day 2007 after a 'dispute' in a nightclub. The guy was 24 and is survived by three kids.


Broncos' Darrent Williams Shot and Killed in Drive-By Shooting After Dispute at
Nightclub //

[align=center]

[/align]An investigator with the Denver Police Department places evidence markers next to the Hummer limousine in which Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams was shot and killed while riding inside of early Monday, Jan. 1, 2007, in Denver. Two other people in the vehicle were also shot in what police are calling a drive-by shooting. Bullet holes can be seen in the door and to the left of the door and the rear passenger window is shot out. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

[align=center]
RiP Darrent Williams


[/align][align=center]Where's the outrage, Al?
[/align]

I'm tired of this bullsh*t.

I'm tired of this bullsh*t.

I am so fed up with the term "Black on Black Killings, Crime or whatever. What is it with that? The white establishment comes up with this term as if to suggest that black people are killing other black peoplefor no other reason than the fact that they are black.

What crap!

The majority (over 90%) of 'crime against the person by the person' is committed within race, so cut thos sh*t as if we are talking about some unique 'black disease here".

You all know why the effort is made to give the perception that blacks have some greater (over and above other races) perpensity to kill their own? Because then the white establishment can say, "Well what ever we do to them can't matter because they do give a f*** about themselves.

I get p*ssed with the likes of DeWayne from Baltimore who come up with cr*p like this as if they haven't got a brain cell in their head. The concept of "BLACK ON BLACK CRIME" is no more valid or logical than the concept "WHITE ON WHITE CRIME" (a concept that most blackswouldn't entertain for one minute....so why entertain the BOBC concept?

FFS.....some black people haven't got the sense they were born with, the way they swallow this foolishness and adopt these 'tags' that are handed to us by whoever deems to tell us what our problems are.

Sure, I don't like it when a brother/sister kills a next brother/sister and wish each and every single one of us lived in perfect harmony loving and caring for each other like devoted love birds. But please...get real....there is no special 'phenomena' of "Black on Black Crime/Killings" which sets us apart from all other races. Except the one that exist in our heads.

Respect

I am so fed up with the term "Black on Black Killings, Crime or whatever. What is it with that? The white establishment comes up with this term as if to suggest that black people are killing other black peoplefor no other reason than the fact that they are black.

What crap!

The majority (over 90%) of 'crime against the person by the person' is committed within race, so cut thos sh*t as if we are talking about some unique 'black disease here".

You all know why the effort is made to give the perception that blacks have some greater (over and above other races) perpensity to kill their own? Because then the white establishment can say, "Well what ever we do to them can't matter because they do give a f*** about themselves.

I get p*ssed with the likes of DeWayne from Baltimore who come up with cr*p like this as if they haven't got a brain cell in their head. The concept of "BLACK ON BLACK CRIME" is no more valid or logical than the concept "WHITE ON WHITE CRIME" (a concept that most blackswouldn't entertain for one minute....so why entertain the BOBC concept?

FFS.....some black people haven't got the sense they were born with, the way they swallow this foolishness and adopt these 'tags' that are handed to us by whoever deems to tell us what our problems are.

Sure, I don't like it when a brother/sister kills a next brother/sister and wish each and every single one of us lived in perfect harmony loving and caring for each other like devoted love birds. But please...get real....there is no special 'phenomena' of "Black on Black Crime/Killings" which sets us apart from all other races. Except the one that exist in our heads.

Respect

Erm....Backatya I'm not one to believe the hype but...

"Of the country's 14,860 homicide victims in 2005, 7,125 were black, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report."

-10% of the population vs. 50% of the gun crime victims? Come on man, lets not pretend to be ignorant.