“Don’t Snitch” street code is killing black kids

 

I can’t remember exactly where I was when I saw the kid, but I do remember the shirt. The shirt said, “Don’t Snitch”. I don’t have any children of my own and I don’t hang around young folks that much, so I have to get my news about what’s going on with the young folk from second- and third-hand sources, but word had been out on these shirts for awhile. The message on the t-shirts – and I think caps, too –  is essentially a warning to black folks not to cooperate with the police for any reason. Even if you know a little girl was killed, and you know who did it, the “Don’t Snitch” code apparently mandates that we as black folks should not tell the cops what we know.

Interesting.

Then, this morning I read an excellent column  discussing the to-snitch-or-not-to-snitch issue by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who writes a regular newspaper column and also hosts the “Hutchinson Political Report” blog. I’d have to say that Hutchinson’s well-researched conclusions pretty much summarize my own, namely that we as black people are only killing ourselves by offering silent haven to those among us who are killing us. That’s not black love, that’s mass suicide.

As Hutchinson points out, there is definitely precedent for why black folks aren’t too enthusiastic about working with cops, especially in a city like Detroit where our first black mayor, Coleman A. Young, largely won the election based on his open stance against the rampant police brutality that was being perpetrated against the city’s black residents. We can all recite by memory a laundry list of cases, both from personal experience as well as well-publicized news headline stories, that more than sufficiently demonstrate the disdain with which some police officers treat our community. It’s not exactly a secret.

But it’s also not a secret – certainly not in Detroit – that  black youngsters are murdering each other at a rate that far outpaces anything rogue cops could ever hope to match, even if they were all working together on a collective mission as part of some “Kill Black Kids NOW’ campaign. The sick and horrible truth is that nobody kills black folks better than black folks do. We’re really good at it.

 And as any cop who is actually trying to help the community can tell you, it is far too often far too difficult to get any help from the very communities that are being torn apart by this sort of violence. Why? Because we’re buying into this lie that we’re better off letting murderers that look like us go free – even when they murder those who look like us – because in some perverse distortion of Black Pride, this is now considered the proper way to show that you’re supporting your people.

You know, if those who insisted on not snitching were doing some behind-the-scenes vigilante-style action where they were taking down the killers themselves and making neighborhoods safer, then in a twisted way I wouldn’t be quite so upset. At least then they could make the excuse that since they don’t trust the cops they have decided to organize amongst themselves to rid the community of its murderers. At least then they could say they were doing something.

But when all you’re doing is walking around wearing a t-shirt that says PLEASE KEEP BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS SAFE FOR MURDERERS, THIEVES, AND DRUG DEALERS  – because that’s what the t-shirts are really saying – then you are the worst kind of self-hater imaginable.

And your self-hate isn’t just killing you; it’s killing all of us.

~ by Keith A. Owens on April 23, 2007.