Oh its time for the Stop The Violence Chants....

For days I've avoided watching the Derrion Albert video like it was the plague. I couldn't bare to watch this young man be killed on a medium so trivial and insensitive as Youtube. For days, I thought that watching this video could do me no good, when I've knowingly seen people shot at and other atrocities within my own community. I didn't want to watch another young man, so full of potential and full of precious life, be snuffed out like a flame. But finally I submitted to the trend and watched the video.

This week in the media and within our own personal circles, those who are asking and pleading to "stop the violence" are apart of a trend of silent acquiescence using this terrible and tragic moment as a chance to minimize and offset their guilt for doing nothing ever to actually stop the violence. Why does it take Derrion Albert's life to realize that Black on Black male violence in America is a problem? Why is it that we're still asking a question that was posed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black scholars and thinkers years ago? Does it take handheld videos of each death to actually make an impact?

My overall problem is not that people are outraged; they should be. My problem isn't even the fact that celebrities, media, and everyone else are calling for an end to the death and destruction that we see in our inner cities. My biggest problem is that I am worried that his death and the call for an end to inner city gang violence is a trend, which will end once this story goes away. Periodically, the media fires us up with specific cases of murder in our poorest communities often perpetrated by other young & impoverished men (be they Black, Latino or the wave of Asian gangs). But what each of us fail to conceptualize is the fact that with these singular documentations of lives cut short are THOUSANDS of other deaths that the media and we ourselves ignore. Everywhere were there is a community of poor Black, Latino, or Asian young men, there are violent deaths caused by gangs and present grieving communities asking "Why was this vibrant life cut so short?" This summer in Ypsilanti, another young man, someone I actually met, was killed for trivial reasons. It is happening right next to you and it is happening at a rate far greater than what young black males die of natural causes.

This does not mean to mitigate or trivilize the death of Derrion Albert, but I hope that with your new found outrage, you aren't trivilizing his death either.

Actually go forth with that outrage instead of use it for a PR stunt. Challenge someone's thinking in regards to the value of life. Take young man aside and mentor him as to believing in themselves and striving for more than what their surroundings present. Yes, racism and economic discrimination, and horrible schools in minority areas are real life threats too and they are partly to blame for these deaths. But if we stand back and do nothing with our youth and allow them to kill eachother, then we are also to blame.