Posted on 01/09/2003 2:22:28 PM PST by SeenTheLight
The beginning of a new year typically brings with it feelings of hopefulness and anticipation. But in the case of Oakland, it’s time to resume a macabre tradition: the homicide countdown. After hitting a high of 113 in 2002, a convicted drug dealer has the dubious distinction of being Oakland’s first killing of 2003. Isom Rodgers, like most of last year’s victims, was young, male and African-American, and it’s likely that the majority of casualties in 2003 will fit the same profile.
Black on black crime has reached dangerous proportions, not just in Oakland, but across the country. Mostly, the crimes involve young black men shooting and killing other young black men. The majority of these murders occur in low-income, inner-city neighborhoods, and they often revolve around gangs and drugs.
Although young men make up the bulk of those involved in these crimes, the violence has spread to the whole community. Grandmothers at home in their kitchens have been shot during drive-by shootings. Children and other innocent bystanders are routinely caught in the crossfire. Last year, an elderly man in a wheelchair was robbed and shot to death.
Women are becoming more involved in the violence as well. A 14-year-old girl was arrested for shooting a middle-age woman in the back last year. Another young woman, apparently motivated by jealousy, killed a mother and kidnapped her baby to raise as her own.
Whole families are targeted in the name of revenge, and family feuds rage on for decades. In another incident last year, firebombs were thrown through the window of a house, while the family slept inside. A mother and her five children died in the fire and the father was injured. These increasingly heinous crimes are symptoms of the breakdown of the inner-city black community itself.
A large component of this is the collapse of the two-parent family, which has led to a plethora of single mothers, fatherless children, and rootless men. All too often, children are neglected and raised in a manner that perpetuates the same vicious cycle for generations to come.
Well meaning programs like welfare and public housing, which were designed to be temporary and to help poor people get on their feet, ended up having the opposite effect. Public housing segregated poor blacks from other Americans and contributed to their alienation. Welfare created dependency and despondency.
A self-crippling ethos has spread among certain black youths, whereby they see success of any legitimate kind as being ''white'' and therefore undesirable. This leads to a general culture of resistance that is anti-establishment and anti-authority. The insistence on ''keeping it real'' prevents these young men from adopting the language and manners of the larger society. As a result, they render themselves unfit and unprepared for the working world. They ghettoize themselves with their single-minded embrace of everything ''ghetto.''
Another pernicious influence on black youth, although they defend it vigorously, is rap music. Rap music, while fresh and vibrant in the beginning, has been reduced to the lowest common denominator, in the form of ''gansta rap.'' Through this music, young black men are given role models that include drug dealers, pimps, and murderers, while young black women are seen as nothing more than ''ho’s'' and shaking ''bootys.'' This constant emphasis on the negative has had the unfortunate effect of perpetuating the very culture it seeks to illuminate. Gangster rap offers forth a world view that is decidedly bleak and nihilistic, and in the end, self-defeating.
Racism can no longer be blamed for all the problems of the black community, and to do so is to ignore what’s at the heart of the crisis. If African-Americans are to save their community from this cycle of self-destruction, then they will have to stop looking for answers from without, and instead start looking within.
If they do, they'll find we're all the same color where it counts.
The only solution I can see is for Oakland to adopt sensible gun control. ;^)
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