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Soapbox time. Profanity ahead. I hate getting into complex conversations online because I think they require the nuance of live discussion, but this one bugged me enough to get essay length comments out of me because of how insane backwards and destructive it is.

TL;DR: This author blames Chris Rock, Barkley and Cosby for adopting holier than thou attitudes in addressing the underclass criminal element of the black community, and makes really dumb excuses for their behaviour. I find this incredibly short sighted because 'black leaders', civil rights groups and the media are reluctant to ever publicly decry black on black crime, black on white crime, or talk about the fact that statistically, black kids are becoming thugs and killing/robbing people well over 58%/67% of the time, or how we really need to fix that problem.

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This article is ignorant as fuck. I'm beside myself reading sentences like " It was the money from a grocery store robbery pulled off by an illiterate grandfather that kept the lights, gas and water on."

Sure dude, let's find a way to excuse and justify behaviour like this (http://tinyurl.com/mv6hxqk), and not point out how incredibly fucked up it is that tens of thousands of black kids easily become this disconnected from basic human compassion, because they are encouraged to do so by a subset underclass - a lowest common denominator that has somehow become representative of black people as whole.

It's bad enough we have to deal with vultures like Al Sharpton and 'black leaders' blindly defending horrible people just because they are black in all situations, but now this writer is criticizing the few who even bother to suggest that black people have a serious problem that needs to be addressed. It's infuriating.

You know what's way worse that 3 dead black teenagers killed by cops? Over 17,000 black men killed by gun violence in overwhelmingly black-on-black cases since 2008. The literally exponential number that are killed by other black people. But of course, that's a less juicy controversy. Media outlets and civil rights groups won't talk about that, because it's just another day in the hood, as expected, in places like Camden.

We instead rally around cases based entirely on who did the shooting, and cry out injustice before we even have the facts on what happened, and cry out that we're still living in the days of Emmett Till. Meanwhile, when a gang of senselessly sadistic, violent and compassionless thugs __literally__ commit crimes worse than Emmett Till (The Channing/Newsom murders) to white people less than 7 years ago, we do not rally around, decry the injustice, or even accept calling it a hate crime. We sit silent and excuse it as just another day in the hood, a robbery gone wrong, and sit guilty of the same passive racism of lowered expectations that keeps the media from even bothering to address black violence.

You can not just write off 5-digit death counts with "the cops mistreat us, so we lose compassion and become criminals because we are lashing out at our surroundings". That is insane. You know what's fucked up? Forget about racist cops for a minute. If you instructed Robocop to reduce crime in North America, and programmed him with the current crime statistics, he would process it and immediately start going after groups that are the most likely to statistically commit crime and go to jail for it: underclass black men with priors. The numbers are so messed up, that an objective unbiased robot would start profiling.

12% of the population, somehow, for some reason, are not only 50% of the total murder victims, but also committing 58% of the homicides, and 67% of the robberies. 93% of black victims are murdered by other black people. Black people are killing people at 8 times the rate of other people, and we're not supposed to question that? We're not supposed to address why that number is climbing? And now, this article wants to attack people that DO want to question this? What the actual fuck?

Of course every race has it's underclass, and of course we see large spikes in crime rates among those in poverty. But it is so disproportionately excessive among the black underclass, AND we have the problem of that black underclass culture being representative of black people as a whole instead as individuals in the media, AND we have the loud angry mobs that only want to get outraged when a white shooter is involved, but remain silent whenever it's not. Now we have some asshat writing a Salon article that not only encourages said silence, it excuses the criminal behaviour and asks that we don't question what is happening and why.

We can disagree about what percentage of blame lies with the system vs what percentage lies with modern cultural re-enforcement of a criminal mentality, and how we got here. But this mentality of making excuses for people who opt-out of respecting others enough to not rob/kill them is actively attacking the only practical solution. One that no one wants to hear - admitting that we(because of course, black people are evaluated as group) are raising criminals and trying to stop that.

It's already such a rare, rare thing for any one in the media to acknowledge this, because black civil rights leaders won't, and yet here this author is saying that addressing these issues is a bad thing. Holy shit that is destructive.