. . . courage, the Wall Street Journal would be a lock for a recent front-page triumph of common sense and moral seriousness over paralyzing political correctness:
Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields, "Communities Struggle to Break a Grim Cycle of Killing," Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2012.
Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.
. . . .
Overall, more than half the nation's homicide victims are African Americans, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men.
Despite the declining U.S. murder rate, killings remain stubbornly high in poor pockets of cities large and small. In some cases, the rate is rising sharply. That increase is draining resources from police, prosecutors, social workers and hospitals.
As of Friday, Philadelphia police had been called to 223 homicides, compared with 198 last year. Chicago has recorded 337 murders, compared with 263 in the year-earlier period, a 28% jump.
. . . .
There is little national attention from policy makers. . . .
Because black-on-black violence tends to stay concentrated within poorer, inner-city areas, there is a lack of wider awareness of the depth of the problem, said Jack Levin of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston. "Nobody in this room would even know the name Trayvon Martin if it had been a black kid who shot Trayvon Martin," said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey . . . .
Why is this happening? For years seven out of ten black births have been to mothers without husbands. No one should be surprised that generations of boys reared without a man in the home should grow up as unsocialized and violent young men.
Whatever the reason, however, the subject of black-on-black killings of young men is largely off-limits in mainstream American newspapers, except for the obligatory four paragraphs for each victim. Otherwise, the silence is deafening.
Far more palatable to the sensibilities of those who decide what is important and what is not is syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts fulminating in the Houston Chronicle against deaths of blacks in policy custody.
Mr. Pitts named eleven actual or alleged victims of the police spanning more than two decades.
The subject is appropriate for both reporters and opinion writers. Finding and exposing police misconduct is a high calling of journalism.
But on any given week in Chicago or Detroit, eleven or more young black men will die, not at the hands of the police, but at the hands of other young black men.
The wide gap between intense coverage of a handful of deaths in policie stations and squad cars and all-but-nonexistent coverage of street murders of thousands of young black men by other young black men is striking and, frankly, appalling.
Where's the perspective? Where is the outrage?
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