Facing The Enemy Within
I want the anger to boil.
I want people out in the streets protesting.
I want business leaders, parents, community activists, students and members of the clergy to demand, “Stop the brutality!”
No more harassment. No more beatings and shootings.
The civil rights of African-Americans and Latinos must be respected … by other African-Americans and Latinos.
That’s right, I’m not talking about racist cops.
In the wake of Mark Furhman and the O.J. Simpson verdict, police officers across the country have been vilified and condemned.
Some deserve it. The actions of racist cops are a legitimate issue that demands attention and correction.
But I refuse to accept that police racism should be the primary focus of rage in low-income minority communities when Latinos and African-Americans are killing their own in record numbers.
It may sound harsh, but it’s the truth.
Ask yourselves: When was the last time you heard members of a Latino or African-American community threaten to riot unless gangs stopped murdering and victimizing their neighborhoods?
Yeah, I’m still waiting, too.
A balanced perspective is essential if we’re ever going to do anything about violence in our cities.
No question the criminal justice system is biased. But it’s also true that many of the Latinos and African-Americans in jails and prisons deserved to be locked up.
I once talked to an elderly black woman in a Miami neighborhood who told me she was afraid to walk down to the corner store or to church on Sundays.
She was literally imprisoned in her own home. Not by racist cops, but by gang members, dope dealers, crack addicts, petty criminals, rapists, scumbags and drunks.
We can point to all sorts of legitimate economic and social conditions as the reasons for the high rate of crime in low-income communities. But that argument provides little comfort for mothers who have to bury their teenagers because of gang warfare. Or for kids whose fathers aren’t around to hold them and guide them because they’re locked up.
John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, put it this way:
“Black on black crime has reached a critical level that threatens our existence as a people. It is our threat to our youths, to our women, to our senior citizens, to our institutions, to our values. And although we are not responsible for the external factors that systematically create breeding grounds for social disorder, we cannot avoid the internal responsibility of doing everything we can to solve a problem that is rending the fabric of our lives.”
Last week, the Mexican-American Bar Association in Los Angeles County called on the federal government to investigate Southern California law enforcement agencies, which they say have engaged in a “reign of terror” against Latinos.
Fine. Investigate. Demand justice and better policing. I have.
But Latinos and African Americans also need to address the reign of terror they impose on themselves.
That starts when the anger over intraracial crime reaches the same pitch as the rage against police abuse.