On Juneteenth, Bullets Fly From Obama Boulevard to John Lewis Way
Juneteenth marked by mass shootings across America.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Over the Juneteenth weekend, 9 people were shot in Harlem. Among them was Darius Lee, an aspiring basketball player from the mostly black neighborhood, who was the only one killed in the mass shooting. The wounded included two women and six men in a shooting that began over the filming of a rap video.
Over 40 shots were fired.
Elsewhere in the Big Apple, a gunman ran up to three men in Queens and opened fire with a rifle, wounding two and killing one. Dwayne Whyte was arrested in the shooting.
"When is enough going to be enough? When we gonna put these guns down?" a community liaison asked after the Harlem attack.
"The emboldened individuals responsible for this are exactly who our officers are battling every day to make our city safe," NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said.
The New York mass shootings were one of a number of shootings over the Juneteenth weekend.
In Washington D.C., the “Moechella” illegal street party “celebrating black culture and protesting gentrification” turned into an even more illegal firefight with one killed and three wounded.
“We have a child who was killed today at an event that did not have any proper planning for the number of people who were here and with guns involved,” DC Mayor Muriel Bowser complained.
But Chase Poole, the 15-year-old boy, had his own gun on him and had been shot twice before, including once this year.
One of the wounded was a D.C. cop.
Moechella organizers posted a statement thanking everyone for coming to the "Juneteenth activation" and declaring that Moechella is a "symbol of black culture in dc and is built on the foundation of peace."
“At some point and time, we have to say enough is enough," a neighborhood activist said. "It's not enough to wax poetic about what police do to Breonna Taylor, or about what happened to George Floyd if we don't also have the same level of care and concern for what's going on in our communities."
In Los Angeles, Juneteenth came to Obama Boulevard as two were shot in a car near a Target store, killing a 17-year-old boy but leaving two 4-year-olds in the back seat unharmed.
In Philly, nine Juneteenth shootings wounded six and killed three. One of the deadliest incidents happened at a cookout where the crowd was watching an NBA game before a drive-by shooting killed one and wounded another.
On the southwest side of San Antonio, Juneteenth was marked with a drive-by mass shooting at a family BBQ. Seven people were shot and two of them killed.
"I did hear some of the kids screaming, 'that's my dad, that's my dad'", one witness described.
There had already been a previous drive-by shooting at that same house back in May.
In Columbus, Ohio, three people were shot during Juneteenth as "two groups of males" got into an argument and "pulled handguns and began shooting at each other." The Columbus Dispatch describes shootings in the area as a "not uncommon occurrence."
In Chicago, where the lack of shootings would be more uncommon, 47 people were shot in honor of Juneteenth. The victims included an 11-year-old girl. A 16-year-old boy was also shot in the arm and a 17-year-old girl was grazed by a bullet. Fredrica Coleman, a black 36-year-old woman, was shot and killed.
At the Tysons Corner Mall in Fairfax, Virginia, Juneteenth was rung in when rapper No Savage allegedly opened fire at the mall during an argument before driving away in a black Cadillac. The Washington D.C. rapper was easily identifiable by a neck tattoo that reads, "SAVAGE".
Three shoppers were injured while fleeing the shooting.
In Baltimore, five people were killed and 10 wounded over Juneteenth weekend.
That neighborhood has seen 8 murders in the past few months and two just on that block alone.
“My boys know the difference between gunshots and fireworks. They shouldn’t have to know the difference,” A local woman whose children were playing not far from where a previous murder victim died, said.
Graffiti on the scene read, “NO SHOOT ZONE #168.”
One of the Baltimore dead was Trevon White, the owner of a soul food eatery, who had given an interview before the shooting.
"Baltimore City is a great place to open a business," he claimed.
Shortly thereafter he was dead.
In Indianapolis, three people were shot at a gas station, but witnesses refused to cooperate. The city has hit a new record with over 100 murders in less than six months for only the third time in its history.
In New Orleans, 14 people were shot over Juneteenth weekend. Two of them have died. In Milwaukee, there were 14 shootings that wounded 15 and left 3 people dead. In Detroit, there were two shootings in a single park in which four victims, all black, were shot, one of them fatally. In Nashville, a man with tattoos over his eye and on the back of his neck opened fire at a garage at Rep. John Lewis Way.
‘Good trouble’, this isn’t.
The media made much of Biden creating Juneteenth National Independence Day last year and the celebrations this year. There are articles on how to celebrate Juneteenth without "cultural appropriation". But it might be better to celebrate it without violence and mass shootings.
Slavery is long since over, but black communities across the country remain in thrall to crime.
It isn’t “systemic racism” that threatens black people, but everyday violence that takes no holidays, that erupts just as regularly on Martin Luther King Day and on Juneteenth, and on streets named after Obama and Rep. John Lewis. Externally the solution may be police and a functional criminal justice system, but internally the change has to come from within.
It’s been a long time since black people needed to be liberated from white people.
Activists act as if the critical issue is a liberation from some nebulous external force, systemic racism, white supremacy, white privilege, or unconscious bias. Black Lives Matter activists and successful politicians, businessmen and generals claim that they feel threatened by police. But the sad truth is that, like the rest of us, the enemy and the threat comes from within.
The only meaningful liberation that still needs to happen on Juneteenth is a moral revolution. Until that revolution comes, Juneteenth will be a bloody reminder that the liberation that matters is not that of the body, but of the soul and the spirit.
How You Get the Left to Talk Honestly About Black Crime
A disturbing look at the FBI’s data on race and animal-cruelty offenses.
Discussing black crime in America isn’t easy. For decades, the FBI has collected all kinds of race and crime data from state police, so we have the information. But due to a ton of negative black disparities showing up in the data, the mainstream media pursues a policy of silence on the issue, turning it as a result into a taboo topic.
But as progressives say: “silence is violence.” Like any policy area, when you refuse full and frank discussion about crime, bad policies get implemented and good people get hurt. Take as an example the reckless driving-equivalent of the “Ferguson Effect” Tucker Carlson recently revealed. Tucked-away in a Department of Transportation (DOT) report from last year was a short series of data points showing that black traffic fatalities surged an astounding 40 percent from 2019 to 2020. This means over half of all vehicular homicide-victims that year were black. Needless to say, this was a giant deviation from the norm; one which deserved, you would have thought, a pro-active, open discussion from police and the DOT. Instead, it was completely ignored.
Interestingly, the data showed the increase largely taking place after George Floyd’s death in May 2020. As Carlson’s report claimed, during this period, police in many parts of the country were instructed to stand down when it came to arresting reckless black drivers so as to reduce the potential for violent altercations. While the fatality figures soon came down, they stayed lofty for months, meaning the police's policy of intentional inaction persisted well after the spike in killings became known. As a result, likely thousands of needless deaths occurred, the majority being black. Again, silence is violence.
So, can it be done? Can progressives, liberals and tepid conservatives be pushed to engage with whatever part of black culture that is at the source of high black crime-rates? Likely yes, and here’s how.
Animal Cruelty and Pet Ownership
Few in the world adore their pets like Americans do. In 2020, US pet owners spent $103 billion on pet care. Sixty-nine million US households, over 3/4s of them all, currently own a dog—the Labrador retriever being the long-time favorite. A whopping 76 percent of millennials own a dog or a cat; the highest among all demographics.
Likewise, few people condemn animal cruelty like Americans do. All 50 states have had laws prohibiting it for decades (with Maine apparently being the strictest), and, in 2019, the federal penalty against animal cruelty was graduated from a misdemeanor to a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison.
And consider the dizzying array of animal-rights groups in the US. Although typically composed of progressives and the more compassionate among us, legal academic Justin Marceau notes how these groups have been at the forefront of ratcheting up animal-cruelty laws, including the pursuit of mandatory minimums, increased felony prosecutions, prosecuting young offenders as adults, and the establishment of offender registries. Interestingly, this has set up a clash with fellow progressives in the “criminal justice reform” movement and those who impugn America’s “carceral state” as an apparent expression of its institutional racism and entrenched white supremacy.
As Marceau writes, apparently so driven is this part of the progressive camp, they are even willing to pause their general xenophilic tendencies and attack certain foreign cultural practices such as Japanese dolphin hunts, indigenous whaling, and the consumption of dog meat and shark fins in Asian cultures. Consider also 1993’s Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah case in which the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court arguing against the religious freedom of the West African Santeria adherents to sacrifice animals. The animal rights battle puts them in direct conflict with progressives’ biggest shibboleth of race.
Also noteworthy is their refusal to back down. Take the Michael Vick case of 2007, in which the NFL star (pictured above) was convicted of multiple Pit Bull killings linked to an underground dogfighting ring he led. As Marceau recounts, groups like the Animal Law Defense Fund (ALDF) condemned calls to forgive Vick and allow him to return to society after his 14-month sentence, calling it mere “hollow rhetoric.” The ALDF even condemned the much-vaunted NAACP when the latter called for empathy for Vick on account of his childhood poverty and early exposure to dogfighting—“ridiculous” excuses, they said.
ALDF's then-executive director Joyce Tischler firmly rebuked the famed black advocacy group, saying their “active embrace of Vick appears to be a classic case of the good old boys circling the wagons to protect one of their own”—a tone which almost no conservative would dare take up. Further, the ALDF and others called on the NFL to ban Vick permanently, while one enterprising company even created a Michael Vick dog chew toy.
Most would agree this is not a typical reaction from progressives when it comes to black criminal behavior, and you would be hard-pressed to find another area of crime so sternly (and fairly) treated.
So, if we can’t have frank talk about the widely varying levels of rape, violent crime, and hate crime within black communities, perhaps we can at least discuss black animal-cruelty rates? After all, those rates within black society are just as disproportionate. And chances are the toxic cultural traits that lead to such disparities are similar.
FBI Statistics
Unlike other crime datasets, the FBI has only reported animal-cruelty information for a few years. The data also could be more comprehensive, as a minority of states still don’t report. Still, what’s available demands attention.
The large majority of reported cases are for animal neglect and, more disturbingly, direct abuse and torture. According to FBI records, 75 percent of them take place in people’s homes with another 12 percent occurring on roads, sidewalks, and parking garages. In 2016, the FBI’s first reporting year, offenses linked to blacks was 25 percent of the total—a rate double their demographic. In 2019, the FBI’s last reporting year, the figure was about the same.
One obscure 2009 survey seems to concur with these findings. When asked to admit to having animal abuse in one’s past, blacks answered in the affirmative, again, at twice the rate of their population. Further, from the results, survey analysts concluded blacks were 30 percent more likely to harm an animal than whites were.
These figures are even more glaring when one considers pet-ownership rates. If blacks owned pets at rates double their own population, their cruelty offense-rates would be less of a concern. But this is not the case. White ownership rates have been shown to be double, even triple, that of blacks, meaning the latter’s propensity for animal cruelty is actually far higher than what’s showing in the FBI’s figures.
The (“Too White”) Animal Rights Movement
Animal-shelter volunteerism, animal-rights activism, and veganism are clear indications of a heightened compassion for animals. I am unaware of any data showing the racial breakdown of each, but there’s plenty of black commentary saying the general area is a “white person’s thing.” That this is so almost always gets defensively reframed through a prism of victimization. As Aph Ko writes for Everyday Feminism, it’s no surprise that whites are disproportionately vegan “given that most mainstream representations of veganism are dominated by white bodies and most of the activism revolves around prioritizing theories born from white people and their perspectives.” Yes, blacks aren’t into veganism as much, but it’s not their fault.
Elsewhere, it’s claimed whites care “too much” about animals. In reaction to the outcry following the killing of Cecil the Lion in 2015, black feminist and New York Times columnist Roxane Gay wrote: “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care”—the hunter in that case was white and had to hire armed guards after receiving multiple death threats.
Similarly, when complaining about whites’ supposed penchant for bringing animals into malls and on to airplanes, The Root’s Michael Harriot took this as an indication that whites care too much about animals generally, concluding “Black people love pets, too, just not as much as white people… White people love dogs. Black people love their dogs.” Unlike whites, blacks “simply understand the difference between an animal and a person,” writes one Medium
Then there’s the fallback on historical racism. Part of the alienation blacks face towards the animal rights movement, we’re told, is due to the history of whites “animalizing” blacks; that is, whites quite literally treating blacks like animals in order to justify “abusing,” “raping,” and using blacks ‘for labor without concern for their well-being.’
Similarly, blacks are said not to own as many dogs as whites because of America’s history of black slavery in which dogs were apparently widely used to police plantations. Aph Ko again: “Dogs have always been a part of whiteness, as well as a part of racism.”
Citing more up-to-date “racist” history, when Ethnic Studies professor Heidi Nast admitted dogfighting within black communities is a relatively common phenomenon, she pinned it to white-driven welfare reform in the 1980s, as poorer black communities needed to supplement their income with drug-dealing and this required using pit bulls for protection.
More present still, anti-black racism today apparently helps explain racial variances in animal care. One black PETA activist said it’s “difficult for communities like mine who live in oppressive environments to see past our own suffering enough to recognize the suffering of other animals.” Again, yes, blacks are relatively unconcerned with animal welfare, but that’s white people’s problem; not theirs.
Conclusion
Why the FBI’s data hasn’t been raised by animal-rights groups is, of course, a good question. It is possible, even given their demonstrated stridency, there really is a collective reluctance rooted in wanting to foster a positive black group-image. Although not an express animal-rights activist, one academic writing about the FBI’s animal-cruelty data collection methods avoided publishing any details on racial disparities in the data. She claimed there was ‘an error in the 2019 Excel file’ obtained from the FBI which made racial figures in particular for that year unclear, even though I managed to locate it on PDF as well and for more than just one year. She didn’t respond when I probed her about this via email.
But on top of the data being quite new, it’s actually extremely difficult to find online (unlike the FBI’s other race and crime data). And nowhere does the FBI promote it. Without being proactive about finding this data, I doubt anyone would come across it naturally. It’s safely assumed then that animal-rights groups are indeed unaware of it (but should be pushed to engage with it).
Given what we’ve seen from animal-rights groups, it might really be that what passes as an excuse on this issue from black commentators fails to carry as much truck as it does when silencing discussions about black crime-rates elsewhere. For whatever reason, animal cruelty-denialism presents a greater moral challenge to many Americans. At least, compared to, say, ignoring or dismissing the wildly disproportionate figures surrounding black and white interracial crime. It is likely then that white (and black) animal lovers might be the most willing to step into this breach. After all, if the central question for them is, how can we challenge animal cruelty and reduce practices like animal torture, it’s hard to see how they couldn’t.
John Kline is an attorney in Virginia. His writing has appeared at The American Spectator, Russia Today, and Law & Liberty. Visit him on Twitter: @JohnJKline99.
THE DEPRAVED GHETTO BLACK CULTURE IN AMERICA - Is it the world’s most violent subculture?
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/10/ghetto-black-violence-in-america-dr.html
Dr. Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites
So, we have local black gang associates posting terror threats on social media -- threats of murder, by burning, directed at the women and children family members of white police employees -- immediately before the murder, by burning, of the white teenage daughter of a local police department employee. Plus, the killing took place only minutes after the victim was seen on video at the same location as the husband or boyfriend of the person who posted the threats, as he was filling a handheld can with gasoline.
BLACK MEN ARE 15xs TO 30xs TIMES MORE LIKELY TO PERPETRATE VIOLENCE!
WATCH THIS VIDEO!
WATCH THIS VIDEO!
WATCH THIS VIDEO!
WATCH THIS VIDEO!
WATTERS ON FRANK R JAMES' STAGGERING RACISM
Watters: How was this guy not on the FBI's radar?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6FnVhTxYlk
BLACK LIVES MURDER
Police Chief: Illinois ‘Monster’ Beheads 8-Months Pregnant Ex-Girlfriend
1,120 people have been shot this year in Chicago and 282 people have been murdered.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/06/americas-black-crime-tidal-wave-how-you.html
During the summer of 2020, BLM and Antifa wrought violence and did billions of dollars in damage across America. The Democrat left supported those riots and raised money to bail out the perpetrators no matter what they had done. Our media, of course, supported the rioters too; they love nothing better than exacerbating an already-explosive situation. The media do not investigate the obvious possibility that the rioters were recruited and paid to do what they do. Ask one of them why they are rioting and you will get a blank look. They may be doing it for a paycheck, not principles or ideology.
How You Get the Left to Talk Honestly About Black Crime
A disturbing look at the FBI’s data on race and animal-cruelty offenses.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/06/americas-black-crime-tidal-wave-how-you.html
But due to a ton of negative black disparities showing up in the data, the mainstream media pursues a policy of silence on the issue, turning it as a result into a taboo topic.
‘These figures are even more glaring when one considers pet-ownership rates. If blacks owned pets at rates double their own population, their cruelty offense-rates would be less of a concern. But this is not the case. White ownership rates have been shown to be double, even triple, that of blacks, meaning the latter’s propensity for animal cruelty is actually far higher than what’s showing in the FBI’s figures.
BLACK LIVES MURDER
THE BLACK SUBCULTURE OF VIOLENCE
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/05/black-lives-murder-most-violent.html
Four BLACK teens will be tried as adults on
second-degree murder charges in New Orleans
after prosecutors said they carjacked 73-year-
d grandmother Linda Frickley and dragged her
down the street while she was still attached to
her vehicle until her arm was severed. She died
on the scene moments later, WWL reported.
WINDOW INTO THE DEPRAVED BLACK SUBCULTURE
https://www.city-journal.org/html/window-depraved-culture-14929.html
Heather Mac Donald
Public safety
The Social Order
As for interracial violence generally, blacks disproportionately commit it. Between 2012 and 2015, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations, excluding homicide, between blacks
and whites, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, committed 85.5 percent of those victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on
whites, while whites, 61 percent of the population, committed 14.4 percent, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Regarding threats to blacks from the police, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
Anti-cop activist Shaun King says that his involvement in the campaign around the Jazmine Barnes murder was not driven by reports that a white man had killed the seven-year-old girl, who was gunned down in Houston on December 30. According to Barnes’s mother and 15-year-old sister, the white driver of a pickup truck had pulled up next to the family’s car before opening fire. The accusation set off a frenzy of hate-crime allegations and blanket coverage by the New York Times. King offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who located the suspect.
As it turned out, Jazmine Barnes was killed by two black men, who opened fire on her mother’s car because they thought that they were targeting enemies of their gang. King passed along a tip about the real killers to the Houston police, and now says that he merely “internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own child who was killed.” Race, in other words, had nothing to do with his activism.
It’s worth remembering, though, the many other black children who have been victims of drive-by shootings without leading King to launch a national crusade.
A sampling: in March 2015, a six-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in St. Louis, as Black Lives Matter protesters were converging on the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department. In August 2015, a nine-year-old girl was killed by a bullet from a drive-by shooting in Ferguson while doing her homework in her bedroom, blocks from the Black Lives Matter rioting thoroughfare. Five children were shot in Cleveland over the 2015 Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In Cincinnati, in July 2015, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September 2015, leading the black police chief to break down in tears and ask why the community only protests shootings of blacks when the perpetrator is a cop. In November 2015, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. All told, ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore in 2015; twelve victims were between the age of ten and seventeen.
In 2016, a three-year-old girl in Baltimore was partially paralyzed by a drive-by shooting. In Chicago in 2016, two dozen children under the age of 12 were shot in drive-bys, including a three-year-old boy mowed down on Father’s Day 2016 who is now paralyzed for life and a ten-year-old boy shot in August; his pancreas, intestines, kidney, and spleen were torn apart. A Jacksonville 22-month-old was shot to death by a passing car last June. In September, three men killed three-year-old Azalya Anderson in a drive-by in Sacramento, and a week before Christmas in Bridgeport, a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed on his way home from the candy store in a drive-by shooting.
Why did King let these shootings of black children go by without responding as he did to Jazmine Barnes’s murder? Could it be because the perpetrators were black? You could end all white shootings of black children tomorrow and it would have zero effect on the death rate of black children by homicide, because such white-on-black shootings are extremely rare. Moral abominations, like the 2015 Charleston church massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof, are aberrations that belong to the outermost lunatic fringe of American society. The country’s revulsion at the Charleston carnage was immediate and universal, resulting in a movement to banish the Confederate flag, embraced by Roof as a white supremacist symbol, from official sites.
If Shaun King and other Black Lives Matter activists really want to save black children from the trauma of urban violence, they should put their efforts into rebuilding inner-city culture—above all, by revalorizing a married father as the best gift a mother can give her child. Fantasies about white violence against “black bodies” are a distraction from what is actually happening on American streets.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
Walter Williams tackles the elephant in the room on crime
Dr. Williams is a well known conservative economist and longtime John Olin Chair faculty at George Mason University in eastern Virginia, author of 12 books and syndicated columnist. In the past, he has been substitute host on the Rush Limbaugh radio program. He is almost like family to me, and I have benefited from his essays and books over the years. This past week, I saw and read his essay on disparities in crime rates among races that was picked up by Military in its October 2019 issue. What got Dr. Williams going was the article by Matthew DeLisi of Iowa State U and John Paul Wright of the U of Cincinnati titled "What Criminologists Don't Say and Why."
Dr. Williams confirms that the writers are right about the liberal tilt of criminologists — "If criminologists have the guts to even talk about a race-crime connection, it's behind closed doors and in guarded language. Any discussion about race and crime ... can mean the end of one's professional career."
Dr. Williams points out teen black-on-white predatory behavior — chronicled in detail by many, particularly Colin Flaherty, whose investigative reports appear frequently (more than 100) at American Thinker — cannot be reported, mentioned, or considered by the media, politicians, criminologists, commentators, politicians, even law enforcement people without risking being called racist, the easy epithet used to enforce a ban on talking about the realities of racial disparities in crime and the increasingly violent nature of black violence against whites — the knockout game, polar bear hunting, flash mob violence against people and property.
Referencing the Wright and DeLisi report, Dr. Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites, for example, and he points out the silliness of criminologists' claims that mass incarceration rather than criminality has decimated the black community. He favorably quotes Wright and DeLisi when they say, "What they [criminals] did, in reality was to prey on their neighbors."
Dr. Williams returns to a theme he has explored many times before in this essay and commentary when he points out that the black family of the past was two parents and stable, even back to days of slavery, and that the black community was moral and law-abiding. "The strong character of black people is responsible for the great progress made from emancipation to today. ... [T]oday's conduct among black youth wouldn't have been tolerated yesteryear."
My regret is there aren't enough Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell types to engage the nutty attitudes of liberal chatterbox experts.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is an emergency physician, sheriff's medical officer and inactive attorney, policy and science adviser to the American Council on Science and Health of NYC and the Heartland Institute of Chicago.
No comments:
Post a Comment