Wednesday, July 04, 2007

The Horror

I don't watch TV much, as it's usually a waste of time. It can occasionally be instructive, or so the producers would hope, but you can also learn more about the culture than what the show is actually trumpeting. I happened across a show call 'On The Lot', a reality show about budding film producers having to make short films in different genres. Last night's episode was an excercise in horror films, or so it was announced. The last short was 'Profile' by Mateen, an African-American film student. Just what kind of horror story was it? I'm sure you can guess.

An African-American driver is pulled over by a white cop, and faster than you can say "license and registration, please," the driver is in a bathroom being brutally assaulted by three white cops. Explaining his choice of drama, the filmmaker said he wanted to convey a horror that people could actually relate to.

Here's a horror that would be more helpful for African-Americans:

In 1999, firearm homicide was the number one cause of death for Black men ages 15-34, as well as the leading cause of death for all black 15-24 year olds.[1]

AND

In 1998, 94 percent of the Black murder victims were slain by black offenders.[2]

As much as the brother wants to spin a yarn about evil white cops, the larger horror is still wrought by his own people. While race-agitating shakedown artists keep the focus on the White Devil, the Black auto-genocide of violence, family disintegration and drug use will continue.

Bill Cosby, anathema to the victimhood mafia, proposed a solution on CNN's 'Situation Room':

It's not outrage as much as sadness that Dr. King started us in a winning position with nonviolence and that our youthful people are picking up guns, knives, and voices against each other, against their parents, against the school system, and a great deal of it has to do with the fact that we need to start in pre-K through 12th grade talking to the children in school, in school, because it isn't happening in the neighborhood, about nonviolence and how to solve one's sadness issue that has grown into frustration and then outrage.

For Cosby, it's not just a 'black thing':

The most important thing, Wolf, is, as time goes by, how many of these candidates, like Mr. Martin said, will address the invisible white people who are not graduating from college, who are teenage pregnancy at the age of 13, who are broke, who are looking for subsidy, who are looking at schools that are broken down? It isn't just blacks.

It's the poor. It's the lower economic people, the lower middle economic. And these people have to speak up. They have got to get themselves together. They are the most powerful. You have politicians who care about them, as opposed to some of these other things...

But will anyone in the Black community hear it? Maybe someone can do a film about that?
1. National Center for Health Statistics, 2002
2. FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1998

1 comment:

The Digital Hairshirt said...

Jimbob,

You forgot that a leading cause of death for Black children is . . . abortion.