This is a video from what I think is a New York TV company, LLN NYC. It’s of a Black gent protesting against Black on Black crime. Listening to his comments and seeing the what looks like a police car there, it seems that this comes after someone has been killed. He notes that Whites and Asians can wander around the neighbourhood without trouble, but when it’s a Black person they’re targeted. He wonders where the self-hatred comes from and calls for Black Lives Matter to do something about it, because they have the money and resources, and have combated police violence against Blacks.
I’ve posted up several pieces before about the problem of Black on Black violence plaguing Black communities and the failure of the anti-racism organisations to do anything about it or even wishing to see it mentioned in the news. Some of these posts have been controversial. I’m aware of how Black criminality has been and is used by the right in this country and elsewhere to promote anti-Black racism. However, I don’t think turning away from the problem and refusing to acknowledge it is an option. Not when innocents are dying.
Black conservatives such as Jason Riley are also worried about gang violence in Black communities, and the Barbershop series of comedies set in a Black community barbers has presented it as one of the major concerns of ordinary Black peeps. And alongside this video there were a number of others from Black Americans expressing similar sentiments.
Regarding certain points, I think White people might be immune from violence in Black communities, at least to a certain extent, because the police respond more quickly and in much more force than if the victim’s Black. Or at least that’s what I’ve seen claimed by one person on the Net, who described how got lost and wandered into the ghetto by mistake. Someone did approach him with the intention of mugging him, but they were set upon by a group of other Blacks, allowing him to escape. I don’t know how true this is or how widespread if it is true. But it might be an explanation if Whites and Asians are able to walk around crime-ridden Black neighbourhoods unmolested.
As for the self-hatred, I honestly have no idea. It might be a legacy from slavery and segregation which have undermined Black self-respect to the point where some members of that community see each other as some kind of threat. It may also be a product of the drug gangs in those communities. A decade or so ago there was a series of shootings in Bristol’s St. Paul’s, which were held to be gang related. It may also be partly due to parts of the rap culture promoting and celebrating the ‘gangsta’ lifestyle. If you remember, the cops over here tried to ban Drill being played on the radio a few years ago as it was just gangsters boasting about what they were going to do to other gangsters.
As for Black Lives Matter doing something about this issue, I honestly don’t have much hope. Their anger is directed towards White racism and police violence, and I don’t see it broadening out to include Black on Black crime. The organisation that does seem effective in keeping communities safe is the Nation of Islam, or so I’ve heard. They’re a nasty group of anti-White racists, who want a separate Black state. But they actively protect their communities and people are safer in them than elsewhere. I’ve seen favourable comparisons with the Guardian Angels. You remember them – they appeared in the 1980s as a volunteer group to protect people on public transport. I’ve read comments that they only protected Whites and never did much, and that the Nation of Islam was much better, at least for Blacks.
It looks to me that there is a groundswell of opinion by ordinary Black Americans against Black on Black murders, and I hope it won’t be long before action is taken against this horrendous problem.
Ruined Leon is a Black American YouTuber, who criticises and rips into the crazy and bigoted elements in gay rights, feminist and purportedly anti-racist activism, ‘woke’ individuals whose comments and opinions are as hypocritical and offensive in their way as the oppression they oppose. This is a video he posted on the last day of February, commenting on the collapse of the trial against the four men accused of shooting BLM firebrand Sasha Johnson in the head. He notes that this was major news when there was speculation that the perp was a White supremacist. In fact, the four suspects arrested by the police were Black. There’s circumstantial evidence to link them to the crime – they were caught on CCTV casing Johnson’s house, and she and her family were already sufficiently worried to put in extra security. The men were arrested following a random ‘stop and search’ by the cops. But the prosecution dropped the case because no-one has come forward to testify against them. In fact, the witnesses’ statement at the time were confused, with some saying they were Black, others White and others that they couldn’t tell, because they were wearing balaclavas. In fact this looks like an example of the twisted code operating in some Black ghettos. It doesn’t matter what Black criminals do, even to other Blacks, no matter how violent or sadistic. Blacks don’t inform on other Blacks. Or it could be simple fear of reprisal from vicious criminals.
What angers Ruined Leon is that while the initial shooting was well publicised, he had to Google to find out about the collapse of the trial. Like many ordinary Black peeps, he’s angry about the amount of violence within the Black community and that it’s ignored by Black activist organisations like Black Lives Matter. At one point in this video he asks if Black lives only matter when they’re killed by Whites. It’s a good question. Jason Riley raises the same issue in the book, False Black Power, I reviewed earlier. Among other things, he cited the Barbershop series of comedies, set in a Black barbershop. In these movies, the hero and his friends and clients are less worried about systemic racism than with the gang violence plaguing their community. The film caused an outcry from the anti-racist activists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but Riley defended it on the grounds that it showed what Blacks really talked about when Whites weren’t around.
Leon has a point. The Lotus Eaters and others have gone through the stats, and at least over here, Black people are far more likely to be assaulted and killed by other Blacks than by White racists. But no-one wants to talk about it. They did nearly thirty years ago, when Black on Black violence was such an intense cause of concern that Sasha Baron Cohen, in his alter ego of Ali G., invited a senior cop on to one of his spoof interviews to discuss Black on Black violence and the weapons brothers were using against brothers.
But even twenty years ago, there were Black activists trying to silence the issue and demanding that attention be directed elsewhere. Readers may remember the Demilola Taylor case. This was a Black lad in London, who was attacked and stabbed to death by a gang on his way home from school. He bled to death in their stairwell of the block of flats where he lived.
I have a particular horror at this case. I was bullied at school, though it was not like today when kids are carrying knives. But the fear I remember from just normal thumps and abuse has stayed with me. I can’t image the fear that child must have experienced as he was set upon and died. The incident is one of the reasons I broke with a Black activist group I was corresponding with when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. This was the Black and Asian Studies Association, and I got on so well with them that they sent me a copy of their magazine. And it offended me so much that I wrote them a letter back, criticising some of their points. The articles in it varied in quality, but the overall tone was that all White people are racist and all Blacks the victims of racism. Which ignores other forms of racism, such as that of the Sudanese Arabs to the Black Beja people of the Sudan. But one of the comments in their magazine which really infuriated me was about Demilola’s murder. They, or at least, the magazine’s editor, felt that its coverage was ‘racist’. Why couldn’t the Beeb and the other news companies cover all the Blacks murdered by White racists? Reading between the lines, it seems to me that they thought the lad’s murder was only covered because it had been done by a Black gang. In fact it was a case of them jumping to conclusions. The race of Taylor’s murderers was not mentioned. When it was, it was stated that the gang was made up of people of different races. It wasn’t all Black.
A child died in pain and terror, murdered by thugs. But this should be ignored because Black activists thought he was murdered by other Blacks. I find that attitude absolutely contemptible.
I’ve reblogged some of the videos made by Simon Webb of History Debunked on racial issues and some of the myths and falsehoods being retailed as solid fact in Black history. Webb needs to be read carefully, as he is a Telegraph-reading Tory who believes that Bell Curve nonsense about Blacks being less intelligent than Whites. I’ve had one commenter criticise one of his videos I’ve posted here for what he considered to be its historical inaccuracies, and I do advise people to check what he says for themselves. Some of his material, where he sites his sources, seem sound, others much less so. But one of his videos explicitly commented on the problem of this media silence. It asked ‘What’s So Special about Stephen Lawrence?’ Lawrence, you may remember, was a young Black lad killed in a racially motivated incident. The Met police failed to properly arrest and charge his killers, who seem to have been the sons of notorious criminals. This rightly caused a national scandal and resulted in further examination and actions against the Metropolitan Police to purge it of racism. But Webb’s video pointed out that Lawrence was far from the only Black male murdered. The thumbnail to his video showed the faces of many other Black men and lads, who were also killed, but whose murders generated much less interest simply because they were killed by other Blacks.
Not that it’s just Blacks like Stephen Lawrence who are murdered by racists. Years ago Private Eye stated that just before Lawrence was killed, an Asian and a White man had been killed in two separate racist attacks. The Met police treated their deaths with the same cavalier indifference and incompetence they treated Lawrence’s. But there was no public outcry, no denunciations by anti-racists, questions in the House, or marches. Absolutely nothing.
Ruined Leone is right. Black lives only matter when to anti-racist activists like BLM when they’re taken by Whites. Otherwise the same people want you to ignore them.
Some of this no doubt comes from the way the right-wing press has reported Black crime figures to generate anti-Black racism and opposition to non-White immigration. It’s why Ashley Banjo of the dance group Diversity told Jim Davidson that the reporting of Black and White crime had been used to oppress Blacks. Davidson had asked him why it was all right to report a White police man killing a Black man, but not a Black man robbing a White man. But when the amount of Black on Black violence has reached such a pitch that it is a major issue that ordinary Black people are living in fear of their and their children’s lives, I don’t think it is fair to remain silent. People should be organising and marching against it, just as they should be organising and marching against the Asian grooming gangs. It should be done as part of proper anti-racist movement, and not left to be exploited by real racists and xenophobes like Tommy Robinson in the case of the grooming gangs.
But it’s acutely embarrassing to the Black and other other anti-racist organisations, who currently control the narrative on racism and racial issues. I think they seem to believe that somehow Black on Black violence will stop or decline once White anti-Black racism is tackled and conditions and opportunities for Blacks improve. This is undoubtedly the case, but in the meantime innocent people are being killed, but the professional anti-racists would rather you looked away and only saw those who were butchered by Whites.
Black lives matter regardless of the race of the people that take them. And Ruined Leon is right to be angry, because silence is violence whatever the colour of the killer.
Jason L. Riley, False Black Power (West Conshoshocken: Templeton Press2017).
This is another book analysing the plight of Black America from a Black conservative perspective. According to the book, Riley’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes for the Wall Street Journal and contributes to Fox News. But the book does quote statistics and sources, which means it’s almost certainly more trustworthy than that news network. When academics from the American universities reviewed Fox’s content, they found that people who took no news at all were better informed about the world than the people who watched Fox. America is indeed being ‘dumbed’ and Murdoch’s part of it. But this book is absolutely fascinating and, if accurate, is a much needed refutation of some of the myths about Black American history.
The introduction starts with an attack on the idea that the decline of the Black American family was caused by slavery. It’s true that slavery did destroy Black family life, as slave families were frequently split up, with fathers separated from their wives and children, children separated from the parents and so on. This, so the argument goes, has made it difficult for Black men to develop the necessary feelings of attachment to form permanent, two-parent families. As a result, most Black American families are single-parent, headed by the mothers. But Riley cites Herbert Gutman’s 1976 book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, examined a variety of sources to the show that the disruption of the slave family did not persist into emancipation. Looking at Confederate plantation records, the testimony of former slaves and the records of Black families in Buffalo and New York City, showed that from the second half of the 19th century to the 1920s, these communities were predominantly two-parent. In Buffalo between 1850 and 1920, the figure was 82 to 92 per cent. In New York in 1925 the figure was 85 per cent. (p. 5).
Riley’s argument is that the present poverty and misery experienced by many Black American communities cannot be blamed solely on racism and the legacy of enslavement. He and the authors he cites don’t deny that racism and discrimination exist, rather that the main cause of the present troubles of family breakdown, crime, unemployment and welfare dependency are due to the misplaced social programmes of the 1970s. Like Shelby Steele, he believes that Black Americans have taken the wrong road to uplift. Since the civil rights movement, they have concentrated on acquiring political power, resulting in the election across America of Black politicos, mayor and other officials. But these have not helped ordinary Blacks. He states at one point that Black politicians will ignore the underclass just to stay elected just as White politicos will, and cites a couple of scandals were Black politicians on their constituencies’ education boards were caught fiddling the exam results. He argues instead that Blacks should have followed the example of other impoverished communities, like the Chinese and Pennsylvania Germans, who eschewed acquiring political power in favour of economic uplift. He contrasts these groups with the 19th century Irish. These had political power, but nevertheless the Irish community itself remained poor and marginal.
Riley cites a number of other authors that show the explosion of Black entrepreneurialism after the end of slavery, as Blacks took over and entered a wide variety of professions. These scholars have argued that by the end of the 19th century Black communities also had their own business districts like White communities, as well as excellent schools. The 1913 Negro Almanac boasted of this achievement, comparing the capital accumulated by Blacks with that of the former Russian serfs. The former serfs had collectively $500 million in capital and a literacy rate of 30 per cent. Black Americans had $700 million and 70 per cent ‘had some education in books’. (74). In Chicago in 1885 there were 200 Black-owned businesses operating in 27 different fields. (75). And this trend continued, with the emergence in other areas of a small, but significant Black clerical class. At the same time, the number of Black Americans owning their own homes increased massively. Black prosperity increased during the years of the two World Wars,, when Blacks took on White jobs. They were still below that of Whites, but were catching up. As were Blacks in education. Blacks typically left school four years before Whites. But as the 20th century went on, this fell to two. Between 1950 and 1960 the number of Black doctors, lawyers and social workers expanded so that in 1953 a real estate journal called Blacks ‘the newest middle class’. (77). But this professional, educational and economic rise and expansion somehow came to an end in the 1970s.
At the same time, Riley cites the statistics to show that the American cops are not gun-happy racists bent on shooting Blacks. Rather, a study by Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, found that Blacks are 23.8 per cent less like than Whites to be shot by the police. (63). As for New York’s stop and frisk policy, that was shown to stop Blacks 20-30 per cent below the appearance of Blacks in the description of suspects.(64). As for police shootings, these fell massively in New York from 1971 to 2015. In the former year, the cops shot 314 people, killing 93. In 2015 they shot 23 people, of whom 8 were killed. (65). He also notes instances where there was still friction between the Black community and police even when the town’s leaders and senior police officers were Black.
On a less serious note, he talks about the Barbershop films and their unsparing, humorous look into the condition of Black America. Set in a Black barbershop and with a majority Black cast, these films showed Blacks making jokes at the expense of revered leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, decrying their kids’ fashion sense – trousers being worn low on the hips to expose the buttocks – and worrying about gangster culture and Black on Black violence. This upset Black activists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but Riley maintains that they nevertheless accurately reflected the way Blacks talk when Whites aren’t around. The same concerns are held by many other Blacks, including one mayor, Nutter, who gave a similar speech at a Black church. He advised people not to dress in a threatening manner if they wanted anyone, of any race, respect them, and called for the kids to work hard at school and pull their trousers up. The crowd gave him a standing ovation, chanting ‘Buy a belt! But a belt!’ But his speech was angrily attacked by Black liberals because it didn’t reflect their priorities of blaming everything on racism. Riley also described the way Obama was often pilloried for his outspoken comments about poor standards in the Black community, while playing the race card himself. Riley also argues that the decline in Black educational standards also has its roots in dysfunctional attitudes among Black youth. If you’re too nerdy or bookish in these communities, you’re going to pilloried for ‘acting White’. This is a controversial position, but, Riley argues, the evidence for it is convincing and solid.
Despite being written from a conservative viewpoint, there are aspects of the book that can also be embraced by those on the left. Firstly, the expansion of Black businesses, jobs, and professions after slavery demonstrate that Black America is as talented as every other racial group in America. I found it a convincing refutation of the genetic argument that states that Black poverty and lack of achievement is somehow because Blacks are, on average, biologically intellectually inferior to Whites and Asians. And the argument that Blacks achieved more when they had stable, two-parent families, would have strongly appealed to a section of the British Labour party. British socialism was influenced, it has been said, more by Protestant, Methodist nonconformity than Karl Marx. Years ago the Spectator reviewed a book on the reading habits of the British working class. They found that the favourite reading matter of a solid working class Welsh community in the teens or twenties of the last century was the Bible.
Much more questionable is the apparent link between the affirmative action programmes of the 1970s and the persistence of Black poverty. Riley doesn’t anywhere show why or how they failed, and correlation is not causation. Just because their introduction was in a period of economic decay and impoverishment for Blacks doesn’t mean that they caused it. And I wondered how much of the decline was due to general, structural changes in the American economy that have also badly affected Whites. For example, Bristol used to have a flourishing print industry. There still are printers in the city, but the industry has declined considerably from what it was and many of those skilled jobs have been lost, along with those in other industries. Many Brits and Americans were hit hard by the oil crisis of the 1970s and the consequent recession and unrest. Thatcher, and then Blair, favoured the financial sector over manufacturing, which destroyed many working class jobs. And then there’s the whole nasty complex of welfare cuts, outsourcing, zero-hours contracts and wage freezes that have kept working people in Britain poor. And the same situation is true in America. This impoverishment and economic restructuring is going to hit Blacks especially hard as the Black community is poorer and less affluent. And I don’t doubt for a single minute that there are problems causes unique to the Black community, of which racism is going to be one.
But this is nevertheless a fascinating and important book, and I think it should have its place in schools if they’re teaching Critical Race Theory. That pernicious doctrine holds that Blacks are being held back solely by White privilege, in which all Whites benefit. The government recently stated that teachers must present controversial ideas impartially and was duly denounced by activist groups and the left for doing so. But I believe the truth in this issue lies somewhere between both sides, and that, if these ideas are being taught, children should be exposed to both sets or arguments. And then make their minds up.
And then, after hearing a variety of viewpoints, we might be more successful in creating a more equal society and truly enabling Black achievement.
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