Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Crime and Violence in America


How to access my blog posts: manringen.blogspot.com

Our nation is beset by a wave of violence, murder, rape, destruction of stores, businesses, and even homes. Looting is rampant in our inner cities where store windows and doors are broken down allowing thugs and thieves to enter without resistance. How can this be happening?!!
Much of the mayhem is being aggravated by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization which aids and abets such destructiveness. Liberals among us ascribe all this chaos to racism, poverty, lack of opportunity for black citizens, poor education, and limitation of health and medical care for the poor (and mostly black) residents of inner-city neighborhoods. But…we need to examine those presuppositions to see if they really are the root causes.

In the first half of the 20th Century, the Black poverty rate was significantly higher than it is today. Black incarceration and crime rates were significantly lower than they would become in later decades. The Black homicide rate fell by 18% in the 1940’s and another 20% in the 1950’s. While this was going on, the Black poverty rate also declined by 40% over the same period. Black incomes grew faster than the incomes of Whites. Safer neighborhoods facilitated upward economic mobility.

In the second half of the 20th Century, those trends reversed. In the 1960’s violent crime rates doubled and continued to increase sharply until the early 1990’s when better policing and increasing incarceration brought crime down. Between 1990 and 2016 the homicide rate rose 40% among black men.

In 2013, the Black Lives Matter organization was established and today, 40 chapters of the organization exist worldwide. This organization was established after the killing of Travon Martin. Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a man of mixed race, as he was attempting to defend a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Martin was a 17-year-old Black, who was unarmed and visiting his relatives in the neighborhood. When an altercation occurred between the two, Zimmerman was injured; but he fired his gun and killed Martin. Later, Zimmerman was acquitted of wrongdoing because he was considered to have been acting in self-defense.

The Black Lives Matter organization has been active in disrupting the American society lately with its open advocacy of dangerous and violent protest activities. Mark Levin, a conservative radio host has said that anyone “embracing or promoting BLM should be made aware of exactly what it stands for.  Violence. Anarchy, Marxism.  And it has a convicted terrorist on the board of its fundraising group.”
Hawk Newsome, the president of Greater New York Black Lives Matter, threatened to "burn down this system" if "the country doesn't give us what we want" in an interview on 24 June 2020 with FOX News host Martha MacCallum. In my opinion, this kind of statement amounts to treason against the stability of our nation. The group is also a strong voice in favor of homosexual, trans-sexual lifestyles. (If anyone reading this blog post does not believe these accusations against BLM, I would recommend you look at their website and click on “What We Believe.”) But…you may ask, “Where did this disruptive rhetoric and behavior come from?”

The Black Lives Matter movement would have everyone believe that all Black persons hate the police and want the Federal Government to disappear, because it does not give them the perks it wants. Jason Riley, a Black columnist for the Wall Street Journal has said that groups like BLM are “out of stem with most Blacks, let alone most of the country.” (WSJ op-ed 6-25-20) In 2015, after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a majority of Blacks said police treated them fairly. Thirty-eight percent of Blacks at that time said they wanted a greater police presence in their local communities. Eighteen percent of Whites wanted that. Last year a Gallop survey asked Blacks and Hispanics in low income neighborhoods about policing and found that they are not averse to law enforcement. Fifty-nine percent of both races said they would like more police to spend time in their neighborhoods than they currently did. Fifty percent of Whites responded that way.

Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970’s. Now 95% of black homicides do not come from law enforcement officers. Jason Riley states that police action against blacks does not come from racial bias it comes from criminal behavior.

In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, two great leaders of the Black community were influential in promoting constructive behavior in society: They were both former slaves, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass. These men advocated peaceful opposition to discriminatory behavior against Blacks. Washington was especially noted for his lifting up of Blacks into higher levels of education and entrepreneurship. Douglas advocated Black participation in the established politics of his day. Both of these men and their followers sought peaceful participation in America through assimilation into the U.S. population. (It may be noted that other ethnic groups have found fulfillment of these desires through peaceful means and assimilation, e.g., Jews, Irish, and Asians.)

Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) was known for his advocacy of peaceful protests in Albany, GA and Birmingham, AL and for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. As the years passed, Dr. King became more oppositional and he became known for his opposition to capitalism, poverty, and the Viet Nam War. In those latter years of his life, he was under investigation by the FBI for his supposed communist ties. Before he was finally assassinated in 1968, he was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C. by the poor and Black population.

Another prominent actor in the saga of Black oppositional activity was W.E.B Dubois (1868-1963). DuBois was an outspoken advocate for Black people the world over. He was a Socialist, and he eventually founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His many writings have encouraged integration of educational, political, and corporate entities for the advancement of Blacks. DuBois argued that the Black man deserved equal rights with the White man under the Fourteenth Amendment, and he should fight for them. On the other hand, the writings of Booker T. Washington have emphasized the development of economic and cultural improvements in order to gain the same goal.

In more modern times, Black people have most strongly advocated more violent forms of protest, modeled after the leadership of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Still, voices of moderate Black leaders like Shelby Steele, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and W. Julius Wilson at Chicago have spoken out in favor of more peaceful and constructive changes.

William Julius Wilson (born 1935) disputed the liberal stance that the “black underclass” owed its existence to entrenched racial discrimination; he also disagreed with the conservative view that African American poverty was due to cultural deficiencies and welfare dependency. Instead, Wilson implicated sweeping changes in the global economy that pulled low-skilled manufacturing jobs out of the inner city, the flight from the inner city of its most successful residents, and the lingering effects of past discrimination. He believed the problems of the underclass could be alleviated only by “race neutral” programs such as universal health care and government-financed jobs. Wilson observed the structural reasons for the plight of Blacks in America’s large cities. These structural reasons include the limited availability of economic and social opportunities and the extremely high crime rates among young black men from ghetto neighborhoods. In addition to those problems, Blacks face cultural problems, such as the tendencies for black men to be nonparticipators in black families. Wilson never advocated violence as a source of relief for the problems in urban America. 

In spite of Wilson’s admonitions, governmental programs, most notably the measures taken by the LBJ administration have failed miserably to raise the Black poverty rate or to do anything good to the deteriorating Black families in our midst. At this time 75% of Black babies are born out of wedlock; and this speaks volumes about why Black people today do not know how to deal constructively with social problems. The American Black simply has not had a father figure to teach him how to behave.

Other Black observers of the urban scene today who have strongly advocated against violence on the streets have been Shelby Steele, a sociologist from the University of California, Berkeley and Jason Riley, an editorialist for the Wall Street Journal. Charles Murray has also spoken of his agreement in this matter; Murray thinks the difficulty being caused by chaos in the cities hearkens back to broken cultural factors in the Black population.  Broken homes, sexual promiscuity, irresponsibility in social dealing, will do nothing except damage our society. It is my own opinion that the neglect of children (born and unborn) is also an important factor in delivering violent and unproductive citizens to our society. 

The essence of what I am saying can be gleaned in more complete form by reading the book by Jason Riley, “Please Stop Helping Us.” Riley makes the cogent argument that administrative/governmental programs do little for the problem of urban poverty. The only thing that holds any real hope of changing things for the better in American cities is improvement in the economic/business fields. Americans of all races need to get back to work, quit relying on government aid, and build trusting and faithful families with fathers who take an active interest in socializing their children.

Now, for a personal note from my own experience in trying to dope out the problem of urban violence. Several commentators have noted that one reason the police have difficulty controlling violence in the cities is that Blacks and others in low income neighborhoods is that the residents are reluctant to “snitch” on their neighbors for fear of retribution from the criminals. Several years ago, when Nancy and I were attending an inner-city church in Detroit, there was a poor Black man in that church who was unemployed and continually asking for prayer that he might find a job. When he failed to find a job, Nancy and I went out and found employment for him. We went to his apartment building to give him the good news, but the neighbors mistook me for a police agent and would not help us find his apartment. That kind of noncooperation never helps law enforcement.

So where does this polemic on violence in America lead us. I believe that the basic problem was elucidated by Mollie Hemingway on FOX news when she pointed out that the underlying problem in the violence and spirit of rebellion in American is the deteriorating family, especially the black family where 75% of Black babies are born out of wedlock. The problem of deteriorating families is not limited to Black families; Whites are culpable, too. Fathers are not the only people absent from the family scene. Many working mothers need to stay home and raise the next generation.  Personally, I think that there is another, even more pertinent cause of the difficulty, i.e., the general lack of faith in Christ by our population as a whole. This problem is not limited to the Black population; it is shared by Americans of all races and ethnic groups. We need to get back to true Christian orientation if we are ever going to solve our cultural and behavioral problems.

each another’s burdens bear,
to your church a pattern give,
showing how believers live.

Ed and Nancy Manring



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