Letter of the Day | Not necessarily ‘black man killing black man’

THE EDITOR, Sir:

With regard to Bert Samuels’ article, titled ‘Why do we want to eliminate ourselves?’ in The Gleaner on Saturday, February 2, sir, we hear your cry, and feel your pain; but, it’s not necessarily ‘black man killing black man’ as such – as if this killing is decreed or it’s inevitable – that’s behind this phenomenon.When more blacks are killed at the hands of black people, it’s just a matter of demographics.

There are numerically more black people in Jamaica than other racial groups. So we have to look for the causes of homicides among our people in other ways. Some of the causes for murders that readily spring to mind are:n Gang-relatedn Drug-relatedn Disputes/argumentsn Interpersonal or domestic quarrelsn Dysfunctional familiesn Crimes of passion/anger-management issuesn Robberyn Politically motivated murdersn Over-emphasis on material things

So, maybe these types of murders top the list.Notice, also, that most of these murders are carried out by males between the ages, say, 20s and 30s. Most of these murders take place in socially deprived and neglected communities.An inadequate legal, justice, law-enforcement system, and the distrust of citizens of the policing authorities, continue to make the problem seemingly insoluble.

The fear of reprisals of our citizens in coming forward to report crimes and murders embolden those who commit those crimes. This summation is what the causes of murders are.

So, it’s not blackness per se, or the self-hate syndrome, or the legacies of slavery that are the driving forces behind our high homicide rates, but some of the above factors.Not included in these murder statistics is the high mortality rate on our roads; and, let’s not forget the high incidence of suicides among our people.So, to reduce the incidence of needless deaths, we have to aggressively and surgically tackle these sociopathological problems.These we can change and not our blackness.

George Garwood

merleneg@yahoo.com