CLIPPING: Wente on Toronto's gun crimes

Globe and Mail

Blowing the whistle on gun murder
By MARGARET WENTE

Tuesday, January 3, 2006

In Toronto, we had a race to see which came first: the New Year's
baby, or the New Year's gun murder. The baby won, but not by much.
Before the day dawned on 2006, 21-year-old Dillan Yhanike Anderson
was shot dead in an alley in his silver Cadillac Seville.

His passing did not inspire the same outpouring of grief and outrage
as the death of Jane Creba, the 15-year-old who was cut down in the
Boxing Day shootout. I suspect no one will be rushing to hold
candlelight vigils for him. Is this racist? The CBC seems to think
so. "Poor black victims are being forgotten," one expert opined.
"There just seems to be a double standard when it comes to white
middle-class people."

Well, hold it just a minute. There was quite a fuss when a (black)
4-year-old named Shaquan Cadougan took four bullets in his little
body last summer. Fortunately, he didn't die, but he, too, was an
innocent bystander. Most of Toronto's other gun victims are not. Mr.
Anderson, for example, was on probation for shooting another man in
the head in 2003. Another difference might be the fact that Ms. Creba
got shot in broad daylight, in the heart of mainstream Canada, on a
day when millions of people go out to shop and have fun. In other
words, if she's not safe, who is?

Far from focusing our attention on the real issues, the murder of Ms.
Creba seems to have inspired new levels of weaseling and fatuity.
"These are Harris's children, because they were 5 or 6 years old
[when Mike Harris became premier of Ontario in 1995], and these were
the kids that got neglected," one community activist told the Toronto
Star, referring to thugs who shoot innocent bystanders in broad
daylight. "A decade of neglect in Toronto is coming back to haunt
us," declared Olivia Chow, who's running for office. "How many more
innocents will it take?"

Racism and joblessness are always popular culprits, too. CBC Radio
quoted someone saying that, when the only jobs young people can get
are part-time ones without benefits, well, what can you expect?
American gun culture also came in for the usual licking. CBC-TV did
some neat graphics on gun crime in Houston, and the Star even found
an expert who blamed Hollywood. "If you go to a movie today in New
York, you see preview after preview with scenes of unbelievable gun
violence," he said.

Actually there's been a crime crash in New York City. Gun murders
there are at a 40-year low, and swaths of the city did not record a
single gun fatality last year. Meantime, the gun-murder rate in
Jamaica is among the highest in the world. But nobody mentioned that.
In fact, the word "Jamaica" can't be found in any of these penetrating
analyses, even though police will tell you off the record that 80 per
cent or more of the city's gun crime is Jamaican-related.

The violent culture of Jamaica sheds far more light on Toronto's
gun-and-gang problem than Mr. Harris's cruel decision to shut down
the Anti-Racism Secretariat. So does the culture of gangsta rap. All
the black kids know this; they understand the pervasive influence of
gangsta culture far better than our media experts and community
leaders do. So does Bob Herbert, the black, liberal New York Times
columnist. In his view, poor, urban North American blacks are being
devastated by a self-inflicted set of woes that are as harmful as the
Jim Crow laws once were. He is calling for a new civil-rights
revolution -- from within.

"It is time to blow the whistle on the nitwits who have so
successfully promoted a values system that embraces murder,
drug-dealing, gang membership, misogyny, child abandonment and a
sense of self so diseased that it teaches children to view the men in
their orbit as niggaz and the women as hoes," Mr. Herbert wrote
recently. "I understand that jobs are hard to come by for many
people, and that many schools are substandard, and that racial
discrimination is still widespread. But those are not good reasons
for committing cultural suicide."

Are we failing our most disadvantaged kids? Damn right. We're failing
them with our evasions and our cowardice. We are failing them with our
reluctance to tell the truth. How many more innocents will it take? I
shudder to think.

mwente@globeandmail.ca

© Copyright 2006 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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