Delric
Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37
AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded
while dozing on the couch. He was nine months old. No one made the
multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into a
national symbol of random violence.
Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago
street. “She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was
pregnant,” a pastor explained. The alleged assailant, Timothy Jones, 18,
shot her in the head, chest and back after seeing her walking with a
rival gang member. New York Times columnist Charles Blow did
not write a column about Jefferson’s killing as a symbol of the perils
of being a young black woman in America.
Last June, a stray bullet from a confrontation on a Brighton Beach,
N.Y., boardwalk killed 16-year-old Tysha Jones as she sat on a bench. A
19-year-old man, out for revenge after an earlier scuffle on the
boardwalk, was charged in the shooting. Tysha’s heartbroken mother was
not featured on all the national TV shows.
In January, 12-year-old Kade’jah Davis was shot and killed when,
allegedly, 19-year-old Joshua Brown showed up at her Detroit house to
demand the return of a cellphone from Davis’ mother. When Brown didn’t
get the phone, he fired shots through the front door. No one held
high-profile street protests to denounce gunplay over such trifles.
Everything about the Trayvon Martin case is a matter of contention.
About this, though, there should be no doubt: If Martin had been shot by
a black classmate, if he had been caught in a random crossfire, if he
had looked at a gang member the wrong way, his death would have been
relegated to the back pages of the local newspaper. Not a cause, not
even a curiosity: Just another dead young black man. Nothing to see
here. Please, move on.
Jesse Jackson is right that “blacks are under attack.” According to a
2005 FBI report, blacks accounted for 13 percent of the population and
49 percent of all homicide victims. In 93 percent of the cases, the
killer was black. Half of the victims were ages 17 to 29. That works out
to 4,000 murders of young blacks in one year, overwhelmingly at the
hands of other blacks. In the communities where these killings occur
there is, to put it in Jackson’s inimitable terms, no justice and no
peace.
There is no comparable epidemic of half-Hispanic neighborhood-watch
volunteers like George Zimmerman shooting young black men. Nor is there
an epidemic of cops doing the same. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan
Institute notes that in New York City, there were nine civilian victims
of police gunfire last year, whereas there were “several hundred black
homicide victims in the city, almost all shot by other blacks or
Hispanics, none of them given substantial press coverage.”
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