Black on black violence is hateful

Clarence Page:

Here's one from the "Taste of His Own Medicine" Department: When the Rev. Al Sharpton led a recent Washington rally to protest what he called lax federal prosecution of hate crimes, at least one local black resident was waiting with a protest of his own.

Amid recent reports of noose hangings and other racial incidents, Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and other activists rallied outside the Department of Justice last Friday to call for tougher federal prosecutions of hate crimes.

Shane Johnson, 32, a social worker by day and blogger on the side, staged a nearby dissent with a few sympathizers. He supported the prosecution of hate crimes, he said, but thinks Sharpton's definition of "hate" is too narrow.

Johnson didn't draw much attention and he wasn't surprised. "Most people view me as taking on the black establishment," he told me in a telephone interview. "They think I am going to embarrass our leaders. My view is that they should be embarrassed."

Maybe they should. As a fellow African-American, I share Johnson's outrage. Why, I often have wondered, do we black folks get so much more agitated about occasional white-on-black insults than about the black-on-black assaults that constantly terrorize certain neighborhoods?

Maybe the Internet, which has changed so many other things, will bring a change here, too. Johnson is part of a new "netroots" movement of black-oriented Web sites that has created a virtual civil rights movement. Aided by black talk radio hosts, they stirred the national protests that led to a march that the mainstream media could not ignore in Jena, La.

That's the town where the hanging of nooses from a schoolyard tree provoked a series of nasty racial episodes over a period of several months. The incidents included the beating of a white youth, for which six black youths were charged.

Sharpton wants tough federal prosecution of hate-related crimes like the noose hangings. Fine, says Johnson. But Johnson also asks why national black leaders have paid so little attention to a more recent campaign in the black net-roots: the beating and rape of a 35-year-old Haitian woman and the beating and sexual assault of her 12-year-old son by up to 10 assailants in West Palm Beach, Fla.

In June, armed attackers broke into her apartment in Dunbar Village, a public housing development, allegedly to retaliate for the woman's complaints about their noise and litter. They repeatedly raped and sodomized her and forced her to perform oral sex on her son, according to a grand jury indictment. They also poured household chemicals on the victim's eyes and threatened to set them on fire, according to police and news reports.

Was that a "hate" crime? It certainly wasn't about love.

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Young black men are murdering each other at an unprecedented rate and Sharpton is marching about nooses. Which presents the gravest danger tot he black community? He should be marching to not only stop the black assault on other blacks and also to get cooperation with the police in putting away those responsible for this violence against the peace and dignity of blacks. Mohammad Ali's famous commercial about not having to live with roaches may need to be brought back with a different villain. Blacks should not have to live with their own people murdering each other.