Why Don't Liberals Care About Black-on-Black Killing?

Why Don't Liberals Care About Black-on-Black Killing?

Christopher Chantrill

The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors.

And when author Jill Leovy gets to talk about her book on NPR's Fresh Air in "'Ghettoside' Explores Why Murder is Invisible in Los Angeles" we get to see what is really going on, despite the author's knee-jerk liberalism.

Author Leovy's angle is that routine murder in African American ghettos is invisible, in the sense that individual murders don't get a write-up in the paper. So she decided to do something about it, The Homicide Report, a blog that documents each and every murder in LA.

Each murder, routine as it is, devastates a family, but the cops only arrest a suspect in about 40 percent of the murders. To add insult to injury, the cops compensate by harassing young men on the street with arrests for minor infractions.

Of course, everybody knows "who dunnit" because the perpetrators typically come around to the victim's home and taunt the grieving family.

Why would they do that? Because the gang-bangers need to intimidate potential witnesses. Thus, everybody knows who did it, but nobody is willing to testify. Here's the scoop, buried in the middle of the Fresh Air interview:

[Leovy:] I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau - black woman - her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn't going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her - her grief. 

What is the African American response to this? It is "Snitches get stitches." And what is the liberal response to this? It is to blame the police for police brutality. You couldn't invent a better way to keep the killing going.

End of song, beginning of story.

This ruling-class tolerance for lower-class violence is not new. We've had urban gangs in America at least since the Irish gangs of the mid 19th century. We've had Jewish gangs and Bugsy Siegel running Las Vegas. We've had the Italians and the Mafia. We've had the black Crips and Bloods for a while and now we've got Hispanic gangs.

And then there are unions. The point of a labor union is intimidation, and not just intimidation of employers. The whole point of the strike and the picket is to intimidate workers eager for a job from hiring on at picketed employers. And liberals are fine with that.

How come people are afraid to report crimes to police and afraid to testify in court? How come the ruling class accepts the existence of virtual proto-states in the inner cities, where the gang, not the police, holds sway?

We all accept urban violence as endemic, not epidemic. But let's do a thought experiment. Imagine what would happen if, say, the NRA and the Tea Party started killing each other in a suburban turf war.

I will tell you what would happen. Number one, white suburbanites would insist that their mayors and city councils stopped the violence yesterday, or say good-bye to elective office. Number two, the liberal media would run wall-to-wall coverage about violence in the very DNA of America.

But with black-on-black violence, the media say nothing (except for Jill Leovy), the liberals do nothing, and inner-city residents reelect their race-baiting minority politicians.

So here is my question: Liberals say they are opposed to violence. They get their knickers in a twist at the very thought of right-wing extremists, as in the latest DHS report on "sovereign citizen extremists."

But hey, when it comes to blacks killing each other in the inner city, they worry about racism. When union thugs are intimidating workers willing to work, they write about unions giving us the weekend. When Muslims are creating no-go zones, they worry about Islamophobia.

You'd think that the liberal ruling class would put a stop to gangs setting up proto-states in our cities, and Islamists setting up no-go zones in Texas.

But liberals don't care about blacks killing each other, or workers intimidating each other. What they care about are threats to their ruling class power. The NRA is a threat to their power. The Tea Party is a threat to their power. College dropout Scott Walker is a threat to their power. So they must be destroyed, as in racism, sexism, hate speech.

But comes black-on-black violence in the inner cities? Nothing Can Be Done.

And nobody calls out the liberals on their hypocrisy.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.