Black on Black Violence / Murder: Why Is it Taboo to Discuss? How Do We Fix it?

[Caballoflaco]

This post isn’t really an answer to the question Blues, or very well organized. More just musings with my after work iced coffee.

When people don’t have trust in the system how can they move from an honor culture to a dignity one. One thing I try to remember is that despite the advancements we’ve made there are still a lot of black people alive who lived during segregation. What black people have gone through in this country is a cultural memory that we can’t just expect people to forget. Hell, look at how riled up people still get over the Civil War.

Then we have the destruction of the black family in the 70’s and the stagnation of the middle class for all races the past few decades. What are the the economic incentives for the culture to change itself from the inside?

I may or may not try to find the statistics, but I remember seeing some numbers that showed black Americans had a higher marriage rate than white Americans during the late fifties through late sixties and it was during this time period they made the largest jump in economic gains in our country. That’s also when the job market provided more opportunities for people of less education to enter the middle class.


This stuff is “Hard Sayins’”.

(Edited to remove a quote I didn’t actually reference in my post)

[GyroF-16]

Thank you for an excellent post.
I truncated the quote to save space, but it was all an excellent read.

Disclaimer: I am not a sociologist, psychologist, statistician, or politician .
Among all the factors, I believe that family dysfunction/disunity is the root cause and leads to almost everything else. This includes absentee fathers, teens having kids, loss of extended family support, and lack of role modeling. Almost everything else is secondary.

Black immigrants to the US from Africa do better than US-origin blacks in education, business, and entrepreneurship.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/blac...s-born-blacks/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...ts-in-the-u-s/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3816006/

[Bergeron]

I think that a community's problems (any community) will have to be solved by its own members and associated stakeholders if it the solutions are to have meaningful impact.

I think that failed educational systems, poverty, criminality, lack of civil society, substance abuse, and weak family structures form cycles of self-reinforcing bad outcomes, and that breaking the chain involves breaking each link. I think that it can be done for any community, and I think that while Americans of all groups really are treated equally under the law, historical patterns have placed certain challenges in certain ways to certain portions of black Americans.

PJ O'Rourke had a great line: A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

[Half Moon]

I'm going to say the issue is lack of hope.

So many behaviors and cultural attributes cited above are not unique to African American culture but come out of poverty culture. For instance, I spent a decade living in rural Southern Oregon. The timber and mining industries died in the 80's. The zombie shell of an economy shambles along but there are poor prospects for most folks. Culturally there isn't much to do. Alcohol and drug abuse is rampant as is teen pregnancy. Drop out rates are high. Physical and sexual abuse are not uncommon. Honor violence and just plain violence happens frequently. And generations breed new generations who have internalized and normalized this lifestyle. This all in a massively Caucasian populace. Talking to old timers it wasn't always like this but then the jobs went away.

I think the first step is getting a sound economy in place but then you still have the newer cultural norms to overcome and values to instill. And getting a sound economy is easier said than done when resources are simply lacking in a region and the region lacks drive to change rather than degrade.

No easy answers at the end of the day.

[willie]

Some of this is learned behavior modeled by others. Over time behavior becomes part of sub cultures. In certain instances it is glorified by music. In this context I use sub culture to apply to lower socioeconomic strata within the black population.

[Joe in PNG]

[Oldherkpilot]

Disclaimer: I am not a sociologist, psychologist, statistician, or politician

I really appreciate the charts and diagrams that make more concrete the multifactorial issues facing the black communities.
Among all the factors, I believe that family dysfunction/disunity is the root cause and leads to almost everything else. This includes absentee fathers, teens having kids, loss of extended family support, and lack of role modeling. Almost everything else is secondary.

Black immigrants to the US from Africa do better than US-origin blacks in education, business, and entrepreneurship.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/blac...s-born-blacks/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...ts-in-the-u-s/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3816006/

If systemic racism is the root cause (I think racism is a factor but not a root cause) then what would explain the relative success of black immigrants from Africa? Granted, many African immigrants come with higher education, but a great many more came with nothing. I lived in Minnesota for some time when there was a large influx of Ethiopian and Somali refugees. Although I cannot recite studies, I observed that the new immigrants were hungry to succeed. Those that kept their culture alive and family intact did well in school and opened businesses.

Similarly, the Asian diaspora tells a similar story. After the Vietnam war hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees came to the US. While many were professionals, a great many others were fishermen, farmers, tribal hunters, etc. Despite the lack of education and poverty in the parents, the singular focus for the children was on education and keeping the family unit and culture. I do not think that there is any argument to their relative success generations later. As one of these immigrants, I remember growing up in housing projects, living on food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, and being quite poor. As kids, we were taught that education was our only route to success. As kids, we were taught that discipline and family cohesiveness was paramount. What’s more, we were taught to give back. We were expected to help other Asians succeed and contribute to our new country. In everything that I did, I remembered that I was representing not only myself, but my Vietnamese heritage.
Now, how do we instill that ethic in the black community? Many black families already have this but as the previous charts show, those intact families are in the minority. Blacks must help their own, not because others do not want to help but because psychologically, any suggestions from someone non-black will be resented, suspected, and shunned. There are clashes between black Americans and black immigrants from Africa. Yet, these are the groups that can help each other.

There are social programs designed to increase opportunity, participation, and businesses in communities of color, such as: affirmative action, minority business loans, grants, minority scholarships, student loans, etc. How about we make all these conditional?

Received a minority scholarship? SBA loan to minority business? Partial loan forgiveness or interest rate reduction for student loans or SBA loans for minorities? Condition: do something concrete for the impoverished community that needs your help. This could be a Big Brother Big Sister program, after school mentoring/tutoring, peer assistance leadership, employment of at-risk youths, etc. This is not a substitute for having a father in their lives, but it will give them a window into a different life and possibilities. Want to be a teacher? How about we forgive your college loans if you not only teach in an at-risk school but show some positive metrics in your class? How about if we incentivize good teachers to work at these schools with higher pay? How about incentivizing wealthy black businesses to contribute to a minority focused bank, willing to write microloans to such communities for small businesses. How about conditioning welfare checks in exchange for finishing high school for your kids, delaying pregnancy, attending family planning counseling, etc.

None of these options will be panaceas. I am okay if someone calls me unrealistic and idealistic but these are my thoughts.
People are people. We are all motivated by one or more of these elements: Greed (money, power), Ego, Safety/security. Whatever the motivation, people only change if they have some hope or incentive, a better life, a way out of poverty, a future for their children, etc.

One factor in the perpetuation of destructive behavior is the cumulative effects of childhood trauma. In the ACE study (Adverse Childhood Experiences) done with 17,000 participants, childhood events such as Abuse (emotional, physical, sexual), Household challenges (mother treated violently, substance abuse, mental illness, parental divorce, incarcerated household member) and Neglect (emotional, physical) add up to lifelong health conditions. These conditions include TBI, Depression, anxiety, PTSD, suicide, unintended pregnancy, HIV/STDs, cancer, diabetes, substance abuse, and poor educational/income attainment. Sounds familiar?

https://www.cdc.gov/violencepreventi...udy/about.html

So not only do we have to manage current psychosocial dysfunction, but also generational adversity that leads to biologic dysfunction into adulthood.
Despite these challenges, I believe that we can overcome it as a nation if it becomes a priority. To be a priority, however, all the influencers in the black community must be on the same page about the problems. Athletes, executives, actors, businessmen, clergy,…everyone who is someone in the black community needs to put these issues on the front page every day in their community. Imagine turning the energy and resources of protests over very few police shootings into constructive building of black neighborhoods. Imagine.

Again, I am not an expert on this issue and base my thoughts on personal reflection and study.

I've read some of the same stuff you have but could never put it into the sort of coherence you managed. Thanks for distilling down a bit. Disadvantages can be cumulative and that certainly seems to be part of the problem in this case. You say you're not an expert on this issue but I'd appreciate it if you'd have a word with the folks who claim to be. They (and we) could use your help.

[Jason M]

@peterb

I wonder what percentage of the marijuana arrests you cited were for marijuana alone or where that charge was in addition to other criminal charges. (I don't know the answer which is why I ask.)

I worked narcotics for many years, but never made a marijuana case as there was a 5,000 lb threshold in South FL to go federal, and it wasn't a priority. And the bulk of what we did was starting from international trafficking / shipments leading to controlled deliveries and dismantling domestic operations. Both on the drug as well as the money side.

Many times, charges in connection with marijuana might be used as an adjunct to other charges, an enhancement, so to speak...or because it was what a case could be made on when there was other shifty business taking place with insufficient evidence to charge. Fortunately, the latter wasn't our way of doing things.

Adding to this: Was the arrest for MJ a violation of a supervised release which resulted in incarceration for VOP rather than the underlying low level drug offense?

[Borderland]

Where is the great black hope Barrack Obama these days? Didn't he say he was going back to Chiraq when he left office and help the black community? Last I heard he and Michelle bought a house on the ocean in Martha's Vineyard.

Right there is the problem. The people that can help the black community don't want to and the people living in the black community can't help themselves. Even Jimmy Carter, as bad of a President as he was, did a lot of civic work thru Habitat for Humanity after he left office.

Lots of blacks in politics but most of them are just using their race to advance their political careers and become millionaires. Obama is a perfect example of Hope and Change. I hope I make a few million so it will change my life.

[ER_STL]

I’ll share this. Normally when it comes to philanthropic outreach I try not to draw too much attention to what I do as I subscribe to what Jesus taught in regarding this type of work, but 99% of those on the board here aren’t likely to be in my sphere of influence.

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Honestly, it’s my opinion that if we all lived like this, we wouldn’t be where we are today. But I digress…

I don’t have all of the answers to the questions you posed, but I believe that at least part of the problems faced by black communities is related to the broken family and the negatively impacting, culturally accepted behaviors from which the next generation of kids find difficult to escape. My heart breaks for those kids. They didn’t ask to be born into a family with no dad around, with little financial resources, with perhaps less physical and emotional safety and with access to less of the things that kids born into safer families might have. I remember years ago reading an article about the actor Tony Danza, who spent a year teaching high-school English at a city school in Philadelphia. He mentioned that, despite his level of fame as an actor, he had only a single parent ever attend any of his face-to-face meetings he had available. What was his conclusion? “It’s not that suburban schools have better teachers (that may be disputable – I wouldn’t know) – it’s that they have parents who care about their kids”. That was a profound and perhaps somewhat obvious observation.

I want to help those kids, and it’s my opinion that communities like that need someone to come in and at least offer to show them how they can work their way into a better life and a better future their future kids. One of the ideas that has been heavily on my mind over the last month is to go down to one of our predominantly black inner city schools in STL and establish a mentoring program there. I do this today in some capacity with the schools in the district in which I live. As an established professional in IT, I can see clearly the type of candidate applying for a position in our company who is the most likely to win the spot, and I know exactly the types of skills and traits that kids in school today should work to develop to become that candidate in the future. Today’s Fortune 500 companies are tripping all over themselves to find qualified black candidates, and I want to show those kids how to take advantage of that.

Ingrained within the program would be a combination of life, personal and technical lessons. Keep your nose clean. Love those in your community. Stay out of trouble and away from drugs and alcohol. Girls, don’t get pregnant as that weighs heavily against your chances for success. Learn to master oral and written communication as well as the technical baseline you’ll need to get into college. Graduate with good grades. Learn to target affordable state colleges with decent tracks in the degrees you’ll need to get into Corporate America (substitute all of that with technical trade training when necessary, etc). Take advantage of scholarships and financial aid that may be available to you. The list goes on. And then, long into the future when you’re successful and have achieved the American dream, take all of your hard-earned lessons and teach them to the next generation.

While I’m following the current events, I try not to get too worked up over them. Politicians and political parties can’t fix our current issues across the nation, and they’re usually just a reflection of our moral standards. Politicians are gonna politic and pagans are gonna, well…..pagan. It’s my personal belief that the only solution is a change in the hearts of us as citizens. When we start following Jesus’s command to love God and love our neighbors, things will improve; if we refuse to do so, America will likely slide into irrelevancy. I’m simply trying to demonstrate the former with the hopes that the people within my sphere of influence will follow. That’s all I can control.