87-Year-Old Korean Grandmothers - Part 2

By Patrick Hall

The clever slogan “Driving-while-black” often mimicked by BLM and other race-hustlers to bolster their claims of blatant racial profiling, on its' face, appears to be a good piece of urban wisdom. However, not criminally profiling (or just using common sense based on the neighborhood) makes law enforcement more costly and dangerous for the police, who are charged with keeping the majority of urbanites safe.  It is the police who are directly responsible for saving and protecting the lives of millions, including black people.

I imagine it would be “fairer” in the dystopic minds of virtue-signaling Democratic Liberal Progressives as well as Hawk Newsome, BLM’s New York Chapter President, to stop everyone after a robbery-homicide at your local Wendy's. Mr. Newsome's shrill protest over New York City’s new mayor reinstating proactive neighborhood crime units to protect law-abiding New Yorkers is deemed intrinsically racist. Mr. Newsome and other insufferable “America-is-bad” propagandists excuse rampant black thuggery with the haggard polemic that these thugs suffer-from-the-effects-of-400-years-of-slavery.  Good grief!

To explain the demolition taking place in many urban communities, their morally bankrupt use of race will only maintain the sacrifice of inner-city residents at the altar of perceived institutional racism.

Nevertheless, law enforcement employs proactive policing (deductive reasoning or profiling) to make the most efficient choice in determining who is most likely involved in crimes occurring in urban areas.

And yes, Blacks from all social classes and income levels pay for this bad behavior. It comes at the cost of receiving extra scrutiny by police or residents visiting friends or just driving through areas less disposed to crime. Blacks pay the price when a security guard might eye-ball them more when entering a store. Often, when my wife and I entertain company, who reside in more affluent parts of town, I might have them park their vehicles up in my driveway or walk them out to their cars simply because of the threat from bad actors in the neighborhood.

All that I have illustrated sounds completely unjust. Of course, it serves as low-hanging fruit for BLM, Democrat politicians, and extraordinarily self-righteous and smug professional athletes like Lebron James or Colin Kaepernick level their familiar secular antiphons on racism. All of us want to be judged as individuals. That one’s character should be the ultimate measuring stick. But that is not the current circumstance when dealing with the ethos of criminal mischief in many inner cities. Whether we like it or not, blacks are objectively more associated (fairly or unfairly) with crime. Most of us, living in marginally safe neighborhoods, don’t have the luxury of living our lives unencumbered by reality. We must take more precautions. As stated in an earlier article, if I guess wrong and am not vigilant with my safety or visiting friends, my children will not have a father, or my friends may be seriously harmed.

Let me reiterate. Blacks commit crime at rates vastly disproportionate to other groups. What has become closer to endemic is the killing of blacks, usually unarmed, and including children and women, by other blacks. Just under 8,600 African Americans were homicide victims in 2020, a record and an increase of 1,000 over 2019. Other blacks murdered more than 90 percent. However, these stark statistics don’t seem to modify, nor alter, the thinking of the Defund the Police Movement and race provocateurs like Hawk Newsome or the Rev. Al Sharpton.  

The problem is not profiling by law enforcement, nor is it the tiresome canard of systemic racism or white supremacy, repeated ad infinitum by the media, omnipotent suburban moral busybodies, President Biden, as well as the master of racial duplicity, mendaciousness and dissembling, Barrack Obama. It is the self-destructive behavior and attitudes all too common within the legacy.1  For the Black underclass, in the year 2021, the main obstacle to racial equality has little or nothing to do with racism, "but culture and behavior."

_________________
1. According to most current crime data, newer black immigrants from countries like Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Tanzania or even the Caribbean countries are less likely involved in criminal mischiefs than “legacy African Americans," whose ancestry goes back to the Antebellum and Post-Antebellum America.

[Patrick Hall is a retired university library director. He is a graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he received three advance degrees. He has published in Freedom's Journal Magazine, America, Commonweal, Headway, Journal of Academic Librarianship, American Libraries and others. He currently volunteers at a local VA hospital in the town of Erie, Pa.]