Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys: Crime and Black Supremacy, Part II

By Nicholas Stix

Part I: How Profiling Saved My Life: Reflections on Black Supremacy and Crime

December 22, 2003
Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer
 

We are Family

When I was a teenager, it never would have occurred to me to blame the police, if I committed a crime or otherwise got in trouble, much less sue them. That’s probably because my mother never taught me to blame the police, and beat the hell out of me when I got in trouble; because I personally knew hero cops; and because no community of solidarity awaited me, if I sought to blame my troubles on the police.

A substantial proportion of the adults in most urban black neighborhoods today – in some areas, the vast majority -- expends great energy encouraging black boys to become criminals.

Those adults – parents, teachers, preachers, social workers, and even black cops —  tell black youngsters that they are the “victims of racism,” which is a code for, “You can blame everything on white people.” No specifics are necessary. Black youngsters quickly learn that they can find a community of solidarity among blacks of any age, including total strangers, if only they complain about their victimization by racist whites. And it´s almost always a lie. Heck, many of the complainers have few encounters with whites, and when they do, usually victimize the whites. I can confidently say what I just did, because racist harassment and crime is now such a one-way street.

But verbal expressions of racist solidarity aren´t the half of it. Over the past ten years in New York City, I have repeatedly witnessed “respectable,” middle-class blacks help violent, black felons avoid capture: From subway passengers to motormen to U.S. Postal Service managers to federal (postal) police officers.

 
Cincinnati: The Fall of the Queen City

For an example of the mentality of “solidarity,” in April, 2001, following the black race riots that besieged Cincinnati, the Rev. Damon Lynch III, who did much to instigate the riots, claimed that following the violence, white businessmen were suddenly “coming out of the woodwork.” The whites´ sudden interest in helping, was for Lynch somehow a sign of their moral turpitude. (But then, anything whites do is for him a sign of their moral turpitude.) Why hadn´t they been around before? Surely their previous neglect of black neighborhoods was proof of their racism. Actually, the white businessmen’s avoidance of such neighborhoods was proof of the racism of THE BLACKS living there, including community leaders like the Rev. Lynch, who don’t like seeing whites in their neighborhoods, and who see all whites as targets for racist violence and shakedowns. Indeed, following the 2001 riot, the Rev. Lynch publicly thanked the racist thugs for brutalizing white motorists.

The black leaders and the white, socialist media colluded to fabricate a story, such that the riots were caused by innocent blacks being murdered by white police officers. In fact, almost all of the 15 black males who had been shot and killed by police between 1995 and the 2001 riot, had attacked, and in some cases murdered police officers. And the April 7, 2001 shooting of Timothy Thomas that was the pretext of the 2001 riot, occurred when Thomas, who had a stack of 14 warrants for misdemeanors and a history of running from the police, ran yet again. In a dark alley way, decorated officer Steven Roach thought he saw Thomas go for a weapon, and fired to protect himself.

Thomas’ mother, Angela Leisure, spoke kindly of all the black men who had attempted to kill police officers, “These people might have been insignificant in y’all’s life, but they were significant in our lives.” Leisure rationalized her son´s behavior thus, “People keep asking me, why did my son run. If you are an African male, you will run.” An African male.

Things have gotten so bad in Cincinnati, that when a race riot broke out on April 15, 2002, most of the media refused to report on it.

(Last year, following my column on the unreported riot, the Rev. Lynch e-mailed me, “Nick you have a lot of anger misconceptions and hatred. I’m sorry justice is such a foreign concept. I wish you well in your struggle.”)

And now, we have the November 30 death of 350-400-pound Nathaniel Jones, who assaulted Cincinnati police while high on “pcp” (aka “angel dust”), and who got beaten to death. Did I mention that pcp is a drug that turns even 150-pounders into psychopaths who cannot be restrained by fewer than five police officers? Or that the pcp was mixed with cocaine and methanol? Thomas´ family, including a beautiful, young aunt, have told us what a wonderful, easygoing fellow he was.

(When I was a social worker, one of my supervisors once observed, “You only take pcp, because you want to become a violent psychopath.”)

In a case of déjà vu all over again, black community “activists” and civilians alike have emphasized that Nathaniel Jones was “unarmed” and condemned the police for acting like, er, police, when attacked by Jones, insisting that police must run away from black men who attack them, or act only with gadgets such as stun guns and “tasers.” (I contacted the Rev. Lynch to give him a chance to comment on the Jones case, but he failed to respond.)

I wish the Cincinnati P.D.´s critics would say what they really believe: That the police should be disarmed, and every black male who can prove that he is violent, psychotic, or both, issued a Glock semi-automatic and a few magazines of ammunition.

There is no such thing as an “unarmed,” 350-pound man in the midst of a drug psychosis. Jones´ body was his weapon. Second, while it is a civilian´s prerogative to defend himself or run away from an attack in a public place, for a police officer to run away, would constitute cowardice in the line of duty. Third, there is no guarantee that a psychotic, ultraviolent suspect like Jones would not have required so many electric stun gun charges, as to end up dead. And finally, the “activists” would be attacking the police, no matter what the latter did. That´s what “activists” do in Cincinnati. The term refers to people who want to aid and abet street thugs, but are either too old, too cowardly, or too opportunistic to actually be street thugs.


 
You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught

When I worked security at New York´s main Toys´R´Us store during the late 1990s, I encountered middle-class black mothers, who made a point of sending their young sons into the store without adult supervision, and later coming in and screaming at my colleagues and myself , when we – following store policy – refused the boys entry. With such monsters on the prowl – the mothers, not the boys – is it any wonder that, as Marc Mauer of the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project writes, “Nearly one in three (32.2%) black males in the age group 20-29 is under some form of criminal justice supervision on any given day – either in prison or jail, or on probation or parole.”

Toys´R´Us did its part, by knuckling under, and refusing to enforce its own rules.

Note that: 1. Mauer has not revised his numbers since 1995 (All figures I was able to find on the subject merely repeated Mauer, who in 1990 reported that one in four black men from the cited age group were convicts. If his 1995 figures are correct, the percentage of black, 20-29 year-old convicts rose 30% in five years, which is as hard to believe as some of the statistics produced by urban police departments since 1995, showing miraculous declines in violent crime); 2. His figures, if correct, mean that 32.2% of all black men 20-29 years of age are CONVICTS (advocates often misrepresent parolees and probationers as “ex-convicts.” Only when convicts have completed their parole or probation, do they become ex-cons. It is because one is still a convict, that a violation of parole or probation can result in one´s having to finish one´s sentence in prison.); 3. The rate of black convicts cannot be reduced to being a function of poverty, since it is 33% higher than the current black poverty rate of 24.1%. Middle class black men are increasingly imitating street toughs from the projects; and most importantly, 4. Mauer speaks of black convicts as victims, rather than as perpetrators, as if they had suddenly been “hit” by crimes, as if by falling bricks from a building. Hence, when he notes that the white and Hispanic rates of 20-29- year-old convicts were only 4% and 16%, respectively, he suggested the other groups – particularly white men — were tremendously lucky.

Luck had little to do with it. At the age of 16, I made a conscious decision to stop stealing, because I didn’t want to go to jail. By contrast, many young black men see going to jail as a macho rite of passage. Fifty-two-year-old Charles “Roc” Dutton, who hails from Baltimore, and who killed a man before he became an actor, has reminisced on the desire of many a young black man to be the toughest man in the prison yard. And yet Dutton, who has no one to blame but himself for his early travails, is a rabid racist who seems to blame whites even for the rain. White Hollywood socialists respond by shoveling ever more work his way, and he responds by taking the work, and insulting them! Black comedian Chris Rock said in a 1994 interview, “Charles Dutton is always preaching. How can you say someone has a negative image? (Shouting) YOU’RE A MURDERER!”

Time was, white cops played an important educational role in the lives of many poor, urban black boys who might have been tempted to go wrong. In his masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of New York City, Roger Starr (1918-2001) wrote of the educational function of the urban police officer.

“Some [19th-century street urchins] were saved for the work force by the presence of a host of informal educators, of whom the most important in the late nineteenth century was probably the policeman with his billy club. Unrestrained by review boards and civil service regulations, the police were not trying to create angels or win the affection of their youthful enemies, but simply to enforce order. In some cases, a sharp rap on the shins with the nightstick must have been more effective than twenty sessions with a Youth Board Therapist would be seventy-five or a hundred years later.”

In the first half of the 20th century, such “insensitivity” and “excessive force” benefited many a black boy, as well, but was ended under pressure from criminals’ rights, er, “civil rights” activists.

(Evoking Aristotle, Roger Starr once wrote that urban planners must begin with “a sense of wonder.” Not only was Starr one of the great social thinkers, policy makers, and raconteurs of his generation, but he was an exquisite prose stylist. This brilliant neoconservative is now largely forgotten, due to his lack of nepotistic tentacles, while his philosophically and morally compromised inferiors expand their little empire.)

The weirdest thing of all, is that there was a time when white police officers routinely cracked heads on innocent black boys and men. And somehow, black crime was then a fraction of what it is today.

Is this a brief for racism? No; it´s a brief for letting cops keep order. It´s also an example of what I call Heller´s Law at work. According to Heller´s Law, which I named after the German democratic socialist political scientist, Hermann Heller (1884-1934), in a society, there will be an inverse relationship between public cries of oppression and real oppression. In the most liberal society, the media will broadcast constant criticisms, most of them specious, if not out-and-out lies, of alleged state “oppression”; conversely, in the most savage, totalitarian dictatorship, the media will echo the butcher-in-charge´s proclamations. Writing in 1931, Heller gave the example of the then (and since) prevalent myth, that Mussolini made Italy´s trains run on time. The trains didn´t run on time under Il Duce, Heller observes, but Mussolini simply had critics who pointed this out shot. Conversely, when Sheik Abdul Rahman, the blind mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was being tried, the media broadcast his complaint far and wide, that “In America, there are no civil rights.”

 
Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys

As a Puerto Rican NYPD patrolman who lived and worked in different parts of Brooklyn told me a few years ago, “In a rough neighborhood, you gotta be rough with the people. Either they´re gonna be in charge, or you´re gonna be in charge.”

There are powerful forces, however, that seek to put and keep the criminals in charge. Not only have positive social forces affecting black society disappeared or been “disappeared,” but they have been replaced by negative ones. Power abhors a vacuum. Nineteenth-century street evangelists have been replaced by fire-and-brimstone riot preachers, such as Al Sharpton and the aforementioned Damon Lynch III. And an almost 40-year campaign has resulted in white police officers either being run out of black neighborhoods, or handcuffed in the execution of their duties. Black neighborhoods are now increasingly patrolled by black police officers who flunked the department hiring AND psychological exams, who are in fundamental sympathy with black criminals, and who are members of racially segregated, urban counter-police organizations, such as the Black Sentinels in Cincinnati and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care in New York. These organizations conspire to obstruct justice, yet get loving media coverage, as they reach out to black youngsters, to teach them that they have more to fear from white police officers than from violent, black felons.

And yet, black crime ultimately comes down to the decisions black women make – about when they have sex, and with whom, and under what circumstances (e.g., within or outside of marriage), and what stories and principles they choose to impart to their children. Most importantly, it comes down to whether black women are willing to teach their children to restrain themselves, a lesson without which there can be no civilization. As gay activists well understand, it all starts with the family.

Instead, as liberal, white anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote in Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life, in words he probably wishes he could unwrite, urban black mothers increasingly tend to deliberately raise their sons to be violent. And that was in 1987! Sixteen years later, things are much worse, as middle-class, urban black women increasingly ape the lower classes.

I know that it is unfair to put such a burden on black women, but as Pres. John Kennedy famously said, “Life is unfair.” Besides, black mothers used to routinely teach their daughters to guard their virginity like a treasure, back when (until ca. 1950) over 80% of black children were born to married mothers. Today, 69% of black children are born to unwed mothers (until recently, the percentage was 70%). And today´s unwed black mothers tend to be grown women, not teenagers. The same women who let themselves be impregnated by “sperm donors,” as one charming, intelligent, pregnant 27-year-old black woman I knew five years ago jocularly referred to her boyfriend, are raising yet more felonious “sperm donors.”

In 1985, Roger Starr anticipated the “broken windows” theory of crime that George Kelling, Catherine Coles, and James Q. Wilson would later develop. But Starr had a more pessimistic understanding of the power of government, and more sober assay of human nature, which may be why he didn´t develop the theory. In discussing the explosion of “quality of life” crimes in the early 1980s (turnstile jumping, smoking in subway trains, etc.), Starr suggested what lay beneath such “nuisances.”

“It is all very well to adopt a self-righteously libertarian attitude and pretend that such breaches of normal civility are of no importance. Few would disagree with the police, who feel that an armed robbery deserves more of their time. Yet such nuisance behavior conveys the unmistakable impression that the quality of life, despite all the conscious agitation to improve it, has been soiled and damaged in far more crucial ways that none can control. Ignoring the nuisance offense opens the city streets to further testing: If I can get away with this, what may I not do next? Yet if the police can stop the nuisances only by making an arrest for violating the sanitary code, they are disproportionately applying excessive force and irking those who wish they paid more attention to life-threatening offenders. The very presence of police, of strangers, of anyone, should inhibit the nuisance creator. If it does not, if there is no inhibition, what has gone wrong is so fundamental that the police cannot correct it any more than they can correct flagrant bad manners.”

The problem of black America isn´t racist, white police officers, but — to paraphrase Golda Meir – black mothers who hate whites more than they love their own children. That hatred — rather than the much trumpeted black “self-love” — is the only common ground in most urban American black neighborhoods.