A thoughtful reader addressed my perspective on gangs, specifically the conflicts between American authorities and black communities. I think about this problem in the context of world history. I didn't always go there.
Last month I wrote a piece called How Fighting Racism Makes You a Pawn of the Left. In trying to contextualize the conflicts between black and white in America, black politics has always taken the Left road. It was always an intellectual path, a road paved with honest intentions. My problem was that I thought it was the only high road. I was mistaken. But there are still fairly massive tragedies in what we have come to know as black history and those tragedies still energize and motivate people to do good. How do we use it without being foolish? There's the challenge.
The thing that snapped me out of my daze was the realization that only about 5000 black Americans have been lynched in the history of lynching. That's about a week's worth of combat on any island in WW2's Pacific Theatre. Maybe a couple days at the Battle of the Bulge, and a few hours at Stalingrad. But also from the other direction, I was angry about hearing about every rock that got thrown in Gaza when black Americans were dying in the streets of South Central. Being me, I decided to get above and beyond it all and focus on what I called a Lynch Factor, which at the time I set at 3000, whcih was the sum total of my estimation of all the lynchings of blacks, and not coincidentally was the total death toll of all the Intidfadas since 1948. If it didn't kill 3000 folks, it doesn't matter in world history so far as I was concerned. So why should a worldly guy like me be concerned.
But I also knew that the Crips in Los Angeles, had killed more than that. According to this website (which I'll link to later) the Crips are more deadly than most people understand.
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We are faced, we black Americans, with making sense of our time in this experimental nation. And in some ways we are the perfect people for it. Chattel slaves were post-modern before modernism. We had, to quote Malcolm (or was it Farrakhan), lost our land, our names, our religion. So who better to imprint the principles of Liberty than those who need it most? That may or may not be practical because we retain the memory and the subsequent political struggles which are the heirs of the Middle Passage. This brings us to our title.
I think that the lions never have their history. They only have their pride. But the hunters win and so the hunter has his history. Black history has tried to invert this and I beleive that it fails. The winners of wars write the histories and in the end everything else is lost. But such cycles of history are longer than we might think so there is some back and forth over generations. But when black activists start raising questions about Middle Passage and attempt to document 400 years of degradation, I say they are ignoring the fact that they are alive to persist. It should be obvious that the faces at the bottom of the Atlantic have a far greater tragedy to tell, except that they don't get to tell it. Nor do the slaves who got beat to death; they don't get to tell the story either. Nor do the black soldiers who fought on the side of the South. They don't get to tell the story. Only the survivors.
So what story is it important for the survivors to tell? Do we tell about the faces at the bottom of the Atlantic? I say no, because in the end, those are only fighting words. You can't talk about genocide except in an academic fashion. If you want more, then you have to fight, and any politics that pretends to be anything else but blather has to be out for blood.
All this puts, for me at least, a taste of finality on the revolutionary black history in America. There is no sustained underground. There are Crips and Bloods fighting for space in prisons and this block or that block, but they cannot and will not command any leadership beyond their own petty feuds. Yeah we got a crowd for the clemency of Tookie, and Mumia Abu Jamal can still draw a small crowd to his side. But those are academics and bored middle class pseudo radicals. They don't even know how to fight, much less lead a fight.
One day a class of black radical politicos are going to wake up and see thousands of black men in uniform in the US Armed Forces. It's going to make them think again, or run and hide.
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