And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?
As Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in reply to Williams, five minutes on Google would've turned up recent coverage of numerous marches addressing precisely that issue, from cities across the country:
Chicago,
Harlem,
Newark,
Pittsburgh,
Gary,
Brooklyn,
Saginaw...and that's just the initial search hits, and just coverage from the last 2 years. Dozens of US cities also have black-community-based organizations working to address gang violence in their neighborhoods;
PBS is currently streaming the award-winning documentary
The Interrupters, about one such organization based out of Chicago's South Side.
None of that ever makes national news, of course. But that doesn't excuse Williams' laziness in not taking a few minutes to answer his own (rhetorical) question. More to the point, none of it has anything to do with the Trayvon Martin case or why it matters.
George Zimmerman has yet to be arrested and it's entirely possible that he never will be. Had he been charged, none of us would've ever heard of him. And if he
is ultimately put on trial, that will
only have happened because of the spotlight all these so-called "race-baiters" have turned on the case. Trayvon Martin doesn't represent the fear that your son will become a drug dealer, or an assault-weapon-toting gangster, or a permanently unemployed high school dropout. There certainly are some black parents (and some white parents, too) for whom one or more of those truly is a priority concern (and apparently, for some social conservatives, those are the ONLY legitimate fears ANY black parents are allowed to have for their sons). Rather, he represents the fear that some stranger (perhaps one in uniform), armed with a gun and the common tendency to automatically register a young black man as a potential threat, might put an end to your son's life in a moment of panicked confusion or paranoia. Or more "benignly," just the pain of knowing that in all likelihood your son will be repeatedly pulled over, stopped and frisked, blinded by a spotlight for having done nothing at all but be black in the wrong place at the wrong time, an alienating and humiliating experience you're powerless to protect him from.
I find the very phrase "black-on-black crime" problematic. Most violent crime in the US is intraracial, period; for example, most murdered white men (46% of all murder victims, FBI 2010) are killed by other white men (32% of all murderers, FBI 2010)--most often men who lived in close geographical proximity to them, most often in neighborhoods characterized by poverty, high youth unemployment, low academic achievement, and drugs. The same is true of most "black-on-black" murders. Yet no one speaks of "white-on-white crime," as if white men who kill other white men were driven to do so by their pathologically white nature, or contempt for their victim's shared whiteness.
)
As if morning shows weren't annoying enough already. Glad I missed out on that mess.
