Who will bell the cat?

The killings of Curtis Lawrence and Keith Graham brought the murder toll to 468 as of November 13. What caught my attention about these two deaths, though, was the fact that the police attributed them to a continuing gang war between two rival gangs from Laventille and the Beetham.

It reminded me of a report I had seen on the BBC as a student in London. It had to do with senseless tribal murders and the horrific rape of a Tutsi girl by a marauding gang of machete-wielding Hutus during the height of the Rwandan genocide. This mass killing of over 500,000 people prompted the white reporter to lament, with tears streaming down his face, that they had raped and then disfigured the poor child, as if she was some sort of animal.

In jail

He ended by saying that while the western world complained of racism, this was linked to, and defined by reference to, people of a different race oppressing people of another race. His experience in Rwanda, he said, had led him to revise this definition to include inhumanity by one’s own.

Black-on-black violence is seldom mentioned in Trinidad and Tobago, but it is a reality. There are no statistics, but I am certain that a black youth is probably five times more likely to die than any other.

Data from researchers Norvel Morris and Michael Tonry (1984) revealed the following findings:

1. Homicide was the leading cause of death for black men and women between the ages of 25 and 34.
2. Black men from 25 through 44 years old were 11 times more likely to die as homicide victims than were white men in that same age bracket.
3. Although one of every nine Americans was black, one of every two male murder victims was black—as was one of every two people arrested for murder.
4. Blacks were two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be victims of rape or robbery.

In one study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the US (covering reported violent crime that occurred between 1993 and 1998), when the offender had been identified, 76 per cent of the time the violence was intra-racial.

Black-on-black violence accounted for the large majority of this. A disproportionate number of black youth are in jail when compared with any other racial group in the US.

The same applies here.

Why is no one willing to take this bull by the horns? Where are the black leaders who pretend they care and exploit these youth when it suits them?

Black leaders are guilty of remaining silent in the face of a crisis that is threatening the very existence of the next generation of black youth. Why the convenient silence?

It's no different in the US. Other than comedian Bill Cosby and a few outraged local black leaders, mainstream civil rights figures haven’t said or done much about the black carnage.

Unlike the US, where people console themselves by saying the white man ruled over them and entrenched systematic discrimination that created a cycle of poverty and crime because he doesn’t really care for blacks, our people do not have the luxury of invoking such an excuse, as the PNM has ruled this country for over five decades, based on African support.

With no one to blame, the best way to deal with the problem, it seems, is to not talk about, be diplomatic enough to never call a spade a spade, and attack any non-African person who dares cross lanes and raise what is a “black problem.”

Act now

This is the sole preserve of the African community alone. I disagree. As a society, it is our duty to be our brother’s keeper. People are generally content to allow black-on-black gang violence, because it doesn’t interfere with the rest of us.

We are relieved because we are not the targets. The over-representation of black men in the prison system renders a staggering number of black males unavailable as fathers and family/community leaders. It is one thing to see non-Africans being charged for drug-trafficking; it is another thing to pick up a gun and casually murder another human being. Nothing justifies this choice. The sooner our leaders stop making excuses for this problem and understand the wider implications of this crisis the better.

Research is needed to understand why the panoply of government measures has not borne fruit; instead, crime had increased. There are many factors that might have contributed to this black-on-black violence, but, in my view, no matter what one says, there is something fundamentally wrong and unjustifiable with one human being taking up a gun to murder a brother.

It shows that the souls of the people are sick and weary. This problem needs urgent and special attention by the Government.

The time to act is now, but who will bell the black cat?

By Anand Ramlogan 2008-11-16