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2009-02-25 Home Front: Culture Wars

Will Holder discuss these five racial issues?

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Posted by GolfBravoUSMC 2009-02-25 10:18|| || Front Page|| [1 views ] Top

#1 Hmmm... yes, we are having the conversation about race that AG Holder seemed to want so desperately. It's just not quite the one he asked for...

Posted by Sgt. Mom">Sgt. Mom 2009-02-25 11:44|| http://www.celiahayes.com]">[http://www.celiahayes.com] 2009-02-25 11:44|| Front Page Top

#2 Add to the list the murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

Posted by BrerRabbit 2009-02-25 11:55|| 2009-02-25 11:55|| Front Page Top

#3 Two Bostons
By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist | January 3, 2007

Last year ended in Boston the way it began: with a black person being shot and killed by another black person.

The first victim of 2007, a 14-year-old boy who was on the street (why?) at 5:45 in the morning, was also black. Boston's body count for 2006 fell just one short of the previous year, when the city reached a 10-year high. Behind those numbers, however, the story is depressingly similar year after year -- in Boston and in big cities nationwide: the alarming slaughter of black people by black people.

Seventy-four people were murdered in Boston last year, and 63 of them were black, according to the Boston Police Department. By comparison, Boston is a relatively safe place to be white: In all, only six non-Hispanic whites were murdered in the city in 2006.

Nationally, blacks are six times more likely to be murdered than whites, according to the US Justice Department. Ninety-four percent of all black murder victims are killed by black people. It is the residents of these communities, almost all of whom are law-abiding, who are the ultimate victims. All of Boston, however, has a stake in what is happening.

This killing belongs on the business page because of the destabilizing effect the violence has on communities. Many of those who can leave will leave. Business will go elsewhere. Neighborhoods will deteriorate. It's a destructive cycle that Boston has seen before and can't afford to repeat.

Take a walk down Dorchester's infamous Bowdoin Street for a case in point. Six people -- all of them black, male, and between 18 and 25 years old -- were killed within a few blocks there last year. Two men were killed at midday on a street corner. Two others were killed months apart at another nearby corner, part of the epidemic of violence in the Cape Verdean community. Monday morning, 14-year-old Jason Fernandes was killed two blocks off Bowdoin.

"This is the Third World within the First World," says Benvindo Barros, who came here from Cape Verde 33 years ago.

Barros knows. In October, his 23-year-old nephew, Adilson Barros, was gunned down on Bowdoin Street a block from the corner liquor store where Barros works. His brother was murdered on Harvard Street in Dorchester 15 years ago, and a cashier in Barros' store was killed in 1989 by some young knucklehead over a jar of coins.

There is no shortage of reasons to explain the violence. Bowdoin Street is a far outpost on the wrong side of the widening gulf between society's haves and have-nots. Our economy is good at producing jobs, but not nearly so good at producing jobs with a living wage. Too many teenage mothers today will be grandmothers by the time they turn 40. Guns and drugs are everywhere. The high-school dropout rate is a scandal. Rap music, and even the NBA, glorify a gangster culture.

White Boston has been mostly immune to the violence. It is Black Boston that is paying the price. Bob Herbert, the black columnist for The New York Times, said it best: "If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast."

What is needed is the same kind of collective, sustained effort that America, black and white, brought to the great civil rights crucible 50 years ago to end segregation. Is there a more basic civil right than the right to walk through your neighborhood without getting shot?

Fixing what is broken needs to start in the black community, the community under siege. But white Boston needs to do far more, too, the business community included. Bowdoin Street is a prime example of neighborhood disinvestment: You will not find a bank or hardly a national chain, for instance, anywhere in sight.

Have we, in effect, decided the killing doesn't matter for Boston as long as it stays on Bowdoin Street or Blue Hill Avenue?

Posted by tu3031 2009-02-25 11:58|| 2009-02-25 11:58|| Front Page Top

#4 With affirmative action and racial preferences, it's a case of right vs. right.

No it isn't. Affirmative action is wrong. It is discrimination plain and simple. If blacks and other minorities in this country ever want real respect, if they ever really want to even respect themselves, affirmative action needs to go.

Posted by Ebbang Uluque6305 2009-02-25 12:51|| 2009-02-25 12:51|| Front Page Top

#5 Who is Ty'Sheoma Bethea?

Miss Bethea was a poster child at last nights Obama speech before congress. She has three possible strikes against her.

1. Trying to get an education in dilapidated schools.

2. Probable victim of item #1 in the story above.

3. Spending the rest of her life spelling her first name for people, trying to explain how she got it and what it means.

Posted by GolfBravoUSMC 2009-02-25 12:52|| 2009-02-25 12:52|| Front Page Top

#6 when the killing gets interracial, the black-on-white slayings are nearly three times the white-on-black ones.

It's 14 to 1. The 3-1 figure includes Hispanics as "white". Lying with statistics. Just as white crime rates are below European levels and educational testing scores match or exceed European levels.

Posted by ed 2009-02-25 13:02|| 2009-02-25 13:02|| Front Page Top

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