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| Do we even need a 'caption'? |
EBONY.com's latest series takes on the crisis in our hometown, Ebony.com, 3-13-13]:
Black death and Black pain are far too familiar to the city of Chicago. A city that should not be viewed through the lens of tragedy. A city founded by a Black man, John Baptiste Point du Sable. A city that has cultivated Black icons and Black excellence, from Lou Rawls to Derrick Rose, Gwendolyn Brooks to Jennifer Hudson. From Harold Washington to Common, Lorraine Hansberry to Michelle Obama. Fred Hampton, Nat King Cole, Redd Foxx and the list goes on…
In fact, it was in Chicago where a young Arkansas transplant by the name of John H. Johnson became one of the most successful Black men in history with the founding of the Johnson Publishing Company. For EBONY, Chicago is and will always be home.
Comparing the violence in Chicago (overwhelmingly black violence, in a city that is 33 percent black, 32 percent white, and 28 percent Hispanic) to Iraq is an affront to the Iraqi people -- their nation was awash in violence because it was an actual war-zone... Chicagoland is awash in violence because black people (like the nine-year-old who engaged in a armed robbery of McDonald's and a carjacking) engage in behavior on a daily basis that can only be referred to as 'tribal' and completely incompatible with the civilization and standard of living white people created in the city -- which, not coincidentally, was what attracted blacks to the city in the first place.
Comparing the violence in Chicago to say, the black violence in South Africa is a much better analogy; to compare Chicago violence to the violence in Iraq is, as stated, grossly underestimating the civility of the Iraqi people.
Luckily, EBONY has been nice enough to break down crime in Chicago by race, establishing just who is responsible for creating the conditions in a city egregiously compared to Iraq:
People are outraged by the senseless ways that most of the Chicago murders happen, the reckless use of hand guns, the high number of young people as both victims and offenders, the record number of unsolved cases, and the added strain on mainly Black and Hispanic communities, with no clear solutions to the killings in sight. Additionally, the 24-hour news cycle, the proliferation of social media and the fact that our president is associated with the South Side of Chicago have subjected the city to additional media attention. However, its important to understand the numbers to get a better picture of what's going on in the city.
Chicago Murders From 1991-2011*
-Prior to 2012, murders in Chicago had decreased by 53% over a 20 year period, with 928 murders in 1991, and 433 in 2011—the City's lowest since the 1960s.
-Chicago is is 231 square miles and has 25 police districts. Of the city's 2.7 million residents, over 887,000 are Black.
Cases Cleared (1991-2011)
-Clearance is when an arrest is made and the offender is prosecuted, or when the police know who committed the crime and have enough evidence, but for some reason, they cannot be arrested, charged, or prosecuted (i.e when the offender is dead).
-On average, Chicago police cleared 46% of murder cases, with the highest clearance rate of 67% in 1991, and the lowest happening over the last two years, with 28% in 2010, and 30% in 2011.
Chicago Communities With The Highest Murder Rates (2007-2011)
-There were 2,289 murders in Chicago between 2007 and 2011.
-Fifty percent of those murders happened in 6 (24%) of the City's 25 police districts.
-The average Chicago murder rate was 21 murders for each 100,000 residents.
-The 6 districts with the highest murder rates had as many as 38 to 67 murders per 100,000 residents.
-These high murder police districts are on average 94% African American. Four of them (districts 2, 3, 6, and 7) are next to each other on the eastern section of the South Side. This includes nine communities: Grand Boulevard (former location of the Robert Taylor Homes public housing project), Washington Park, Woodlawn, Greater Grand Crossing, South Shore, Englewood & West Englewood (home of Derrick Rose and Jennifer Hudson), Auburn Gresham, and Chatham. The other two Chicago police districts with the highest murder rates (districts 11 and 15) boundary each other on the central section of the West Side and include the four communities of Austin, Humboldt Park, West Garfield Park, and East Garfield Park.
-Although there are differences among them, 32 % of the residents of those 13 communities live below the poverty level, compared to 20% citywide.
The Victims (1991-2011)
-On average, men have been 86% of the murder victims, and women 14%. In 1991, men were 86% of victims, and in 2011 they were 90.1%, the highest for this 20-year-period.
-On average, Blacks have been 76% of the victims; Hispanics 17%; and Whites 7%. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of Black victims decreased by 1%, Whites decreased by 5%, and Hispanics increased by 5%.
-Persons between the ages of 17-35 make up the majority of murder victims, with 63% in 1991, and 72% in 2011.
-In 1991, 69% of victims were shot, and 17% stabbed. In 2011, 83% were shot, and 7% stabbed.
The Offenders (1991-2011)Why can't people understand that if a community is violent, then businesses are probably going to stay away from opening in this area? Those that do open, operate in an environment resembling a war-zone, with security cameras, barbed-wire, and bullet glass windows protecting/shielding employees from the wanton nature of violence in these majority black communities.
-Most of the known murder offenders are also between the ages of 17-35, they were 74% in 1991, and 79% in 2011.
-The percent of female murder offenders has been as low as 4% and as high as 12% during the period, but were 10% in both 1991 and 2011.
-On average, Blacks have been 76% of the known offenders; Hispanics 19%, and Whites 4%. The percentage of Black offenders decreased by 11%, Hispanics increased by 11%, and Whites decreased by 2%.
"Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History," is a book - basically an angry screed - by Paul L. Street, which is nothing more than a running gag of statistics to show how black people are economically discriminated against in Chicago.
The result? They kill other black people, rob from other black people, and do nothing more than turn their neighborhoods into the poster-child for what criminologist James Q. Wilson spoke of when he put forth his 'broken-window' theory of crime... Doesn't make much sense to turn your community into a 24/7/365 war-zone, where neighbors are afraid to go out during the day, and the only business that stay open are there to offer high-interest loans on your paycheck, liquor, or perhaps that winning lottery ticket.
But back to Mr. Street's book and those "horrible" statistics that showcase how white people continue to oppress black people in Chicagoland:
- A fourth of the Chicago metropolitian area's black households were officially poor, compared to just 5.6 percent white and 16 percent of Latin households. Sixteen percent of Chicago's blacks lived in what researcher call "deep poverty" - at less than half of the federal government's notoriously low and inadequate poverty level. More than a third of the metropoloitan area's black children lived in poverty, compared to just 5 percent of white kids. [PK note: why allow these people to have children? If you receive government aid, a mandatory Depo-Provero shot should be included]
- Of the city's fifteen poorest neighborhood's, with poverty measures ranging from 32 to 56 percent, all but one was disproportionately black and eleven were at least 94 percent black. Of the city's top fifteen neighborhoods for child poverty, with rates ranging from 55 to 71 percent, ten were disproportionately black and none were disproportionately white, the rest being disproportionately Latino.
- All but one of the 15 Chicago neighborhoods where more than 25 percent of the kids were growing up in deep poverty had a black population percentage considerably higher than the city average. All but 3 were at least 94 percent black. There were six predominately black neighborhoods - Oakland, North Lawndale, Washington Park, Grand Boulevard, Douglas, and Riverdale - where more than 40 percent of the children were deeply poor and in Riverdale it was actually more than half. [PK Note: You always hear conservatives attack "Progressives" for running these country -- the apt word is "Regressives": what insane group of people who want to see the proliferation of black poverty and crime from one generation to another?]
- Seventy-two percent of the 107 Chicago public elementary and high schools that reported 97 percent or more of their students as "low income" were 90 percent or more African American.
- Blacks were 37 percent of Chicago's total population (2000) but 56 percent of the city's unemployed.
- Between 1990 and 2000, 98 percent of the Chicago metropolitian area's job growth as measured by the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) took place outside Chicago. Just 2 percent occurred within the city, home to more than 2/3's of the area's African Americans.
- More than 95 percent of the region's job growth outside of Chicago took place in communities with black percentages smaller than the suburban average.
- Communities that became significantly more African American during the 1990s tended to lose jobs. Of the 10 communities for which IDES data exists and that saw their black percentage rise by 10 percent or more, five lost jobs between 1991 and 2000.
- Overall, the city's 19 disproportionately black zip codes lost 18,080 IDES-recorded jobs between 1991 and 2000. By contrast, the 15 Chicago zip cods that were 75 percent or more white in 1990 collectively gained 19,215 such jobs during the same period. The total job gains of the seven zip codes that were 90 percent or more white was equivalent to nearly 90 percent of the city's overall job growth.
- In 2003, of the nearly 32,000 Chicago households that relied on federal "Housing Choice Vouchers" ("HCV's", formerly known as "Section 8 Vouchers") to meet their housing costs, 26,826 (84 percent) were African American. Just 11 neighborhoods - one seventh of the city's seventy seven community areas - were home to 50 percent of Chicago's HCV households, and they were all 90 percent or more black.
- From 2000 through 2002, a quarter of the state's (Illinois) released prisoners - more than 20,000 each year) returned to just 10 predominately black zip codes on Chicago's West and South sides.
- In North Lawndale, the West Side neighborhood that Martin Luther King briefly inhabited in the summer of 1966, fully one-third of the adult residents were "incarcerated and therefore out of the community" at the end of the last century. The adult neighborhood population left behind by mass imprisonment was 59 percent female and 41 percent male- typical of the city's overall black male deficit that high black male mortality and rampant black incarceration generates. A generation after the rise and fall of the Chicago Freedom Movement, the community area from which King had hoped to headquarter his struggle for racial justice in Chicago was under massive criminal justice occupation and supervision. (p.202-209)
Mr. Street compiled those facts in "Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis" to show how 'white privilege' creates a culture of oppression for non-whites; in actually, he helped illustrate the "Visible Black Hand of Economics" to showcase why self-segregation of racial groups (away from large clusters of black people) takes place in Chicago: looking at the data, there is no greater threat to private property value, the health of a community, and the integrity of the businesses within that community than the proportion of black people found there.
Economic activity accelerates when the proportion of black people is less than 10 percent; conversely, economic inactivity accelerates when the proportion of black people is greater than 90 percent.
We agree with EBONY magazine -- 'ENOUGH!'
Enough lies, enough hatred, enough killing, enough closing of businesses, enough moving to avoid crime, enough, enough, enough!!
It's time to take off the white privilege bracelet America, and think long and hard about the true source of calamity in the black community in Chicago, and why - in the absence of black people - the quality of life immediately soars...
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