Some things need to be said.
And some things only a black person can say in order for the remarks to have maximum impact. Exhibit A: Tampa City Council member Frank Reddick’s comments that put the understandable outrage over the George Zimmerman acquittal into an uncomfortably relevant context that is more than racial profiling.
At the end of a recent City Council meeting, Reddick weighed in. He contrasted the black community’s visceral reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin with its passive response to the murder of Horsley Shorter, the black Family Dollar store manager and retired U.S. Army veteran. A 23-year-old black man with a felony-riddled rap sheet has been arrested and charged with Shorter’s murder.
“I want to say today I’m equally outraged,” stated Reddick who is neither Uncle Tom nor Rev. Al. “Where is the outrage in this community about this black-on-black crime? This (Shorter) family deserves justice, just as the Trayvon Martin family deserves justice. We must be prepared to explore this issue.
“No one is marching for black-on-black crime,” Reddick added passionately. “That is the problem in our community. No one is speaking about black-on-black crime, and that’s the problem … We need to make some changes, and I hope we start soon.”
What Reddick said in public at city council is the sort of thing that usually stays within the black community, which is used to circling the racial wagons to suppress the spread of minority-stereotypes. As in, “Don’t give the other side ammunition. It’s our business.”
Only we’re all in this together. There can’t be “other sides” when people are killing each other, hues or ethnicities notwithstanding. Literal life and death is everybody’s business, and there’s no room for cherry picking outrages based on racial dynamics and historic grievances.
No, we’re certainly not “post-racial” America just because we have an African-American president. But the festering problem of black-on-black crime goes largely unaddressed and metastasizes. It’s not just East Tampa and Chicago. By giving voice to reality, Reddick underscores the critical “need to make some changes.”
Before that happens, however, this country will finally have to have that serious race conversation that we only talk about having. And to have any effect, everything will have to be on the table.
That includes Founding Fathers’ slaves; degrading Jim Crow laws; banks’ red-lining practices; minority-voter-suppression efforts as political strategy; and blatant racial profiling. But it would also include black crime rates; a thuggish, misogynistic rap culture; out-of-wedlock birth rates; the perception of academic achievement as “acting white”; and rationales for profiling. It’s all got to be there. If Jesse Jackson is sitting in, then so is Pat Buchanan.
We’ll give the (next to) last word to Michael Nutter, the black Democratic mayor of my home city of Philadelphia.
“Why is it that African-American males are so disproportionately both the victims and the perpetrators of violence, more often than not against one another?” he asks. “In Philadelphia … 75 percent of our homicide victims are black men. About 80 percent of the people we arrest for homicide are black men. Black men across the country are killing one another, yet that epidemic is rarely part of any national conversation.”
Shame on us if we, as a society, ignore the candid acknowledgements and urgent calls for change from credible, credentialed insiders such as Frank Reddick and Michael Nutter.
Well said, Joe, as always. I e-mailed Reddick to let him know he had a lot more support than he knows.
Whenever I used to write about this subject I would receive the kind of reaction you described, such as “Why you puttin’ out our dirty laundry for white folks to see?” Well, with the ubiquitousness of social media, its now all over the world, whether I write about or Frank Reddick talks about it.
I would always go back to something Martin Luther King wrote in his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom” (1958):
“Negroes must be honest enough to admit that our standards do often fall short. One of the sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self-criticism. Whenever we are the objects of criticism from white men, even though the criticisms are maliciously directed and mixed with half-truths, we must pick out the elements of truth and make them the basis of creative reconstruction. We must not let the fact that we are victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives.”
He said basically the same thing is his last book, “Where Do We Go From Here (1967). Unfortunately, as we will soon celebrate the 50th anniversary of his historic speech, we have shunned self-criticism as an important element in our pursuit of his dream.