FOX News and the Framing of "Black on Black Crime"

Sean Hannity recently (May 26th, 2015) was astounded by two community leaders from Baltimore who called the recent spike in murders in Baltimore as "having its root in racism." Hannity promoted the false dichotomy of INDIVIDUALS responsibility/Black cops charged for Freddie Gray's death/"Black-on-Black crime" OR RACISM/systemic policies and attitudes and practices.

You can watch the video here

No one doubts that the murderers of this crime spree should go to jail. Black progressives all want this to happen, and they also want to go beyond this. Thus it is not "Either only blame racism, no individuals" "Or just blame the system". A progressive view includes but transcends the individual.

If you put a bunch of Appalachians into a high-density ghetto, the same thing would happen. Looking at a recent longitudinal study conducted by University of Colorado's Delbert Elliot- he found by the time white males and black males reached the late 20s, the violent crime ratio is 4 to 1 -- 4 black to 1 white. This is a much higher violent crime rate among black males. 

However, when he controlled for employment, there was no significant difference in the violent crime rate between white males and black males. No significant difference.

Throw in the white-on-white violence that occurred in Chicago during Prohibition - the prohibition of drugs play a huge role in Black on Black crime. And let's look at how police departments in cities with large Black populations give an incentive for Black gang members to murder each other. A suspect was arrested in 38 percent of the 2,677 killings involving black male victims in the city of Los Angeles. This stat is in Jill Leovy's book Ghettoside, which details how the “system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap". There is more to this story than just what I can fit here before you lose attention, such as how the homicide detectives get mad at patrol police for being rude to and scaring away potential witnesses, and how city budgets underfund homicide detectives so that they have to go out and buy their own resources.

So let's not just look at the individual pulling the trigger, but the incentives and the conditions of hopelessness they are in. White people would react the same way if they were in the same miserable condition. 2007 set a record for the highest number of defendants ever convicted in one year for civil rights housing discrimination cases, meaning that white supremacy is keeping Blacks from escaping these miserable conditions, and then going on FOX to chastise Blacks for being on the ground when we kicked the ladder out from underneath.

And hiring Black police officers and asking them to help us in kicking that ladder does not make the kicking any less structurally racist.


*A note to my readers: when I say "white people would act the same in these conditions," if I seem to be talking about you specifically, I am not. 

I am talking about how the murder rate goes up like clockwork when unemployment goes up and when something in high demand undergoes prohibition, meaning that if we made alcohol illegal again you would see white murder rates begin to skyrocket like they did in the 1920s, and if you look at the murder rate in Appalachia where unemployment is higher, the murder rate is higher than the white average. 

I am not talking about individuals, I am talking about how hopelessness affects different people in different ways, about how it is inevitable that a small percent of young men will be bound to act like they are in the wild west. Because ghettos are in anarchy due to America's neglect of them. I will ask everyone to please *not make this about YOU* but about how societies function and dysfunction.