It was a disturbing image to see in Full Metal Jacket – the skilled sniper wiping out an entire platoon of men with little to no understanding of where the sniper was. Viewers assumed it had to have been a young Vietnam refugee – someone who was old enough to know how to operate a sniper rifle with impeccable range. The skilled sniper was only a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl. Yet the first images of child soldiers for the black community were not just in Vietnam, but also in Africa. With every genocide and crime against humanity charge came the horrific stories of children lusting for blood, trained at the same veracity of a U.S. Marine on how to kill, only the enemy was their people. Black culture has a marriage to violence that digs deeper than our motherland roots, yet the explanation for why we engage in violence against our own is lost in a black hole.
The south side of Chicago has become notorious over the past two decades for its black-on-black violence. Youth armed with more guns than the police department, pointing the trigger at the futures of kids that mirror them. The violence has gotten so out of control that the death toll this year in Chicago, 228, has surpassed Afghanistan, 144. The toll has also surpassed that of Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Kabul – three cities consumed in dying economies, drug trafficking and a non-democratic political system.
Rapper Chief Keef and his crew of friends, who hail from the same city, have properly coined their stomping grounds as “Chi-Raq.” However, even Keef is a glaring example of how lost and complacent the youth are in the state of their bleeding city, rapping verses casually describing killing anyone who “disrespects” his friends. His peers fail to realize that they are byproducts of a regurgitated past of ignorance, senseless violence and no foresight for the future – their future. The irrational hostility consuming the youth is only worsening with every headline, begging the question of whether intervention is even an option. Are these inner-city child soldiers the product of an intellectually irresponsible past generation? Or, were we raised into killing one another after years of desensitizing the life of the black male?
Much like the child soldiers in Libya, Sudan and Ghana stripped away from their families and forced to live a life of unfathomable horror, the Chicago youth have been lured away from their otherwise stable homes to live the same third-world country reality. The parallels are striking; even though these youth are brought up under different circumstances, the conclusions are the same. These children do not have a choice that is within arms reach because we would rather harbor ignorance than raise royalty.
While many of the deaths that are accounted for are mixed in range of age and gender, the overwhelming amount of them is young black males killing young black males; a lethal combination of rage and revenge that mirrors that of child soldiers in West African countries.
Black males are killing the man in the mirror, and this confused narcissism is truly displaced anger of the hatred they have for themselves. From the senseless murders of young black men by police departments across the nation to the lives lost in a systemic cycle of drug dealing and gangs, the life of a black man has no value in societies mind.
Murder is a reflection of a desensitized hate for what ever is being killed – the killer must dehumanize the face of their victim. Society’s treatment of black men as less than has consumed the psyche of our youth, displacing their disrespect for themselves in the cold bloody murder of their reflection.
It is a sad state of affairs that a thought piece, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago’s police department cannot repair, but intervening in the minds of these young men and restoring their self-respect is the only way to restore respect for their bleeding city.