“Shootings and violence within our community by one of our own is an outrage and an issue that we must confront as diligently and as passionately as a sensational case of police misconduct or brutality.”
The words would be credible if they belonged to anyone else but notorious rabble-rouser Al Sharpton.
Yet, the man, who put the agita in agitator and exhausted all modes of civil indecency in his quest to be society’s pest, is calling for a summit to address an epidemic, which has held the city physically and emotionally hostage for decades, and which the likes of him have helped inspire, engineer and fuel: black-on-black violence.
Last week’s ‘emergency summit,’ convened by Sharpton and attended by Governor David Paterson and community leaders was a prelude to a more extensive “Summit on Violence” planned for later this month, but garnered little beyond the usual rhetoric about strengthening gun laws and reversing unemployment rates. Tougher gun legislature is not an antidote to blacks killing other blacks because many hoodlums do not acquire a firearm through legal channels. As for more, or better, employment opportunities, affirmative action policies have proven that to be an ineffective salve to the ongoing despair, decay and destruction in the black community.
If Sharpton wants to salvage today’s black youngsters –according to him, one black child a day under the age of 17 was shot and killed in New York City last year – let him issue a bold call for a change in black attitude and an investment in self and civic pride; an equation, which is in absentia for too many young African Americans, who glorify prison culture, snub education, respect disrespect and then blame cops, society, the government and the kitchen sink for self-harvested woes.
Young blacks need to be told by their own leaders that they belong to a larger community, which offers them equal opportunities, and which can only exist in harmony if they, too, do their part to be productive, pleasant, human beings for the duration of their lives.
To activate the juggernaut of change, black leaders must realize that gone, buried – and now boring – is the era, which prompted Ebony magazine publisher John H. Johnson to print a special back in August 1979, entitled, “Black on Black Crime: The Causes, the Consequences and the Cures,” in which he remarked, “As in the 19th century, there is no flesh in America, as Frederick Douglass said…as cheap as black flesh.”
Nearly 30 years later, white America is bending over backwards to accommodate a consistently frayed black agenda, Barack Obama is this nation’s first half-black Democratic presidential nominee, subsidies on education, housing and healthcare abound for minorities, yet black-on-black crime continues its blitzkrieg, unchecked. This past Memorial Day, four gun battles in Harlem wounded 10 people and killed a 15-year-old boy on the upper West Side – all victims of black-on-black crime.
Evidently, not much has changed since Pan-Africanist and civil libertarian W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) credited emancipation with a surge in crime in the black population, explaining, “The appearance of crime among the southern Negroes is a symptom of wrong social conditions, of a stress of life greater than a large part of the community can bear.”
That “stress” is still largely unabated, and reinforced at every turn by scavengers, such as Sharpton, who warned our city, in the wake of the recent Sean Bell cop-trial verdict, “They want us to act crazy so they would have an excuse to do more…we are going to be strategic. We are going to close the city down in a nonviolent effective way.”
Who are “they”? More importantly, why does Sharpton and his gang have to “act crazy” and “close the city down?” Why can’t they just be normal? That would be far more effective.
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