Reparations? How about an end to the murder of us by us?

Damn reparations! Let’s stop the slayings.

What good are reparations to a dead man? To a people whose sons and daughters, gunned down in genocidal proportions, will never breathe again? When these streets run with a generation’s blood, like gutters gushing with summer rain?

Insane.

Let us take up a more imminent cause: The murder of us by us. The slaying of African American sons largely by African American sons in what amounts to a mass shooting nearly every freakin’ weekend.

Black lives don’t matter to black people. Damn. So why should black lives matter to anyone else? They must matter to us first.

I acknowledge systemic racism, the toxic and conspiratorial socioeconomic soup that has placed black folks in a most unenviable American position. But weren’t we poor before? Were we not once slaves? And yet, we did not self-destruct or inflict upon ourselves this homicidal scourge that sends us in droves prematurely to our graves.

We don’t possess the power to stop killing each other?

1989. That was the year I began as a journalist chronicling murder in Chicago. It is still a tale of two cities. One ugly. One pretty. One in which babies and pregnant women are caught in the crossfire. No mercy. No pity.

All day long we die. Who cares?

The media spew numbers. The humanity is lost in transmission. The weather forecasts get more attention. I keep asking: What’s wrong with us — all of us? Has Chicago lost her soul?

Why hasn’t a state of emergency been declared? Why have we come to accept as normal the perennial procession of caskets carrying our daughters and sons?

When will we end our ritual of hand wringing and burying our heads sheepishly in the sand? Oh church, come out, come out, wherever you are. Take a stand.

Urban terrorism. What else should we call it when little girls can’t jump rope outside? When little boys can’t ride their bikes, and families — in neighborhoods where gunfire is as common as crickets — can’t have a backyard barbecue without fear of being shot?

The numbers paint a grim portrait: Chicago black male adolescents in 2017, ages 15 to 19, become a firearm homicide victim at nearly 35 times the rate than that for other U.S. adolescents, according to a March report by the Chicago-based Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute.

From 1965 through 2017, of 35,346 homicides in Chicago, only 12,039 — or 34.06%— were solved, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Murder Accountability Project.

The number murdered in Chicago from 2016 through 2018 alone: 1,998. Shot? 10,762. Mostly black. Across America, the number of African Americans murdered from 1976 through 2017, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 343,780.

The headlines bleed murder. The wind blows cold with bloody murder. Urban radio breathes murder. Our sons sing murder:

“I got one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight shooters ready to gun you down, yeah (fast)… Ready to gun you down (oh God)… Spray your block down, we not really with that ruh-rah s---. Glock cocked now, I don’t really give no f--- ‘bout who I hit…” (from 21 Savage’s “Bank Account.”)

As a black man, I am damn near numb. And I ask, “How come?”

Why, in this grand city, where skyscrapers declare its ability to resolve issues of great complexity, where the eternally reversed flow of the Chicago River speak to this city’s determination and innovation when necessity dictates finding solutions, and where our social and political will and might have prevailed time and time again? Why?

Why Chicago — why America — can’t we solve this?

All I know is I don’t give a damn about reparations.

Amid all this shooting and killing, another word rises from my black soul: cessation.

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com

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