The recent verdict in the Zimmerman trial is a case in point. Regardless of whether you believe the jury got it right or wrong, there is a bigger more devastating picture that this trial paints for us. Not to belittle the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, but thousands of more deaths occur yearly due to the atmosphere that exists in relation to this Murder case and many other crimes. This atmosphere is created by the media that is more about ratings and feeding their political leans than they are reporting hard news.
According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, 7000 African Americans (I will use "blacks" for the remainder of this blog entry) are murdered every year. Furthermore between the years 1976 and 2011 there were 279,384 murders of black people. The amazing statistic that would surprise anyone who watches the news in our country is that 94% of those crimes are committed by other BLACK people. Blacks account for 50% of the homicide victims in this country although they account for only 13% of the overall population.
Here are a couple other statistics:
According to a Tuskegee Institute study, between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites. Black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and all wars since 1980 (8,197) come to 18,515, a number that pales in comparison with black loss of life at home.
T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, [put it best when he] told The Daily Caller that "the outrage should be about us killing each other, about black-on-black crime." He asked rhetorically, "Wouldn't you think to have 41 people shot (in Chicago) between Friday morning and Monday morning would be much more newsworthy and deserve much more outrage?" Fair was referring to the news coverage of the Trayvon Martin death.
Another tragedy is that there is little to no coverage of Black on White crime in the news media despite the continuous coverage of this case and others that involves white on black crime if you want to considered Mr. Zimmerman white to begin with. I will give one example only though:
Columnist Walter Williams pointed out that two Virginian-Pilot newspaper reporters driving through Norfolk were beaten up by a mob of young blacks. They had to miss a weeks worth of work due to injuries. This story was not even covered by their own newspaper. Thomas Sowell gives even more examples here:
You can also get Pat Buchanan's take on it here:
Some of you might read this article and call me a racist. The reality is that I love all people. And my favorite and most often read columnists in the world are two African Americans that I mention in this story. Some of my favorite people at my school happen to be black and I personally only know 3 or 4 black kids in the entire school (of course in my defense there is no more than twice that many in the entire school). The unfortunate thing is that many are afraid to talk, write, discuss, debate, or lecture on this issue because of either white guilt or the perception that due to our racist past we must assume that racism is still raging throughout our great country and we must first blame racism for every tragedy that involves a black person or that second, we cannot speak out of some of the cultural struggles today in black society because it might come off as racist.
The type of violence that I have just listed and the statistics at the beginning of this blog entry were far less prevalent in the 1950's according to Dr. Thomas Sowell. And poverty and discrimination were far worse then than it is today. It is apparent that poverty and racism cannot be the cause of what we see today in the black community.
This is a difficult blog entry to write as a school teacher because of the controversial issue that it covers. The unfortunate legacy of slavery and racism in American History is that as a society we still use those tragedies to justify not covering and not criticizing problems that obviously exist in our culture. All races and all people have their problems. We must deal with them head on. There are many reasons for this uptick in violence among black people whose victims are often and probably most of the time completely innocent wonderful people. One of the main reasons is the legacy that has been left behind due to our history. A legacy that continues today. This legacy is one of dishonesty when reporting news and discussing issues that involve those distant decedents of victims of our past failures and Sins as a nation.
