In 2016, 7881 blacks were murdered, 90.1% of them by other
blacks; 7100 blacks killed by other blacks. FBI crime facts show only 16
unarmed blacks were shot by police. CHRIS KEMBLE – AMERICAN THINKER
A Window Into a
Depraved Culture
EYE ON THE NEWS
A
Window Into a Depraved Culture
The
Chicago torture video provides a close-up look at gang-centered criminal
mayhem.
January 8, 2017
Public safety
Cities
Anti-police
activists and the mainstream media are incensed at the suggestion that the
Black Lives Matter movement could have influenced the behavior of the four
individuals in Chicago who tortured a disabled white man for hours last week
while yelling “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump.” In one sense, the
activists and media are right: The influences were broader than that. They
include the reign of racial victimology, inner-city gang culture, and black
anti-white animus.
We live
in Ta-Nehesi Coates’s America, characterized by the assumption that blacks are
the eternal targets of lethal white oppression. Coates’s central thesis
in Between the World and Me, his acclaimed phantasmagoria of racial
victimology, is that America continuously aspires to the “shackling” and
“destruction” of “black bodies.”
Chicago’s
four torturers certainly have not read Between the World and Me. But the book’s
worldview echoes throughout our society, including in the inner city. Michelle
Alexander’s equally publicized book, The New Jim Crow, argues that the U.S.
seeks to reimpose de facto segregation on blacks via the criminal justice
system. Alexander has been a staple on black media, among many other outlets.
President Obama has insisted, even up to his last days in office, that blacks are the
victims of a racist criminal-justice system. The press routinely disseminates
phony statistics that purport to demonstrate a police war on blacks. These
ideas matter.
Black
Lives Matter ideology is just a more in-your-face manifestation of the
Coatesian conceit that blacks are living in a system determined to destroy
them. The Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter embraces the motto “Stop killing
us,” aimed at the Chicago Police Department. It chants: “CPD, KKK: How many
children did you kill today?” (The answer is: Virtually none. Last year, over
3,400 people in Chicago were shot, overwhelmingly black. Victims included 24
children 12 years of age or younger. The Chicago cops shot 25 people, virtually
all armed and dangerous, or .6 percent of the total.) The Chicago Black Lives
Matter chapter disseminates inflammatory lies about the Chicago police, such as
that BLM activist Ja’Mal Green was beaten for 30 hours following an arrest for
battery against an officer and trying to disarm an officer. Increasing the size
of the Chicago Police department, per the Chicago BLM, will simply result in
“more killings by police, more police torture and violence.”
These
anti-law enforcement claims reinforce existing anti-white animus in the inner
city. The notion that the dominant or exclusive racism in America today is
white anti-black racism is absurd. Though many urban residents harbor no racial
animosity, the recurrent “Fuck Whitey” and “Kill the cops” themes in rap music
are not accidental. (Sample: “Kill the White people; we gonna make them hurt;
kill the White people; but buy my record first,” by Apache, adopting without obvious irony lines from an Eddie
Murphy parody; “The White man is the devil… Drive-by shooting on this White
genetic mutant,” by Menace Clan.) I have been warned by residents of one East
Harlem housing project not to go to a neighboring project because “they really hate whites there.”
Even if
there weren’t already a strain of racial hostility in inner-city culture, the
constant establishment refrain that whites oppress blacks at every opportunity
would create it. Every highly publicized cop assassination in the last two
years has triggered gloating on social media. Ja’Mal Green told the New York Timesthat the assassination of five Dallas police officers was “not a setback
at all” for Black Lives Matter. The Dallas gunman had said he wanted to kill
white people and white cops. Though Green insisted that he was not encouraging
violence, he said that the assassination showed “the people of this country
that black people are getting to a boiling point. We are tired of watching
police kill our brothers and sisters. We are tired of being tired.” At some
point, there “comes a time when black people will snap,” he said. While one is
grateful for Green’s avowal not to be encouraging violence, such sentiments
come close to rationalizing it.
The
establishment typically looks the other way at manifestations of black
anti-white animus. Racism in rap music is usually ignored. The Associated Press
excluded any reference to the race of the victim and assailants in its initial
report on the Chicago torture episode, as John Hinderaker observed at Powerline, and merely noted that
police were investigating a “beating” captured on social media. The AP’s
follow-up report acknowledged that someone in the video appeared to use
profanities about “white people” and that the victim “appeared to be white,”
while “others shown in the video appeared to be black.”
Radley
Balko rushed to tweet out that the Chicago kidnapping is not a trend because
since 2001, 80–85 percent of white murder victims were killed by whites. True,
but the percentage of blacks killed by blacks is higher. From 1980 to
2008, 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks. White-on-black
homicides are much rarer than black-on-white homicides. The vast bulk of
interracial violence is committed by blacks. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600
acts of violence against whites, and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence
against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey
provided to the author:
Distribution of violent victimizations, by race/Hispanic origin of
victim and perceived race/Hispanic origin of offender, 2012–2013
Blacks,
in other words, committed 85% of the interracial crimes between blacks and
whites, even though they are 13 percent of the population. This data accords
with the last published report on interracial crime from the Bureau of
Justice Statistics; the Bureau stopped publishing its table on interracial
crime after 2008, the first year of the Obama presidency.
Some portion
of those black-on-white crimes may be driven by the same racial hostility that
gives rise to urban flash mobs and the knockout game. As Dead Prez rapped: “We
gonna order take out and when we see the driver/We gonna stick the 25 up in his
face . . . White boy in the wrong place at the right time.” Even if the higher
rate of black-on-white violence is simply a product of blacks’ higher rate of
violence generally, that violent crime rate is another fact suppressed by the
mainstream media whenever possible. In response to the Chicago torture video,
Callum Borchers of the Washington Post sneered at conservatives’ supposed delusions, such as that “Chicago
is a war zone.” This idea struck Borchers as so preposterous that he repeated
it later in his column: “Oh, and by the way, Chicago (the part inhabited mostly
by black people, anyway) is a super-dangerous place, just like Trump said.”
One
wonders how quickly Collum would move his family out of the allegedly pacific
South and West Sides of Chicago if he actually had to live there. The following
is a partial sampling of crime headlines from Chicago papers over the last few
weeks, in reverse chronological order:
FAMILY SINGALONG ENDS AS BULLETS FLY THROUGH CAR WINDOW ON PULASKI
ROAD
SHOOTINGS KILL 4 PEOPLE, WOUND 24 SINCE SATURDAY, POLICE SAY[referring to the 24-hour
period from December 31, 2016 to January 1, 2017]
TWO BOYS, 16, KILLED IN SHOOTING THAT ALSO WOUNDED 65-YEAR-OLD
WOMAN
A VIOLENT CHRISTMAS IN A VIOLENT YEAR FOR CHICAGO: 11 KILLED, 50
WOUNDED
BROTHERS KILLED, 5 OTHER PEOPLE WOUNDED IN CHRISTMAS SHOOTING
3 KILLED, 17 WOUNDED IN CITY SHOOTINGS
4 DEAD IN FERNWOOD ATTACK, 15 OTHERS WOUNDED IN SHOOTINGS
3 WOUNDED IN PARTY BUS SHOOTING NEAR LAKE SHORE DRIVE
WOMAN RAPED BY ARMED MEN AFTER ROBBERY IN HUMBOLDT PARK
MAN WHO ATTACKED, ROBBED 94-YEAR-OLD GARFIELD RIDGE WOMAN SOUGHT
BY POLICE
47 SHOOTINGS SO FAR ON EXPRESSWAYS IN CHICAGO, 10 ABOVE ALL OF
LAST YEAR
BOY, 16, SHOT ON HIS WAY TO SCHOOL — BUT WENT TO CLASS ANYWAY
INBOUND EISENHOWER SHUT DOWN AFTER SHOOTOUT BETWEEN CARS
MEN CHARGED WITH ROBBING WOMEN WALKING ALONE IN LAKEVIEW, POLICE
SAY
SHOOTINGS KILL 9, WOUND 66 OVER THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY, POLICE SAY
Or maybe
Borchers is only interested in the white areas of Chicago, which are not yet a
“war zone.”
Black
Lives Matter activist Shaun King, responding to the Chicago torture, rejected the idea of
speaking out “on crimes committed by black folk because nobody in this country
is held more responsible for the crimes they commit, and even the crimes they
don’t commit, than black folk in America. . . . American prisons are full of
black folk who are being held responsible for every mistake they’ve ever made.”
Try telling that to Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. Johnson
regularly bemoans the fact that convicted gun felons in Chicago have little to
fear from the criminal-justice system, because they are so quickly back on the
streets following a shooting. The Illinois Black Caucus has blocked stiffer
penalties for gun crime.
The
victims of a November 2016 robbery spree in Chicago may also disagree with King
that the criminal-justice system is vindictive against black criminals. Isaiah
Scaife had already been convicted of theft, attempted theft, criminal trespass,
and possession of a stolen motor vehicle before he turned 18, according to
DNAInfo. He continued to commit gun crimes as a young adult. At age 19, after a
conviction for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, Scaife was already out on
parole. That’s when he began his five-day crime spree on November 18, robbing a
Subway store’s customers after sticking his gun in a baby’s face and trying to
manhandle his way behind the restaurant’s counter. A few minutes later, he
robbed a man leaving a Citgo gas station, beating the victim unconscious with
his gun before shooting him in the face. The next day, Scaife returned to the
same Subway, where he robbed and choked a man while a juvenile accomplice
pointed a gun at the victim. A few days later, Scaife pulled a gun on a man at
another gas station and stole his possessions and car. At his arraignment, he
yelled at the court deputies: “I’m going to spit on your ass.”
Scaife is
hardly unique. A huge percentage of violent crime is committed by people with
serious criminal histories who are free to continue terrorizing the innocent.
And, pace King, if you commit a drug crime, you’ll get more leniency
in a large urban jurisdiction than in a rural county, where sentences for white
drug dealers dwarf those of inner-city traffickers, according to the New York Times.
At least
one of the Facebook torture assailants belonged to the gang culture that
produces Chicago’s violent crime. Tesfaye Cooper posted a video on his YouTube
channel in October in which he points a rifle at the camera and says: “I’ll put
a bullet in your ass,” reports DNAInfo Chicago. Cooper’s Facebook page
glorifies him posing with guns and paying homage to local murderers. His raps
threaten to kill people who disrespect him and his crew.
The
violence in the Chicago torture video does not arise in a vacuum. Most
residents of inner-city areas are hardworking bourgeois citizens longing to
live in safety and in racial harmony. But the video opens a window into a
culture that America would prefer to turn its eyes away from—and which it has
helped create.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a
contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.
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