An all-too-common headline
News broke late yesterday afternoon of an 11-year-old boy shot and killed at Fowell Park in North Minneapolis. Eleven years old.
Star Tribune headline.
The killing is tragic, but the deeper tragedy is that such news in Minneapolis just isn’t that uncommon anymore.
As a detective in 1996, I worked the murder of another 11-year-old boy, Byron Phillips, who was shot and killed just south of yesterday’s murder. Phillips was sitting on the front porch of his buddy’s house when he was hit by a stray bullet fired by gang members during a drive-by shooting.
Phillips’ murder in 1996 was rare. There was violence in Minneapolis in that era, but it tended to be confined to criminal circles, seldom affecting others, especially kids at play.
That has changed. In the decades that have followed there have been far too many instances of kids who have been shot and killed in Minneapolis, doing nothing more than riding in a car with a parent, sitting at their kitchen table doing homework, sleeping on a couch, jumping on a backyard trampoline — nearly all of them innocent black children killed by young black males resorting to violence to resolve conflict.
A two-minute internet search will provide anyone interested with reams of tragic headlines over the decades involving young black children in Minneapolis killed by errant gunshots.
This article is not intended to pile on, but asks a tough question. How is it that we have gotten to the point where this level of violence can occur almost exclusively in the black community, and no one in that community, the government, the media, or the policy world is able to call it out? And how do we expect to stop it if we can’t even name it?
We are all expected to accept the narrative that this violence is the result of a complicated web of systemic injustices and disparities. Fingers have been pointed at the police, the courts, sentencing policies, drug policies, housing policies, school funding, healthcare, where highways were built, and so on.
These trope-ish excuses have harmed us all, but they’ve devastated the black community, allowing some to destroy black culture from within, while forcing others to remain silent.
It’s beyond time to flip the script — not to pile on, but to lift the black community and foster the voices of reason that understand it is ultimately up to the black community to reject the violence tearing it apart.
We can and should all demand more of ourselves, and that includes Minneapolis’s black community. Accepting the status quo will only make it more likely that the cycle of violence continues — and that option should be unacceptable to us all.