"Primal anger over dubious acts of disrespect": The Fate of Baltimore Captured in Seven-Words from the Baltimore Sun

Low impulse control.

A lethal case of poor future time orientation.

"Primal anger over dubious acts of disrespect"-- the Baltimore Sun's Don Rodricks blames this for killing the city of Baltimore

An average IQ incompatible with maintaining a long-ago abandoned civilization decaying all around them; a civilization that was bequeathed to them when white people (the very people responsible for the civilization to begin with) "ran like it was the plague" from the black newcomers, a people on average one standard deviation less intelligent.

Nubian settlers whose DNA held the key to unleashing a far different community than the one reflected in the manicured lawns, safe streets, and thriving economy only possible as an outgrowth of the now departed white population.

Once they drove away whites the city was remade in a black image, with government and city jobs going to employ black individuals in positions no private company could ever hope to reproduce. But the Baltimore that grew around this new black majority, was just an outgrowth of the DNA inherent in each black individual who called the city home. [His gospel preaches teaching, not jailing Corrections chief: At 70, Bishop L. Robinson continues to argue for keeping people in school, not prison., Baltimore Sun, 3-11-1997]:

Bishop Robinson was born Jan. 16, 1927, into a Baltimore vastly different from the one whose citizens he imprisons at alarming rates today.

Back then, you could sit and visit in the courtyard of the McCulloh Homes where he grew up in West Baltimore.

"Nobody was running through the neighborhood with a Tec-9," he said.

 Maybe now it makes sense ethnic white people "ran like the plague" (White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980: Behind the Backlash, by Kenneth D. Durr, p. 101) from black people, knowing the truth of this racial transformation would unleash a far less desirable neighborhood/community than the one television would produce in the 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show.

The Baltimore Sun's Don Rodricks' shed some light into the type of community black people created in Baltimore, when he wrote of the plague of "disrespect" that causes far more damage to the city than drug wars. [The insanity of Baltimore's 'disrespect' killings: Verdicts take two killers off street, but how do police prevent such murders?, Baltimore Sun, 1-19-14]:

Two years after someone fired 18 bullets into his body, we finally know the reason Gregory McFadden died such a brutal death at the age of 27 in West Baltimore. He turned his back on a guy.

It was disrespect, a malady that inflames the male ego and makes young men do terrible things. Disrespect has been around for centuries, of course, but its consequences have been particularly lethal in the age of the high-powered handgun.

Killing someone because he disrespected you is a phenomenon that no amount of police power or community vigilance can seem to stop.

Some interventions — Safe Streets in the Leon Faruq days — have been effective when beefs between young men became known. But what do you do to stop a killing like McFadden's?

All of the following facts come from testimony in a murder trial last week in Baltimore Circuit Court.

The shooting occurred on Tuesday night, Nov. 15, 2011, in Harlem Park.

McFadden was part of a group of young men on the street at 11 p.m. in the 700 block of N. Carrollton Ave., near a beautiful old stone church.

Maybe it's not a good idea to be on Carrollton Avenue at that hour, but until we declare martial law, a citizen is allowed to visit with friends on the sidewalk. That's what McFadden was doing.

The problem developed when a couple of guys approached him on the sidewalk.

One was Melvin Baker, 34, the other Antonio Moore, 22.

Baker had a brother named Neal Hunt, and Hunt had a girlfriend.

McFadden had flirted with the girlfriend a couple of weeks earlier, and now Baker wanted to have a word with him about that on Carrollton Avenue.

McFadden declined the opportunity for conversation and turned his back.

Baker took offense. So did Moore.

They felt they had been disrespected.

Instead of cursing McFadden or even engaging him with their fists, they reached for guns.

Baker started shooting. McFadden started running.

Baker chased him, shooting as he ran. Some of the shots hit McFadden. He collapsed in the street.

Baker and Moore fled into an apartment building, but moments later Moore re-emerged on Carrollton Avenue. He found McFadden prostrate on the asphalt, stood over him and fired more shots into him.

The medical examiner later found 18 wounds on McFadden's body, one from a close-range shot to the head. The detectives who worked the scene found 26 shell casings in the street.

The facts sound insane — primal anger over dubious acts of disrespect (in this case, flirting and spurning a confrontation about it) leading to a vicious death — but I hardly think this is an unusual story. In fact, I think it's more common than we generally believe.

We think of Baltimore homicides as drug-related, stemming from a turf war or an unpaid debt; we think of them as gangland killings.

But a bunch of them happen because of stupid human stuff, and the availability of guns.

You wonder how, in such cases, police ever manage to make arrests — how they get witnesses to come forward, how they separate facts from gossip — and how prosecutors manage to get convictions from juries that include some citizens who have low opinions of police and jaundiced views of the criminal justice system.

Their son, Kenneth Lee, was killed by a black man in Baltimore back in 1993; two years later, a jury (11 of 12 members were black) acquitted the accused black murderer of all charges... the shoe was truly on the foot when it came to administering justice in majority black Baltimore

 Don't blame the gun; a gun is an inanimate object, a tool that can hardly blamed for performing its duty when an individual pulls the trigger after consciously chambering a live round.

Low impulse control, poor future time orientation and low IQ all equate to creating a situation where fatal moments of "primal anger over dubious acts of disrespect" ignite into spontaneous blackness.

It is now this community who elects the people in charge of Baltimore (and sit in almost all-black jury pools that acquit civil rights heroes like Davon Neverdon of murders), convincing those remaining white people to continue to "run like it was the plague." [Denial of black racism denies justice to Joel Lee, Baltimore Sun, 1-19-1997]:

We find ways anew to kill Kenneth Lee.

In September of 1993, Lee's oldest son, Joel Lee, was killed during a robbery in Northeast Baltimore. The elder Lee -- a Korean immigrant -- probably died a little that day, as all relatives and friends of homicide victims do.

Baltimore police arrested and charged Davon Neverdon in the slaying. In July of 1995, Neverdon was tried in Baltimore Circuit Court in Joel Lee's slaying. A predominantly black jury acquitted Neverdon, who is also black, eliciting charges of racial bias from Kenneth Lee and others. On a radio talk show a few days after the verdict, one of the jurors said none of the six prosecution witnesses was credible.

When asked if she thought Neverdon had in fact murdered Joel Lee, the caller answered, "He probably did, but the evidence was weak."

Other callers took to the airwaves, chastising those who criticized the verdict. How dare they question the intelligence of black jurors? (As if a jury that doubts the credibility of not one, not two, not even three, but six prosecution witnesses is not in some way cognitively challenged.) How dare they imply that the verdict was racist? Black people, it was repeated ad nauseam and for the umpteenth time, couldn't be racist.

Purveyors of this fiction insist that in order to be racist, you need power. Blacks have no power, the argument goes, hence they cannot be racist. It's an attempt to invoke black moral superiority, but in the process those who use this reasoning end up conceding black inferiority. It's a subconscious admission that blacks are powerless and will always be so.

But in Baltimore blacks have power aplenty. The executive and legislative branches are run by blacks. There are black judges and a black state's attorney. There is adequate black representation on juries. We do, indeed, have power.

What, then, do we call it when we use that power to acquit a black man of murdering someone of another race despite overwhelming witness testimony indicating he did so?

 We call it a city powered by the idea of Black Supremacy, where no law can interfere with the right of every black individual's cup of "primal anger over dubious acts of disrespect" to runneth over and submerge the decaying remains of Baltimore in their image.