Chattanooga, Tennessee -- And you Thought the Blacks in Memphis Were Bad?

You have a city of 171,000 people. Fifty-five percent are white and 34 percent are black.

Gang violence in this city – of which, 90 percent of the gang members are black – is increasingly responsible for the majority of the shootings and homicides [Violence and crime toll rises in Chattanooga,TimesFreePress.com, 10-30-11].

An average day in Chattanooga -- police searching for black criminals

The same paper editorialized recently about the need for the shooting to stop (since the start of 2013, there’s been an average of a shooting every third day) and for addressing the problem with ‘wanna-be’ gang culture infecting the city.

Not once could the Chattanooga Times Free Press mention the word ‘black’ when describing the gun/crime problem in this unsigned editorial [Shootings must stop, and patterns offer clues,TimesFreePress.com, 6-23-13]:

And yes, gangs are fed by poverty. In communities where few have jobs, learning is an uphill battle because the youngsters have less extras to ready them for the first grade. That can become a generational treadmill of more poverty and future learning problems -- and of course future gang culture. 

Finally, after years of waving off an emerging Chattanooga gang problem as "wanna-bes" the city and its residents are waking up to see the entrenched gang culture here. 

In April, after "bloody March," gang leaders themselves saw the problem growing out of hand and arranged a truce. 

"Bloody March" was the gang leaders' description for a spate of daily shootings described as retaliations following violence after the death of a Howard High student who was shot in a vacant house a few blocks from campus. Between March 5 and March 25, police worked 14 shootings in which someone was killed or injured. 

The truce worked for a while. But now Chattanooga is aiming to -- and must -- bolster the effort with relationships, jobs and other efforts. And the police effort is increasing, too. The city is expending overtime to staff downtown and North Shore's Coolidge Park with 10 extra officers all summer. 

A shooting every third day is absurd for a city like Chattanooga. 

It's time to look at the patterns and address the root issues. 

It's time to stop the shooting.

There’s plenty of white poverty in Tennessee, yet there’s no comparison anywhere in the state to the level of violence seen in the black community of Chattanooga, Memphis, Knoxville, and Nashville.

None.

Whatsoever.

What’s the difference between white people in poverty and their ability to maintain some form of impulse control (though they display a lack of future-time orientation, as evidenced by their poverty) and the poverty in the black community, which is visible in the blight of their neighborhoods, dearth of businesses, and high crime rates?

A shooting every third day in Chattanooga is absurd, but it’s in the black community these shootings are transpiring. Being incredibly unfair to lump the white community in with the ‘wanna-be’ gang bangers in the black community, at least one black man in the city was willing to ascribe ‘some’ of the blame to this demographic [Panel seeks to sort Chattanooga crime truth from perception, TimesFreePress.com, 2-8-13]:

Ken Chilton, president of the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, said Chattanooga lacks a sizable educated black middle class. He said that for every black man with a college degree in the city, there are two without GED certificates. 

Compared to other communities across the South, Chattanooga has the highest rate of black men without degrees, he told a room of mostly white men. 

"What do we expect from society when you look at some of these neighborhoods ... where the percentage of the population that has a college degree is less than 10 percent, the percentage of participation in the labor force is below 40 to 50 percent," he said. "The percentage of married couple families with children is below 10 percent. There's a lot of socioeconomic factors involved in that in these neighborhoods and what's going on in terms of the opportunity structure and things that foster a good outcome."

What do you expect to see when you look at these neighborhoods where all the above-mentioned requirements manifest in a ‘community’ – well, black people of course.

Again, the state of Tennessee has a lot of white people below the poverty and living on welfare and EBT/Food Stamps. It has the fourth highest rate of white poverty in America (by state).

But why is one poverty (in the white community) not a prerequisite for high crime rates, as we continue to be told is a variable necessary for the production of black crime/murder rates?

In 2012, 75 percent of the homicide victims were black (sadly, no available exists to show the race of the 24 homicide suspects).

Luckily, one of the big four affiliates (FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC) in the city decided to try and decode the enigma of black-on-black crime, which has plagued every city in America for centuries. [Black on black crime hurting Chattanooga's African American community, WDEF 12 Chattanooga, 2-19-13]:

Mention the words black on black violence in the inner city and places like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York come to mind but Chattanooga is quickly becoming known for it's fair share of escalating black on black crimes. 

 The story is usually the same as it involves a disagreement between two black men or a group of African Americans that leads to violence. Some of the victims live. 

Others die. No one knows this better than Celeste Woods. Nine years ago, her son Demond was shot to death in an East Chattanooga neighborhood. Woods say's she'll never forget that horrible night. "The next thing I knew, I was getting a phone call that said Demond had been shot. They asked me to come to the location where it happened. When I arrived, there he was; the rope was taped around and he was laying face down in the street," Woods said. Demond died on Martin Luther King Jr. Day; A day most Americans celebrate a man who stood for non-violence; A day that now carries more meaning for Woods. Gang Task Force community outreach coordinator Fred Houser said the level of black on black violence in Chattanooga is at an epidemic level. 

 "We're seeing so many black children and mid-age black males and older ones that are being murdered as a result of gang violence and other kind of violence," Houser said. "It affects one of our precious resources; the black male," Houser said when asked about how this type of violence is impacting the African American community.  

"My heart bleeds for both sides. Not only the victim but the person doing the shooting," Woods said. News 12 wanted to why so many African Americans are killing each other and the best way to find out was by talking to a man who is affiliated with the Crips gang. He agreed to talk with News 12 as long as his identity was not revealed for safety reasons. 

 "Now days you have to go through more to prove yourself as a man and stand your ground as a man. A lot of the times it gets carried away real quick and that's how a lot of this violence and the gun play come about," he said. He says some neighborhoods in Chattanooga are war zones and during a time of war people get killed.

So this is the state of the ‘black community’ (the personification of the term oxymoron) in Chattanooga? “Some of the neighborhoods in Chattanooga are war zones,” translates into, “racially segregated residential decisions has ensured that Concentrated Blackness is contained within well-defined neighborhoods that all law-abiding citizens know to avoid.”

More to the point, acts of Spontaneous Blackness – the random act of muggings/robberies, a Flash Mob attack, or an attempted/successful murder – are far less likely to include a white person because of their decision to envelope themselves in a cocoon of whiteness.

No one cares about those white people who fall below the poverty line, save for when they provide the punch line to one of Daniel Tosh’s jokes (or as the villain in a film with roughly the same plot as Deliverance).

Of course, black dysfunction is off-limits in comedy (save for Daniel Tosh), nor can we cast ghetto blacks in similar movie/TV roles as hillbilly whites – prepared at a moments whim to engage in sodomy – because laughing at blacks is tantamount to pointing out the emperor has no clothes.

In Chattanooga, the reality of crime is the same as St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and New Orleans.

But the real criminal is the white person who dares notice these trends; the real criminal is the white person who puts 2 and 2 together and doesn’t agree with managers of Black-Run America (BRA) who proclaim it equals ‘5’.

 ‘Wanna-be’ gang bangers aren’t turning Chattanooga into a war zone, black people are doing this.