The Real Black Holocaust

Convicted rapist Mike Tyson has now weighed in on the Trayvon Martin case, and he thinks it’s a disgrace that George Zimmerman has not yet been shot. Two weeks ago Spike Lee tweeted what he thought was George Zimmerman’s address (it wasn’t) thereby unleashing a wave of terror on the elderly couple who lived there. Apparently after a few days, Mr. Lee apologized to the couple he victimized, but hasn’t regretted the gist of his action. Of course Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have expressed their outrage publically, with Jackson declaring that “blacks are under attack.” The black liberal columnists like Leonard Pitts and Eugene Robinson have written columns on it saying that this is just so typical of the black experience in America. Certainly everybody can be outraged at the death of an unarmed, black youth. And the Reverend Jackson is correct to say that blacks are under attack. But they have all picked the wrong case to rally around.

Here is the scenario that has their collective undies in a bundle. A “white Hispanic” (a term developed just for this story) was a neighborhood watch captain out looking to play hero. He had a concealed carry permit for the 9mm handgun he was packing. He ignored advice from the 911 operator to not follow Trayvon. A confrontation occurred and Trayvon wound up dead.

There are two obvious factors that have vaulted this case on to the front page. First, is that Mr. Zimmerman is white. Except that he isn’t. Like our president, he had one white parent, but his mother was Hispanic. (But for some reason we never refer to Mr. Obama as a “white-black” or a “white-African American.”) The second thing that stands out is that Zimmerman had a permit to legally carry a gun. This makes the case particularly attractive to liberals who have been predicting Wild West shootouts for years. When you’ve waited as long as they have for this to happen, you just can’t resist jumping on it with both feet, and so they have. But all of these people refuse to talk about the elephant in the room. This case is far and away, the exception rather than the rule.

Jesse is right when he says that blacks are under attack. But Jesse didn’t mention where that attack is coming from even though he knows very well. In the city that is home to both Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, Chicago, there have been over 100 murders by gun this year alone. Over 70 of those murder victims were black males. Over a dozen were teenagers, with one as young as 14. If prevailing statistics bear out on these crimes, around 90% of the shooters will also turn out to be black. Blacks are definitely under attack, but from other blacks, not white Hispanics. And this ongoing black holocaust is not being perpetrated with legally carried guns either. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case is an outlier. It is a statistical aberration. But that didn’t stop a NY Times columnist from declaring that the problem was these legally carried weapons. In her column she linked to an anti-handgun web site that documented all the gun deaths where the shooter had a permit. The list was an attention getting 400 people including 13 police officers. And that does seem to be a significant number of victims. Until you realize that it’s over a five year period and covers the entire United States. If they keep the pace up, Chicago will surpass that number this year alone, and they are a single city representing less than 1% of our nation’s population. And there are a number of cities that can challenge Chicago on the matter of young dead black men: New Orleans, Philadelphia, LA, Washington DC, Houston and New York. I don’t have all the numbers to calculate it, but does anybody doubt that the ratio of black men killed by black men carrying illegal weapons, to the number of black men killed by white men with legal weapons is over 50 to 1? More likely it’s over 100 to 1. Where is the outrage? Why aren’t Jackson and Sharpton railing against the real killers of black youth? Because there is nothing for them down that road.