Hard reality of black-on-black violence is wrongly ignored

For those of us who live in Washington, reading the Post's Metro section is often more depressing than watching the drama of the Republican presidential primaries. Story after story deals with versions of "man kills child of his girlfriend by another guy," "gang member kills gang member (or misses and murders 5-year-old sitting on a stoop)," or "woman kills girlfriend of the boyfriend who left her six months ago."

And then occasionally, there is a related story that touches you in a different way.

The other day, for instance, a Metro article related the death of a fine young African-American man, Deandre Sibblies, near a recreation center in the largely black and often troubled northeast section of the city. Just a shot out of nowhere, and he was dead. A man who respected his elders, worked with children and was training to be a cross-country truck driver. As he died, he held in his hand his first tax refund from the IRS.

But where was the anger, where was the public outrage? Where were the calls for justice or the protests of Ferguson or Baltimore?

There were none, for the simple reason that Deandre was a 21-year-old African-American almost certainly killed by another African-American. Black lives may matter in Chicago when a white copper puts 16 bullets into a black boy, but they sure don't matter in the gang-ridden neighborhoods of our big cities, where acknowledging what is really going on would mean reassessing our viewpoints on race and violence.

Oddly enough, however, the paper reported that Deandre's northeast neighborhood DID have an answer to what had happened: "The Street" did it.

Deandre's onetime assistant football coach Larry Williams explained in an interview: "A lot of times we get mad at the police killing people. But we do it every day." For the past 17 years, he said, he has given his players the same warning: Don't love The Street, because "The Street don't love you."

Now, we can't really believe that the streets of Washington would jump up to kill a nice young man like this. We don't really believe that The Street is just the name for another gang, like the Crips and the Bloods, out to gun down guys who "dis" somebody for a pair of shoes or a football helmet.

So, The Street, as these good folks see it, must be some kind of intangible being - an evil version of the Holy Ghost - that one breathes in every day, poisoning young people like the water in Flint, Michigan.

The Street is not something these mothers (and a very occasional father) can put a finger on. The closer they get to it, the more breathlessly it escapes them. The finger is almost right on it and - ZOOM! - away it goes.

And so they give up trying to live in a rational universe, in which there are reasons for human actions and they step back, almost relieved, that "The Street did it!"

The Chicago Tribune did something very interesting recently. It took an entire page of the paper and printed only the full names of 484 men and women, girls and boys, elder mentors and grandmotherly ladies killed in Chicago neighborhoods last year. (Already nearly 100 have been killed this year.) Most were killed in the streets of the South Side; almost all were African-Americans murdered by other African-Americans. And the only cases that are ever solved are those of white cops killing black kids, where it is apparently presumed that guns, rather than some magical "street," killed the unfortunate victims.

It's interesting that, in white neighborhoods in most of our big cities, observers as well as investigators, black or white, are almost always able to delineate the guilt for a killing, right down to individual human beings involved, to real guns or to date and time of attack. The street comes into it only in terms of the address of the heinous act and actor.

In the end, there are several reasons why even Deandre's fine family could not look the truth in the eye. First, there was no ONE truth; he could have been killed by 100 boys with guns who roam like coyotes in the northeast, lusting for loot. Second, they know from experience there was little chance of apprehending anyone. Third, too much action, they know, can cause The Street to roar like an earthquake.

On the larger scale, black leaders, and especially black sociologists, have disgracefully bowed out of what should be a major national discussion on race - NOT the Black Lives Matter pretense that somehow only whites are killing blacks, but a true, existential discussion that would force African-Americans to take responsibility for their crucial part in this tragic wasting of their own young black lives.

It is only then that African-Americans, who have so much going for them in today's America, can become the fulfilled human beings who lie inside them, waiting for their moment of final freedom from The Street.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2016, Universal