Commentary: If the Cops Won’t Protect Us from Criminals, We Need to Arm Up and Protect Ourselves
Date: Wednesday, September 13, 2006
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
Same folks, same strokes.
Remember the “Good Times” episode when son Michael Evans expressed apprehension about going to an all-white school because some white kid might attack him because he was black?
“How would you handle that at your old school?” dad James Evans Sr. asks him.
“I’d defend myself,” Michael answers.
“Different folks, same strokes,” Dad tells him.
We could apply that James Evans Sr. wisdom from “Good Times,” combine it with the original saying of “different strokes for different folks” from the band Sly and the Family Stone and some down-home black history to come up with a new saying.
Same folks, same strokes.
The folks would be those black criminals like the ones who prompted a testy exchange between a resident of the southeast area of Washington, D.C. and one of that city’s police brass. The forum was held after a recent spate of crimes in the more affluent, white areas of the city.
“Why do murders in those parts of town seem to get solved faster?” a testy resident of Southeast D.C. wanted to know.
“Because when we investigate murders in those communities, we get busloads of people going to the police station to give statements and be witnesses,” the police official answered. “When we go to places like Southeast, nobody sees anything.”
“That’s because witnesses don’t get police protection in our communities when we give statements,” the woman shot back.
The woman was partly right. There have been cases where police utterly failed black folks in poor urban communities who reported crimes in their neighborhoods. The most notorious case is that of the Dawson family in Baltimore four years ago next month. Angela and Carnell Dawson had the nerve to tell drug dealers slinging drugs in front of their home to stop. They called police on the miscreants 36 times, to little avail.
On the night of Oct. 16, 2002, Darrell Brooks kicked in the front door of the Dawson house, doused the only escape route with gasoline and set the home ablaze. The Dawsons and their five children were killed.
Brooks and his drug-dealing buddies considered the Dawsons “snitches.” And that’s the little part the woman from Southeast D.C. ignored.
Black folks are partly, if not primarily, responsible for making the Stop Snitching T-shirts and caps sell so well. Hip-hop periodicals like The Source and XXL have elevated the phrase “Stop Snitching” to the status that slogans like “Freedom Now,” “Black Power” and “Power to the People” held for previous generations of black youth.
That makes it kind of hard for law-abiding black folks -- that would be the majority of us, no matter what editors and writers of The Source and XXL would have you believe -- who want to report murders and drug deals in their neighborhoods. Cops won’t help. Some black folks feel “Stop Snitching” is some sort of divine edict. Criminals want to kill black folks who fight crime. What are such black folks to do?
Apply the variation of the James Evans rule. Invoke the “same strokes, same folks” clause, and go Robert F. Williams on these fools.
Here’s where the black history comes in. It’s a good bet your kids didn’t learn about Williams and his role in the civil rights movement in school, probably because teachers were too busy cramming Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech down their throats.
Williams rejected King’s philosophy of nonviolence. When Ku Klux Klan caravans rode through the black community of Monroe, North Carolina in 1957 and tried to shoot it up, Williams and his organized ban of black followers -- all members of the National Rifle Association -- shot back. The Klan didn’t come back.
Williams and those other “Negroes With Guns” shot it out with the Klan because police failed to protect them. If black folks like Williams and, later, the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana and Mississippi used the principle of blacks organizing themselves against white aggressors in the 1950s and 1960s, what’s wrong with black folks using the same principle now against black aggressors?
Same folks, same strokes.
That woman from Southeast D.C. and other law-abiding black folks should channel into that history of Williams and the Deacons. They should join the NRA, buy some weapons and then announce to city officials that they’re prepared to defend themselves against criminals.
When that happens, they’ll have assured themselves of a steady, permanent police presence in Southeast D.C.
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/kane914
Date: Wednesday, September 13, 2006
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com
Same folks, same strokes.
Remember the “Good Times” episode when son Michael Evans expressed apprehension about going to an all-white school because some white kid might attack him because he was black?
“How would you handle that at your old school?” dad James Evans Sr. asks him.
“I’d defend myself,” Michael answers.
“Different folks, same strokes,” Dad tells him.
We could apply that James Evans Sr. wisdom from “Good Times,” combine it with the original saying of “different strokes for different folks” from the band Sly and the Family Stone and some down-home black history to come up with a new saying.
Same folks, same strokes.
The folks would be those black criminals like the ones who prompted a testy exchange between a resident of the southeast area of Washington, D.C. and one of that city’s police brass. The forum was held after a recent spate of crimes in the more affluent, white areas of the city.
“Why do murders in those parts of town seem to get solved faster?” a testy resident of Southeast D.C. wanted to know.
“Because when we investigate murders in those communities, we get busloads of people going to the police station to give statements and be witnesses,” the police official answered. “When we go to places like Southeast, nobody sees anything.”
“That’s because witnesses don’t get police protection in our communities when we give statements,” the woman shot back.
The woman was partly right. There have been cases where police utterly failed black folks in poor urban communities who reported crimes in their neighborhoods. The most notorious case is that of the Dawson family in Baltimore four years ago next month. Angela and Carnell Dawson had the nerve to tell drug dealers slinging drugs in front of their home to stop. They called police on the miscreants 36 times, to little avail.
On the night of Oct. 16, 2002, Darrell Brooks kicked in the front door of the Dawson house, doused the only escape route with gasoline and set the home ablaze. The Dawsons and their five children were killed.
Brooks and his drug-dealing buddies considered the Dawsons “snitches.” And that’s the little part the woman from Southeast D.C. ignored.
Black folks are partly, if not primarily, responsible for making the Stop Snitching T-shirts and caps sell so well. Hip-hop periodicals like The Source and XXL have elevated the phrase “Stop Snitching” to the status that slogans like “Freedom Now,” “Black Power” and “Power to the People” held for previous generations of black youth.
That makes it kind of hard for law-abiding black folks -- that would be the majority of us, no matter what editors and writers of The Source and XXL would have you believe -- who want to report murders and drug deals in their neighborhoods. Cops won’t help. Some black folks feel “Stop Snitching” is some sort of divine edict. Criminals want to kill black folks who fight crime. What are such black folks to do?
Apply the variation of the James Evans rule. Invoke the “same strokes, same folks” clause, and go Robert F. Williams on these fools.
Here’s where the black history comes in. It’s a good bet your kids didn’t learn about Williams and his role in the civil rights movement in school, probably because teachers were too busy cramming Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech down their throats.
Williams rejected King’s philosophy of nonviolence. When Ku Klux Klan caravans rode through the black community of Monroe, North Carolina in 1957 and tried to shoot it up, Williams and his organized ban of black followers -- all members of the National Rifle Association -- shot back. The Klan didn’t come back.
Williams and those other “Negroes With Guns” shot it out with the Klan because police failed to protect them. If black folks like Williams and, later, the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana and Mississippi used the principle of blacks organizing themselves against white aggressors in the 1950s and 1960s, what’s wrong with black folks using the same principle now against black aggressors?
Same folks, same strokes.
That woman from Southeast D.C. and other law-abiding black folks should channel into that history of Williams and the Deacons. They should join the NRA, buy some weapons and then announce to city officials that they’re prepared to defend themselves against criminals.
When that happens, they’ll have assured themselves of a steady, permanent police presence in Southeast D.C.
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/kane914
