ONLY 8% OF S.F. IS BLACK, HOWEVER
BLACKS PERPETRATE 40% OF THE CRIMES.
THESE ARE PRE-COVID NUMBERS AND BEFORE
STORE CLOSING DUE TO BLACK LOOTING AND
CAR JACKINGS. S.F. IS ONE OF THE
CARJACKING CAPITALS OF AMERICA.
Philadelphia’s (Fatherless) Black Teen Mob Problem
When families go down, one very specific thing goes up.
Philadelphians, even the crusty sort who inhabit the city’s boozy nightlife circuit, know what to do when they see a squad of black teenagers headed their way: they exit stage left, or take the nearest street away from the advancing squad, because not to do so may result in injury or death.
Some might call this the epitome of racial profiling, but it’s what smart Philadelphians have learned to do.
Sadly, things have gotten this bad in downtown Philadelphia, although you wouldn’t know it if you were to concentrate only on the city’s cultural nightlife, meaning the coming and going of people into theaters, concerts, or even lectures at the historic American Philosophical Society. Life inside these cultural snow globes is champagne-fine until one steps out into the real city to wait for a bus or head to the subway for the trek home. It’s then that one must be on guard against ‘fateful encounters’ such as the one that happened to a 34-year-old woman walking near City Hall in broad daylight on February 23.
This area near City Hall is a busy hub for shoppers, hawker vendors, lawyers, municipal workers and drifting homeless. It’s an area that is so congested there’s a feeling of safety in numbers, the last place you’d expect a 34-year-old woman to be knocked down by (as 6ABC reported), “a group of people” who beat her until she was unconscious.
The “group of people” in question proved not to be Kiwanis Club members, or even Philadelphia Flower Show attendees, but 8 black male and female youths, some of whom were on bikes and looked as young as 11 years old.
The Gateway Pundit published parts of an interview that the victim’s father, Dr. William Corse, gave to WTFX: “The victim, a 34-year-old woman who lives nearby, was on her way to a hair appointment when she was jumped by a group of eight young people.”
Dr. Corse also told FOX 29 that, “Someone tapped her on the shoulder, she turned around, and they smacked her on the head, she went down and her head was stomped on.”
FOX 29 continued: “Police say the group continued to punch and stomp on the victim until she became unconscious, then left her injured on the sidewalk. Dr. Corse, a longtime Chester County doctor, said his daughter suffered a broken orbital bone, widespread bruising, and required stitches.”
Earlier in February, four very young black teens were caught on video beating a 30-year-old woman, attacking her from behind and then stealing her handbag. The victim suffered injuries to her face. The video of that incident, uploaded by Philly Voice, has since been removed, although it was not stated why the video was removed unless someone—Philly Voice or YouTube censors—deemed it potentially dangerous (in terms of racial profiling) because the victim was white and the assailants black.
It is not hard to imagine a super-woke bureaucrat making the decision to remove the video in light of the fact that since there have been numerous attacks by black teens in the city, a visual reminder of the attack borders on the incendiary and “racist.”
Complicating the scenario is the way in which many stories like this are reported. Often local news outlets in Philadelphia do not specify the race of the victim when the (alleged) attackers are black. The race of the victim is only brought to light if these same news outlets happen to interview one of the victim’s family members.
This is what happened in the City Hall attack, where the race of the victim went unmentioned until the victim’s father was interviewed — after the assailants were caught.
Another Philadelphia local news custom is to identify the victim of these attacks as a “person” rather than spell out their sex. The reason for this is unclear unless it has something to do with the latest ‘do’s and don’ts’ in the world of gender ideology.
The largest teen attack in 2022 occurred in February when a group of 150 black teens disrupted Center City businesses, forcing stores to close early.
On March 7, 2023, a group of 15-to-20 black juveniles ransacked a Center City business at 10th and Chestnut Street, attacking an employee while destroying merchandise and stealing hookahs.
Group attacks by young black teens began to surface in 2010, when two city juveniles (pre-teens) assaulted a black woman as she walked through a playground. The pre-teens at that time were playing a game, “Catch and Wreck,” in which girls and boys randomly terrorize people.
Several years ago a flash mob flooded a major Market-Frankford El station in Center City and wound up chasing a white employee of a nearby Dunkin Donuts, causing him to have a fatal heart attack.
One year later in 2011, Metro Philadelphia reported that “Two Teens Suspected in Independence Mall Swarm Attack Surrender.” The attackers in this case were 8th and 9th graders.
In 2011, The New York Times reported that “Flash Mobs Take Violent Turn in Philadelphia.”
The Times reminded readers that Flash Mobs began as an act of performance art before metamorphosing into violent attack squads. Residents of South Street were quoted as saying that they were concerned about the rising numbers of unsupervised children there.
Traditionally, South Street was never an area that attracted minority youth, or even young white teens, but had its roots in the 1960s counterculture: head shops, bistro-style restaurants, art film cinemas, and New Age crystal shops and bookstores filled the area, a far cry from what the street has become today: a magnet for thug subculture denizens.
Recent data from the 6ABC Safety Tracker indicates that assaults have been on the rise in the area near the City Hall attack. In the last 12 months alone, there have been more than 200 attacks, all of them not necessarily from underage teens.
The question is: why are children—black children—coming together in swarms to attack and rob pedestrians, and trash downtown businesses?
Conservative critics point to the high numbers of fatherless/single mother children in black urban communities as proof that liberal policies have never really served black families. Progressives like Barack Obama even agree that absent black fathers continue to be the number one problem in Black America.
“Since the 1960s, liberals have turned us [Black America] into a culture of baby mamas,” black conservative Candace Owens is on record as saying. Before the 1960s, when poverty and racism were by all accounts far worse, the black family was considerably more stable.
Much of the blame can be attributed to a welfare system that offers money to [black] families as long as a man [husband] does not live there. This Faustian bargain is the main reason behind the current statistic that over 75% of black people grew up in one-parent households.
Owens adds: “It was an incentive to be a single mother. It dismissed the role of the black man.”
Ironically, in 1985, a Times piece entitled, “Restoring the Traditional Black Family,” blamed the destruction of the black family on “Self perpetuating culture of the ghetto,” and on the disastrous long-term results of slavery in terms of its links “to modern discrimination and its continuing effects.”
In other words, the trauma of slavery worked its way through the collective DNA of black people, causing fathers to leave families and mothers to have as many babies with other men as possible.
But government cannot become a stand-in parent or a fill-in second spouse.
This idea was easily condemned by one of Philadelphia’s best mayors, Democrat Michael Nutter, a black man, when he scolded liberal social critics for suggesting that race (descending from slaves, etc.) cuts in city services programs and after-school programs were responsible for the rise in black youth group violence.
“I don’t think people should be finding excuses for inappropriate behavior,” Nutter said in 2010. “There is no racial component to stupid behavior, and parents should not be looking to the government to provide entertainment for their children.”
Thom Nickels
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.
San Francisco board open to reparations with $5M payouts
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.
These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism. And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing.
Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans apparently unaware that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity, and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.
“Those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it's not something we’re doing or we would do for other people. It’s something we would do for our future, for everybody's collective future,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the heavily LGBTQ Castro neighborhood.
The draft reparations plan, released in December, is unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth. The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals, but critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible. An estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which leans conservative, has said it would cost each non-Black family in the city at least $600,000.
Tuesday's unanimous expressions of support for reparations by the board do not mean all the recommendations will ultimately be adopted, as the body can vote to approve, reject or change any or all of them. A final committee report is due in June.
Some supervisors have said previously that the city can't afford any major reparations payments right now given its deep deficit amid a tech industry downturn.
Tinisch Hollins, vice-chair of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, alluded to those comments, and several people who lined up to speak reminded the board they would be watching closely what the supervisors do next.
“I don’t need to impress upon you the fact that we are setting a national precedent here in San Francisco,” Hollins said. “What we are asking for and what we’re demanding for is a real commitment to what we need to move things forward.”
The idea of paying compensation for slavery has gained traction across cities and universities. In 2020, California became the first state to form a reparations task force and is still struggling to put a price tag on what is owed.
The idea has not been taken up at the federal level.
In San Francisco, Black residents once made up more than 13% of the city’s population, but more than 50 years later, they account for less than 6% of the city’s residents — and 38% of its homeless population. The Fillmore District once thrived with Black-owned night clubs and shops until government redevelopment in the 1960s forced out residents.
Fewer than 50,000 Black people still live in the city, and it’s not clear how many would be eligible. Possible criteria include having lived in the city during certain time periods and descending from someone “incarcerated for the failed War on Drugs.”
Critics say the payouts make no sense in a state and city that never enslaved Black people. Opponents generally say taxpayers who were never slave owners should not have to pay money to people who were not enslaved.
Advocates say that view ignores a wealth of data and historical evidence showing that long after U.S. slavery officially ended in 1865, government policies and practices worked to imprison Black people at higher rates, deny access to home and business loans and restrict where they could work and live.
Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law, says no municipal reparations plan will have enough money to right the wrongs of slavery, but he appreciates any attempts to “genuinely, legitimately, authentically” make things right. And that includes cash, he said.
“If you’re going to try to say you’re sorry, you have to speak in the language that people understand, and money is that language,” he said.
John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, does not support reparations although he says he’d support a serious conversation on the topic. He doesn’t consider the board’s discussion of $5 million payments to be one.
“This conversation we’re having in San Francisco is completely unserious. They just threw a number up, there’s no analysis,” Dennis said. “It seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass.”
The board created the 15-member reparations committee in late 2020, months after California Gov. Gavin Newsom approved a statewide task force amid national turmoil after a white Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man.
The committee continues to deliberate recommendations, including monetary compensation, and its report is due to the Legislature on July 1. At that point it will be up to lawmakers to draft and pass legislation.
The state panel made the controversial decision in March to limit reparations to descendants of Black people who were in the country in the 19th century. Some reparations advocates said that approach does take into account the harms that Black immigrants suffer.
Under San Francisco's draft recommendation, a person would have to be at least 18 years old and have identified as “Black/African American” in public documents for at least 10 years. Eligible people must also meet two of eight other criteria, though the list may change.
Those criteria include being born in or migrating to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and living in the city for least 13 years; being displaced from the city by urban renewal between 1954 and 1973, or the descendant of someone who was; attending the city's public schools before they were fully desegregated; or being a descendant of an enslaved person.
The Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first U.S. city to fund reparations. The city gave money to qualifying people for home repairs, down payments and interest or late penalties due on property. In December, the Boston City Council approved of a reparations study task force.
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