Is This News? Nearly Half of US Murder Victims are Black

Is this really news?  Nearly half of all US murder victims are black.  Breitbart seems to think so, but they also don't ask the follow up question:  who is committing all these murders?

Now before anyone starts trying to brand me as a Grand Kleagle, back the hell off.  I think the crime problem in the black community is HORRENDOUS. It's APPALLING.  It's a NATIONAL DISGRACE.  But is anyone really surprised by this?

After all, most crime happens in urban and suburban areas.  Blacks are largely urban dwellers-- for a lot of reasons, but mostly because in the 1930s and 1940s, exurban blacks left the farms (mostly sharecropping) and rural areas for jobs. Jobs were located in the cities.  And they stayed.

So it would naturally follow that blacks are victims of crime at a higher rate in areas where more crime happens. It also follows that they would commit a disproportionately higher number of crimes as a result.

The two questions we should ask are a) why? and b) what in the hell do we do about it?

For why, I think we need to look at the black middle class.  It barely exists.  There was at one time -- even under Jim Crow -- a thriving black middle class.  Yes, they were denied all sorts of equality and were treated as second class citizens, but a middle class did exist.  Black families were VERY strong, and were the centers of their community.

But then came the War on Poverty, which really became (unintentionally) the War on the Black Middle Class.  Instead of lifting up the poor blacks, it destroyed the middle class black families and sent them down the economic ladder.  Forty years later, too many children in black families are only raised by a single parent-- and a single parent often struggling just to make ends meet.  "Good Times" was a myth people.  Funny show, but separated from reality.  In most cases, the father would have never been able to stay in that apartment and the family still qualify for HUD assistance.

Do you remember when the Boy Scouts of America finally started to allow female Scoutmasters?  Do you know why?  It was because in the inner cities, they couldn't find enough male leadership to fill the roles.

Public housing destroyed communities.  Public housing plus "urban renewal" utterly devastated them.  The sixties were a horrible time for the urban black family.  The War on Poverty created massive ghettos of an underclass population  that went from slavery to freedom to dependency in less than two generation.  Anyone who has strolled down past the Perkins homes, or drove through the high rises on Franklin knows this.

And in those ghettos, the second great scourge of black America took root:  drugs.  Oh, yes, white America has a serious drug problem too.  But drugs destroyed an entire generation of black youth, and created a hostile, street-warrior culture that puts more young black men in jail every year than we graduate from college.  And that culture is not only promoted, but it is celebrated in gangsta rap.  How sad is that?  An entire urban culture that promotes violence, addiction, mysoginy and abuse.

So is anyone really surprised?

But what do we do about it?  Hell if I know.  Prison doesn't seem to work that well -- it only adds to your street cred (not that I advocate abolishing prison).  Fully half of the ninth graders that will start in a Baltimore City high school in a couple of weeks will not finish high school, so education doesn't seem to be cutting it.  Welfare certainly hasn't worked, so pouring more gas on that fire is a losing proposition.  And what makes it worse is that today's jobs are a lot more demanding than the jobs of yesteryear.  You don't just work hard anymore.  You work hard and you work smart.  And if you can't operate a cash register without pictures, you are screwed.

But let's not act surprised at how bad this problem really is.