tees's Blog

Commentary: The Deaths of Young Black Men is an Ongoing National Crisis, Yet is Met with a Giant Shrug

Date: Sunday, December 02, 2007
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

On day in the early 1960s, a patch of interstate highway was opened in my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. Reporters described the first car to touch the new pavement and quoted state officials about what the multi-lane stretch would mean for commerce and commuters’ convenience.

That day, a teenage black boy took to the interstate on his bicycle. He was struck and killed -- a horror at any time, but especially in those days when you seldom heard about young black boys dying. So shocking was the accident that people talked about it for months.

The death of black boys and young black men is so common now that the news doesn’t even bother to keep up. It takes the death of a superstar, like pro footballer Sean Taylor, to get communities talking.

If only Taylor had been the only young black man cut down by senseless violence last week. But he was just the most famous one of many.

It’s been that way for two decades now. Twenty years of self-destruction that, for the most part, the country has met with a giant shrug. What we have here is an ongoing national emergency, albeit undeclared.

“A telling thing happened in the wake of the Columbine massacre,” I wrote in my 2002 book, Yet A Stranger: Why Black Americans Still Don’t Feel at Home. “The entire country turned inward, tearing itself apart for answers, for reasons, for anything to explain how two young white boys from supposedly solid, comfortable homes and a community that prided itself on old-fashioned values and religious fealty -- two boys with whole lifetimes ahead of them -- became so possessed of anger, so diabolical, so obsessed with revenge, so obedient to evil, so racked with hatred.  We investigated the whole of modern American culture. Was it television programming, rife with gratuitous violence and sex? Could it have been the seedy, violent video games the boys favored? Is that how they learned to kill so cavalierly?

“Might alienation from, and bullying by, the school’s in-crowd have had anything to do with it? What about music, like the raging, screeching rock they preferred? Had a satanic cult consumed their innocence? Parental supervision, was it too lax? Did illegal drugs drive them to it? Was a chemical imbalance to blame? How about the availability of firearms; could that have been it? Did the absence of prayer in public schools leave a hole big enough for the devil to come in?

“A nationwide search for answers, an all-points bulletin, was launched. Law enforcement authorities, sociologists, physicians, psychologists, educators, parent groups, students, even the U.S. Congress and the White House kicked into high gear, searching for the demons that had invaded the young minds, commandeered them and directed the slaughter. There was consensus that some external force had compelled the boys to murder and, with all urgency and determination, the country set out to apprehend that mysterious provocateur. It was a state of emergency.

"But it was a tardy declaration. Since more than a decade before the Columbine tragedy, black youths have been killing one another at dizzying rates. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the homicide rate of young black men blasted off the charts. Funeral directors, who used to handle young bodies only occasionally by way of disease or accident, began keeping undersized caskets in their inventory and honing their skills at repairing holes in the chest and face and making young skin look as natural as possible. Support groups for mothers of slain youngsters sprang up around the country. Ministers got more calls for counsel in the middle of the night. Kids in impoverished neighborhoods that were susceptible to violence began writing down instructions for their own funerals -- the clothing they wanted to be buried in, the color of the coffin, the music they wanted played at the funeral service.”

“Yet no state of emergency had been called. There had been no haste to discover what on earth was bedeviling black youths. No search party had been dispatched to nab the monster, to cut off the cancer that had metastasized, spelling our demise. It was as if the country had decided violence was an inherent impulse among black youths, an internal force to reckon with, while in the Columbine case it was believed to be the work of outside influences ... ”

Our sons and brothers are not born to kill nor are they destined to be killed. External forces turn the sweet baby in the cradle into a menace in the ‘hood. Could we track them down with the same determination that we employ in writing off their prey?

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