The Field Negro and #BlackLivesMatter Do #BlackLivesMatter only when they are taken by a white guy?

There is a Philadelphia blogger named Wayne Bennett who writes a site called The Field Negro.[1]If you are wondering about the name he chose, here is Malcolm X’s definition of the difference between a “house Negro” and a “field Negro. Several years ago, Mr Bennett had a box in his sidebar called Killadelphia, in which he kept track of murders in his hometown, though he ceased doing that a few years ago. Mr Bennett still maintains that blog, though he writes far less frequently than previously, with only three postings so far this month. Yes, he is fairly liberal, but I still used to enjoy reading his site, although it’s one which has almost totally dropped from my attention.

The City of Brotherly Love utterly destroyed its previous yearly homicide record with 562 killings last year, and if the totals are down 7.46% date-over-date as of last Sunday, as we pointed out yesterday that’s only because the gang-bangers’ marksmanship has suffered. The number of shootings in the city are almost the same — down 1.10% — and if the bad guys were as successful in their attempted murders as they were last year, the total number of killings would be just three fewer than the same date last year.

It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that Philadelphia writer Amanda Marcotte blamed the Buffalo massacre on Tucker Carlson and other evil reich-wing Republicans. At least as far as I can tell, she never writes about murders in her adopted hometown.

From Mr Bennett, I expected better, but I didn’t get it.

There will be more replacement theory killers. And no one will be held accountable.

Sunday, May 15, 2022

One common theme throughout my blogging career has been well meaning people who read my blog admonishing me because I allow the most hateful and vile white supremacists to post comments after my posts.

Frankly, it’s something that I have struggled with as well: Should I even allow comments? Should I block all comments, or just the offensive ones? At the end of the day, I always follow my strong First Amendment instincts and allow everyone to comment. I also allow it, because it’s important that folks who read this blog realize what’s lurking out there. They need to know how the landscape has changed, and how white supremacists — and the hatred that they have for folks who look like me — have become emboldened.

We all know by now what happened in Buffalo, New York, yesterday. A lone eighteen year old gunman took it upon himself to drive hours to find a black neighborhood and kill as many black folks as he could (eight is the latest count) before surrendering to law enforcement and being taken alive (Of course he was.) I am not sure if they took him to get a happy meal or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

His name is Payton Gendron, and his manifesto on white replacement , as someone stated on twitter, reads like a job application to be a producer on one of those FOX nightly news shows.

There will be more Payton Gendrons in the days to come, because the right-wing hate machine that profits off white fear and resentment of others will not stop cranking out their hatred for profit. And gullible poor and undereducated white people will continue to think that folks who look like I do are the root of all of their problems.

There’s a bit more at the original.

The (alleged) gunman, Payton Gendron, killed ten people in Buffalo, and he was a whacko. But Mr Bennett’s hometown saw just as many people murdered last week. and with 20 weeks having elapsed so far this year, and 186 people murdered as of Sunday, May 22nd, Philly is averaging just under one Buffalo, 9.3, every single week. These aren’t whacked out wannabe whatevers, but the citizens in the primarily black neighborhoods in Philly killing other black people. The city is seeing an average of 40.35 shootings a week, at least 40.35 in which there’s someone actually shot. How many shootings are attempted that strike no one, only the Lord knows.

Somehow, I’m guessing that ‘replacement theory’ isn’t the motivation behind the blood flowing in Philly’s mean streets.

Mr Bennett, though clearly smarter than Miss Marcotte — admittedly a rather low bar — is doing the same thing: using the actions of a clearly deranged boy to use against his political enemies. What he isn’t doing is trying to explain why young black male Philadelphians are executing other young black male Philadelphians in staggering numbers.

The city has been governed by the Democrats for decades; the last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President of the United States. The governing policies of the city have been in Democratic — and union — hands for longer than most of the residents of the City of Brotherly Love have been alive, and if those policies actually worked, surely, surely! Philadelphia wouldn’t be the crime-ridden hellhole it is today.

Despite being a very racially and ethnically ‘diverse’ city overall, Philadelphia is also one of the most internally segregated big cities in the nation. Philly was also our nation’s poorest major city in 2016, before the evil reich-wing Donald Trump took office, and though the poverty rate dropped during Mr Trump’s time in office, it was still our poorest city at the end of 2020, though the COVID panicdemic had struck by then. As much as Mr Bennett would like to blame Tucker Carlson and Republicans and conservatives, those people were not governing the city, those people had no power to put conservative policies in place.

With 499 homicides in 2020, Philadelphia’s murder rate was still higher than what is often touted as our nation’s murder capital, Chicago, 31.60 per 100,000 population to the Windy City’s 28.38. Only 499, huh? The city’s gang-bangers simply said, “Hold my beer,” and drove the homicide rate up to 35.04 per 100,000 last year, all under a liberal Democratic mayor in Jim Kenney, his sycophant Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and a District Attorney, let ’em loose Larry Krasner who, in an attempt to employ ‘racial justice’ and ‘social justice’ has been dealing out slaps on the wrist rather than actual punishment for crime.

Ten homicides in Buffalo, with three other people seriously wounded, by a nutcase is certainly horrible; the Bills’ home city had ‘only’ 65 homicides in all of 2020, and 67 in 2021. But in Mr Bennett’s home town, governed by liberal policies for decades, ten homicides is just a normal week. It leads me to wonder: do #BlackLivesMatter only when they are taken by a white guy?

References

References
1 If you are wondering about the name he chose, here is Malcolm X’s definition of the difference between a “house Negro” and a “field Negro.
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