More Lynching's

There were several lynching’s in Chicago this weekend.

Well they may as well have been lynching’s as far as the poor victims are concerned. They’re just as dead.

It was another vivid example of what young blacks face in this country. These lynching’s were carried out without the use of rope or a tree, not by an angry group of white supremacists. They were committed by other young blacks, most of them in their teens. It was a rampage of violence carried out up close and personal. In the first there were no guns, no knives, just hands, feet and two by fours. In the end 16 year old Darrion Albert lie dead on the ground, having been savagely beaten. A beating that will likely be gracing the web site You Tube soon as it was caught on the video recorder of a witness’s cell phone, a common practice these days amongst black teens at gang fights. The beating occurred just outside Fenger High School where young Darrion was an honor roll student. It was part of a larger gang related melee between two rival gangs. Darrion just happened to be in the wrong place at the time as he was not a gang member.

Several other young black teens will not get to see their next birthday either, due to black on black gang violence. Some of the victims were in gangs but several more were not. One was a college student who had just returned home to pick up some additional clothes. As he stood on his front steps talking with a neighborhood friend a teenage gang banger walked up and shot both of them to death. There will be those that will foolishly focus on the gun rather than the hand that carried it, pointed it and pulled the trigger.

Once again just being young and black is enough to get you killed in the hood.

There were small rallies and 10 or 15 person marches protesting the senseless violence. News cameras recorded the tear filled faces of friends and families of the dead with local church pastors and neighbors trying to console them. But in Chicago, just like every other major city and smaller community nationwide, black on black crime is so commonplace that these tragic stories of death and family destruction will not garner a second day of newsprint. Not that they’re not important. It’s just that tomorrow there will be a whole new list of young blacks lynched without ropes by other young blacks.

But what do we hear from the black politicians? We hear that the problem in America is all about white racism. Newsweek’s recent cover story focused on the premise that white babies are actually racist. Blacks and liberal whites in Congress and the pundits that follow them claim that every dissenting vote against Barack Obama and every problem in the black community is caused by white racism. But the fear that grips the black community is not of racist white people. The fear that grips the black community is of the black community.

If whites had carried out these heinous killings the streets of the crime scenes would be jammed with news trucks and satellite dishes. The good Reverend JJ and his counterpart Jheri Curl Al would be ranting about how this was an example of the years of racist oppression. But Sharpton and Jackson didn’t attend the small rallies. Maybe their schedules were already filled or maybe they feared for their own safety on these mean streets. Or maybe their attendance at a rally against black on black violence wouldn’t support their rhetoric or lifestyle.

It’s a lot easier to blame white racism, especially when whites are willing to go along with the idea. But this constant drumbeat of racism does nothing to solve the real problem. In fact it just makes it worse.

16 year old Darrion Albert and the others from this past weekend are dead just because they were young and black. There were no ropes, no trees, no white hoods, no burning crosses, no swastikas, no discussion of hate crimes, no shaved heads, not a white face in the bunch except for the police trying to solve the crime.

No Racism. Just dead black kids and weeping black parents.