Leaders in Washington Ignore Black Racism, Gang Violence | Opinion

"The top domestic extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race," Attorney General Merrick Garland testified before the Senate last May.

FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar warnings, as did President Joe Biden on countless occasions. You'd think there would have by now been a wave of domestic terrorism by white supremacist groups against black people and other minorities, judging by those dire warnings issued from D.C.

Something quite different happened. The two most high-profile domestic terror actions committed in the past year have been committed not by white supremacists but by overtly racist African-American men. And then there's the even bigger, if less widely reported, problem of inner-city gang violence.

Last November, Darrell Brooks, an African-American man, drove his red SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Brooks was charged with 6 cases of intentional homicide. All 6 victims were white, including members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies and an eight-year-old boy. An additional 60 bystanders were injured in this deliberate act of terrorism.

We soon learned that Brooks posted racist rants on multiple occasions. "So when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it...the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD," Brooks wrote on Facebook under his rap name, MathBoi Fly. Brooks also shared several anti-Semitic rants, captured in a screenshot by the Daily Mail.

The mainstream press barely mentioned Brooks' racist and anti-Semitic ravings. The commissars at Facebook, Google and Twitter somehow missed them, too. We didn't hear a peep from our president, attorney general or FBI director about the racism behind this act of domestic terrorism—or any impending hate crime charges. But apart from his skin color and weapon of choice, Brooks was no different than Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who deliberately murdered 9 innocent black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church.

Flash forward to Brooklyn last week. A 62-year-old African-American man named Frank James was arrested for committing the worst mass shooting in the history of New York City's subway system. He fired 33 rounds at morning commuters jammed into a subway car. Ten were struck by gunfire. More were injured in the mayhem.

The New York Times and other media outlets downplayed the anti-white messages of many of James' YouTube videos. Here was one:

It's just a matter of time before these white motherf***ers decide, 'Hey listen. Enough is enough. These n****** got to go.... And so the message to me is: I should have gotten a gun, and just started shooting motherf***ers.

James issued equally vile anti-Semitic rantings, and repeatedly called for the separation of the races. He now faces terrorism charges, but will he also face hate crime prosecution?

The threat less widely reported on, but far more widespread, is gang violence. In just the past few weeks, African-American gang members were responsible for mass shootings in—of all places—two shopping malls. "It is increasingly clear that gang violence is at the center of this tragedy," Sacramento police said in a prepared statement about a gun battle that killed six and injured 12 in a downtown mall earlier this month.

And then, this past weekend, nine people were shot and an additional five were injured at a mall in Columbia, South Carolina. Authorities believe gang retaliation was the cause.

Each and every week, gangs have been terrorizing our nation's inner city neighborhoods, with ever-growing body counts in places like Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The perpetrators of the violence—and the victims too—are disproportionately African-American men. And an overwhelming number of good and decent African Americans live in neighborhoods held hostage by violent gangs.

The numbers are stark. Of the Americans murdered in 2020, nearly 10,000 were black, 7,000 were white, 3,000 were Hispanic and 500 were from other races. Those numbers bear repeating because they're so startling. Though African-Americans comprise only 13 percent of the population, they accounted for more than 50 percent of the victims of homicide in America in 2020. And more than 50 percent of the perpetrators, too.

By year's end, another 10,000 or more African Americans will be victims of homicide in America, a heartbreaking number. That's 200 people—mostly young men—dying each week.

Though the probability of one black person being killed by another is about 30 times higher than that of being killed by a member of law enforcement, the narrative that white supremacist and white racists are a clear and present danger to black people—and the American people as a whole—continues to be peddled by our nation's president, attorney general and FBI director. And the media and academia, too.

Biden, Garland, Wray and their public relations minions probably missed the 2020 Gallup poll which found that more than 80 percent of black folks favored the same or higher levels of police presence in their neighborhoods. There's a reason why: the overwhelmingly decent and law-abiding black people living in inner city neighborhoods are the ones who suffer most from fewer police on the streets. And it's gangs that prosper. The bad guys are winning under the leadership of President Biden's law enforcement team. The good guys and gals are losing.

Writer Rav Arora, whose family emigrated from India to Canada, writes often about matters of race and ethnicity. In a recent column, he wrote about a woman named Sylvia Bennett-Stone, director of the Voices of Black Mothers United. She's dedicating her life to amplifying the voices of black moms who've lost a child to gang violence. She knows that trauma first hand: her 19-year-old daughter was killed in gang crossfire while sitting in a car at a gas station in Fairfield, Alabama, in 2004. "One bullet shot through her car window and pierced her torso before entering her friend's heart. Sylvia's daughter was killed instantly, and her friend later died at the hospital," Arora wrote.

Sylvia was angry at the lack of media coverage of her daughter's death. "No one knew her name. No one knew the name of Krystal Joy Bennett," Bennett-Stone told Arora. "If she was shot by a cop, the whole world would know. Every day we are losing kids and no one knows. That's the case of so many kids, tens and thousands of kids."

The passionate mom wasn't finished. "I think people as a whole have become desensitized to black-on-black crime," she added. "Violence in black neighborhoods is becoming too normal. As it relates to the media, it doesn't get ratings."

Bennett-Stone's wrath was not only directed at the media. The mother who lost her daughter to gang violence has nothing good to say about the "defund the police" movement, and her neighbors feel similarly. "When you speak with people in the communities, 80 percent of them don't believe in defunding the police at all," she said.

Bennett-Stone's dream—and the best way to honor her daughter's memory—is the creation of a national movement to address gang violence. "We have to start within the home, within the individuals in that home. We do that out of love," she told Arora.

Maybe our top law enforcement officials in D.C.—our president, attorney general and FBI director—should spend some time with Bennett-Stone and her band of righteous black moms. One thing those D.C. elites will learn listening to them is this: the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Klan and Neo-Nazis—as loathsome and vile as they are—are not on the top of their worry list. Or their terror list, either. They're too busy dealing with the reality—and the very real consequences—of the terror of gang violence.

Lee Habeeb is vice president of content for Salem Radio Network and host of Our American Stories. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, Valerie, and his daughter, Reagan.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.