"The past week has seen three high-profile mass shootings that involved African-Americans. FBI statistics indicate that Blacks are disproportionately both perpetrators and victims of crimes across America. It doesn't have to be this way, but, just as America's Blacks were once victims of the Democrats' slavery and Jim Crow policies, they are currently the victims of Democrats' social and criminal justice policies.
On April 12, 2022, Frank Robert James, a 62-year-old angry Black nationalist, fired 33 shots inside a crowded subway car. Thankfully, no one died, although 10 people received gunshot wounds, and 19 other people were injured in the panic.
On April 16, 2022, a mass shooting took place at a mall in Columbia, South Carolina's state capital, leaving 14 people injured. It seems that the shooting was part of an ongoing dispute involving several shooters and some of the victims. The police have currently arrested Jewayne Price, a 22-year-old African-American man. For the time being, he's being charged only with unlawfully carrying a pistol, hence the low $25,000 bail and the ankle bracelet that allows him to go to work.
On April 17, 2022, in the wee hours of Easter, at least nine people were shot at Cara's Lounge in Furman, South Carolina, a small town about 90 miles west of Charleston and 110 miles south of Columbia. Promotional material for an event that began the Saturday night before the shooting strongly indicates that this is a bar that African-Americans frequent, and it is a Black-owned venue.
What's going on? First, although three incidents do not create data, these events are consistent with statistics for Black crime, especially Black-on-Black crime. As a recent American Thinker article noted, Blacks commit crimes at a rate nine to eleven times higher than the general population — and are also victims of crime at a rate far disproportionate to their representation in the population. The FBI's crime statistics bear that out.
In 2021, Blacks accounted for 273,595 offenders of violent crime and Whites for 270,229 offenders — a tragedy, considering that non-Hispanic Whites are 57.8% of the population, whereas Blacks are only 12.1% of the population. You don't need to be a math genius to recognize a problem.
Image: A Black-on-Black shooting at Houston's upscale Galleria mall. Twitter screen grab.
The victims' race is equally problematic for Blacks, with Whites accounting for 367,792 victims and Blacks (again, 12.1% of the population) accounting for 245,706 victims. Worse, Blacks are preying on each other.
Although it's certain that only a small percentage of Blacks are engaged in criminal activities — the news stories routinely show that the bad guys have endless arrest records — the American Black community still has a tragic problem, and I'm going to place the blame firmly where it belongs: on Democrats.
As the Jim Crow Democrats' hold on Blacks slipped away in the 1960s, the LBJ/JFK/BLM Democrats' hold on Blacks mounted. Thomas Sowell explains that the Great Society and the end of Jim Crow did not raise Blacks out of poverty...because Blacks were already raising themselves out of poverty, with the rate falling from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960. "[M]ost black children [were] being raised in two-parent families in 1960," and the "murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later[.]"
What changed after 1960, just as Blacks were beginning to live the American dream? The Great Society. As John McWhorter explains in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, well-meaning White, Democrat college students fanned out to Black communities and essentially bullied Black families into taking welfare
(the pitch was that Blacks were "owed" it), beginning the marginalization of Black men. In 2020, the Census revealed that "fewer than two-fifths of Black children were living with two married parents." Most lived with their mother, which is (sadly) an indicator of poverty, as well as increased crime among boys and promiscuity among girls.
Democrats have also pushed on Blacks failing public schools without charter school alternatives; an end to discipline in schools for young Black students; defunded police, increasing Black crime victimization; a Soros-funded tolerance for criminal activity (the attitude on the left is that Blacks can't help themselves); and a hostility to faith that has affected Black church attendance, with COVID making it hard for the remaining faithful to attend church.
Black leftists demand that Whites in government fix the problems in their community. In other words, they're demanding that the same people who destroyed their communities remediate them. That's just wrong.
When there's a spiritual hole in a community, the solution must come from within. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1857 when asked what should be done with Blacks when slavery ended,
"Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone."
