Why White America Ignores Urban Gun Violence

While we as a nation continue to try and wrap our collective head around the unspeakable tragedy that occurred in Newtown on December 14^th 2012, and as the issues of gun control, gun violence and mental health are now firmly planted on the front burner of our political stove, there are some people in the black community asking the question, what took you so long to recognize gun violence as a problem because black people have been dealing with this for years?  Dr Cornel West laments that there is “not a peep, not a mumbling word when black folk get shot.”

 Truth is…black children shoot each other with such regularity that it is no longer a big deal.

 The list of young black homicide victims and their murderers is so long that it just blurs into a large bloody tapestry on the back wall of American society that goes largely unnoticed because it is always right there.  

 The questions that I am more interested in are…Why do so many of our children have so little regard for the sanctity of human life that they can pull a trigger and end a life as easily as flicking off a light switch? And, what can we do to reverse this process? Because new gun laws alone aren’t going to do it. We have far too many young black men with no fathers, no values, no direction, and no hope.

The city of New Haven alone has seen fifty-one murders in the past twenty-one months but the level of outrage from the parents, politicians, and clergy that matter most is sadly lacking. Then of course there is the city of Chicago with 500 homicides in 2012 alone.

By the way, since 2001 the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan is about 2000. During the same time period more 5,000 people have been killed by gunfire in and around Chicago, the overwhelming majority of the victims were black.

 With numbers like these it is no wonder that there is little to no media coverage of violence in our urban centers.  In American culture things that happen every day and all day aren’t special.

It doesn’t mean that not every violent death is a tragedy because make no mistake every life that is cut short is a huge loss not only to the family but to society as a whole which is robbed of the promise that resides within every human life.

 I’m typing these words on the morning of January 1^st 2013 and already in Chicago 11 people have been shot since midnight, including 20 year old Octavius Dontrell Lamb, who will never see a full day of 2013.

In Philadelphia at around 12:30am a 17 year old boy was shot and killed. By 3:00am there were two more bodies littering the streets of the city of brotherly love.

In my native city of Cleveland, at  2:50am police found an unidentified black male shot to death on the front porch of an east side home.

The reason the mainstream media pays so little attention to these killings of mostly black and brown people has less to do  with racism than the simple fact there are just too many of them.

 If we believe that constant exposure to violence on television and in video games desensitizes children and adults to violence in real life, then why is it so hard to believe that constant exposure to gun violence in our minority communities would desensitize the rest of the nation to the true impact and depth of this very real national tragedy?

 Black people shoot each other with such regularity that it is no longer news, it is just normal.

And folks, white people can’t fix that, only black people can.

This is why I am choosing to focus my efforts on inspiring and motivating as many young minds as possible with the idea that their lives are valuable and filled with the promise of greatness and opportunity. Maybe some of those young minds will in turn begin to see value in the lives of their peers as well.

 

Wayne Winsley is a former U.S. Congressional Candidate, award winning speaker and author. He lives in Connecticut.