Source:http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=161245856
By Keith Smith
Apropos of Mango Rose" was the tart explanation for this cry posted to me from the United States by Ms Cheryl Thompson with reference to the piece I wrote on Thursday headlined "Thorns in My Mango Rose". Among other things and, certainly not for the first time, I had taken aim at the ignorance "prevailing among a black East/West Corridor subset that had resulted in ignorant behaviour of the murderous kind".
Actually, the headline above is an edited version of Ms Thompson's in that I left out the name of the particular young man to whom she was referring the better (hopefully) to lead you in to the lady's general point:
"The glaring details that still haunt me about Sean Taylor's death are the violent way he died and his young age: getting gunned down at 24 (Sean Taylor if, like me and most Trinidadians you don't know, was a star American footballer player). An occurrence that has become all too common in the black community. Saying a young black male was shot to death is becoming the equivalent of saying, 'Hey, did you know the sky is blue?'
The subject of Al Qaeda and terrorism consumes much of our nation's political talk, but what about the terrorists living in our backyards. The terrorists who made sleeping in his own home in suburban Miami a fatally unsafe decision for Taylor.
He went to college. He got a job that earned him millions and by several accounts had a bright career ahead of him. By its true definition, Taylor was living the "American Dream". But it was all blown away by a gunshot wound.
Taylor's death marks the second time this year that a bullet has snatched away that dream from a young, black NFL player. The first bright day of 2007 turned dark for Darrent Williams, a Denver Broncos cornerback, who was murdered in a drive-by shooting near a Denver nightclub.
Sure Williams and Taylor were rich and famous, but in the end it didn't really matter. It's tragic, it's senseless, and it's unnecessary. So why does it keep happening?
There have been studies done concluding that black men are more than six times more likely to be murdered than their white counterparts. The Center for Disease Control reports around 4,000 blacks are killed by guns in our country.
The famous and rich ones, like Taylor and Williams, will grab national headlines and attention. Yet at the end of the day they are part of a growing (silent) epidemic. How many more will have to die before our nation gives the same attention it's giving Iraq to the war that's going on in our very own streets.
How Will Sean Taylor Be Remembered?
We don't know what happened other than he was shot by an intruder at his home in Miami. Yet most news stories released shortly after his death made it a point to discuss Taylor's run-ins with the law and troubles on the field - including the seven fines he'd received for late hits and other infractions, a $25,000 fine he incurred for skipping a mandatory rookie symposium after the Redskins drafted him in 2004, and the incident where he was accused of brandishing a gun during a fight in 2005.
Almost as if to say, "he had it coming."
Some journalists have taken a "live by the sword, die by the sword" approach to writing about Sean Taylor's life....."
I paused here to ponder my own state of mind and that of many journalists in Trinidad and Tobago who have allowed themselves to become so beaten down by the daily diet of death that the police "gang-related" dismissals invite from us a correlated dismissive shrug. But to continue with Ms Thompson:
"Shortly after the shooting, Washington Post columnist and ESPN personality Michael Wilbon responded with the following in the paper's online chat session:
'I know how I feel about Taylor, and this latest news isn't surprising in the least, not to me. Whether this incident is or isn't random, Taylor grew up in a violent world, embraced it, claimed it, loved to run in it and refused to divorce himself from it. He ain't the first and won't be the last. We have no idea what happened, or if what we know now will be revised later. It's sad, yes, but hardly surprising....'"
I had to pause and ponder here again because while I have no knowledge of any Trinidadian "gang area" boy who became as moneyed as Taylor but couldn't leave the gang I did know one "gang area" resident who won a millon-dollar Lotto and who used it to promote the "pusher" trade he was accustomed to, his shooting death captured in a Sunday Express headline thus: "LOTTO WINNER SHOT DEAD!" But let us read on:
"You see, just because Taylor was changing his life, don't assume the people who pumped 15 bullets into his SUV a couple of years ago were in the process of changing theirs. Maybe it was them, maybe not. Maybe it was somebody else who had a beef with Taylor a year earlier, maybe not. Maybe it was retribution or envy or some volatile combination.
Also, in a column titled 'Taylor's Death Is Tragic but Not Surprising,' Washington Post sports columnist Leonard Shapiro wrote: 'Could anyone honestly say they never saw this coming? You'd have to be blind not to considering Taylor's checkered past. It was only a few months after he was drafted, when we got something of an inkling of what sort of young man the Redskins were selecting out of the University of Miami with the fifth overall selection in 2004.'
...By the accounts of his friends and teammates, Sean Taylor had become a new man. He had turned his life around, staying out of trouble and focusing on what looked to be an emerging superstar career.
'It's hard to expect a man to grow up overnight, but ever since he had his child, it was like a new Sean, and everybody around here knew it,' Redskins running back Clinton Portis told reporters. 'He was always smiling, always happy, always talking about his child.'"...
If you don't pause and ponder this with me at this point it may just be that you continue to discount the reports of gang-related murders in which some grieving mother or brother or sister insists that "So and So" wasn't a saint but he was trying to change his life, the fathering of a child more than once cited as being, well, the trigger of the supposed turnaround. Listen, I make no claims one way or the other except, of course, the obvious which is that in the shadow of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, not only here but elsewhere, murder by and within the tribe has become a black urban thing.
Posted By: Candice Johnson
Thursday, December 6th 2007 at 2:52AM
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