The Tale of Two Communities

“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.” — Thomas Sowell

Last week Bill O’Reilly kicked up a firestorm with his talking points memo on the plight of African-Americans in the United States. He blamed much of the poverty and crime on that the Black community suffers on Blacks themselves along with the race hustlers and politicians who have made a profitable industry out of ignoring the real problems in the African-American community.

O’Reilly’s main talking points were the high rate of African-American girls have babies out of wedlock (73%), the high rate of Black on Black crime, the countless fatherless homes, the narcotics trade, and the failed social welfare programs that have created a federal plantation.

In preparing to write this blog I did some research on Black on Black crime and I discovered some astonishing statistics. You constantly hear about the racism of lynching.

Violence in the United States against Black Americans, especially in the South, rose in the aftermath of the Civil War, after slavery had been abolished and recently freed black men were given the right to vote. Violence rose even more at the end of the 19th century, after southern white Democrats regained their political power in the South in the 1870s. States passed new constitutions or legislation which effectively disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites, established segregation of public facilities by race, and separated blacks from common public life and facilities. Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920. The whites who were lynched were those who had helped blacks, married blacks, Catholics, and Jews..

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. Jehmu Green, a liberal Black commentator often seen on MSNBC and Fox News has stated that 280,000 blacks have been killed by other blacks since the advent of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

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.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal:

“Then there is the matter of who is dying. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.

Overall, more than half the nation's homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men.

Despite the declining U.S. murder rate, killings remain stubbornly high in poor pockets of cities large and small. In some cases, the rate is rising sharply. That increase is draining resources from police, prosecutors, social workers and hospitals.”

This 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?

The vast majority of the above statistics stem from the urban centers in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami, and Newark. But there is another Black community. It’s the community of Blacks who have left these urban cities for the safety of the suburbs. This is one of the major reasons for the failure of Detroit. These Blacks have nuclear families with a father in he house. They work hard and buy homes. They are not on the dole. Their children are supervised and go to good schools where their graduation rates are the same as whites and Asians. Some of these families have mom’s working so they can send their kids to private and parochial college preparatory schools. They don’t do drugs and they go on to becomes doctors, lawyers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They are involved in their communities and pay little if no attention to the race hustles. They even vote Republican. I know this because I have a neighbor who fits this model.

The to counter the race hustlers there are the commentators like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, David Webb, Deneen Borelli, Dr. Ben Carson, Star Parker, and the entire staff of Project 21. These are the voices of reason within the Black community that are drowned out by the voices of race hustlers that get some much coverage in the mainstream media. These are the voices urging Blacks to stop the out of wedlock births, get off he drugs, stay in school, learn to speak proper English, and learn how to work. They are the voices who identify the issues existing within the social welfare states of the federal plantation. They are also the voices most criticized by the race hustlers and Congressional Black Caucus. You see they are preaching a doctrine of personal responsibility, family cohesiveness, and self-education. They tell Blacks in the urban center not to rely on the failed government schools dominated by the self-interests of the teachers unions to open their eyes and ears to other sources of learning, i.e. read books.

It is these voices in the Black community we must listen to. They are the voice with solutions, even those solutions may seem harsh to many in the urban centers used to the comfort of the federal plantation. They are the voices the race exploiters in the entertainment drown out with their music, TV shows and films while they make millions from their exploitation. When I look at people like Allen West, Ben Carson, Deneen Borelli, and Thomas Sowell, I stand in awe at their poise, linguistic skills, and thoughtful deliberation.

In reality, the Trayvon Martin case gave Obama another way to avoid dealing with issues of national and international importance. Cries of racism permit Obama to deftly avoid the penetrating questions that need to be asked about the ongoing scandals that plague this country, be it the IRS, the NSA, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the Federal Data Services Hub revelation, or the "impending train wreck" of ObamaCare.

There is no dealing with an individual who changes the rules of the game and makes them up as he goes along. When the American people understand this and liberate themselves from such race-baiting, we will be able to make some real and definitive steps to halt the ongoing assault on this country. It is an assault that hurts blacks and whites alike by a man and a party who care for neither group, except as a means to expand their grip on power.

So the next time you see a Black person walking down the street make sure you can identify the community he belongs to before to pass judgment.