My challenge to Charlamagne tha God
I am not interested in pointing fingers. I am not looking to assign blame. I have no interest in diving into the sewer of partisan politics. I am simply trying to reach out to one person who I believe can make a real difference with regard to the greatest failure in American “leadership” over the course of the last seven decades.
I refer, of course, to the complete abandonment by both political parties of millions of innocent men, women and children in America’s crumbling inner-cities. The vast majority of those abandoned are Black, with children paying the highest price of all.
This is a national disgrace and an obscenity that should haunt our dreams. But it is largely ignored because it has become one of the electrified “third rails” of politics that should never be acknowledged or addressed. Why? Because of blind allegiance to those who created the tragedy.
Who truly cares about the most continuous and inhumane failure in modern American history? Honestly, next to no one. Why? Powerful forces from both political parties want and need to keep it that way.
Some people will give me little credibility on this subject just because I am an older white guy. But I have a history in this dystopian urban world. As a child, I grew up in abject poverty and was homeless often. By the time I was 17, I had been evicted from 34 homes. A number of those evictions relocated me into housing projects and school classes where I was often the only white child.
That experience was one of the greatest blessings of my life. At an early age, I got to witness that Black America was a great and caring America. I bonded with that community like none since. My earliest heroes became some of the single Black mothers I saw working two or three jobs at a time to support their children while sacrificing their own happiness — women who are my enduring role models to this day.
All these years later, there is not a week that goes by when I don’t think of the plight of those often trapped in our inner cities, existing in hope-crushing realities that would make most people run into the night screaming for help.
Occasionally, I write about it. But again, who really cares? I’m just an older white guy.
Although my voice and my pleas for help for those suffering in anonymity and abandonment in our inner cities may never register or count, I do believe there is one voice today above all which would. That is the voice of Charlamagne tha God (a.k.a. Lenard McKelvey) — co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club.”
His voice and his massive platform have the power to move the needle, to open eyes, to shine a light into corners many would just as soon leave shrouded in darkness and ignorance.
Earlier this week, Charlamagne made news by airing his concern that the war in Ukraine “could get stupid real fast” because the clashing egos of President Trump and Vladimir Putin “could be the end of civilization as we know it.”
It is gratifying to see him focus on a conflict that could trigger World War III. That said, there are people hurting unimaginably in our inner cities who no doubt believe they have long been experiencing “the end of civilization as we know it.”
The horrors happening in Ukraine may soon dissipate via a coming ceasefire, but the horrors taking place in our inner cities will go on unchecked, as they have for decades. Preordained suffering for the convenience and self-interests of various powerbrokers. Who today can expose this literal crime against humanity? I truly do believe the voice and platform of Charlamagne could begin the upending of this travesty of justice.
And just how bad is it? What follows are but two examples out of literally hundreds in various inner-cities which could be highlighted.
As the Chicago Tribune reported several years ago, over the course of the last 60 years, more than 40,000 men, women and children have been murdered in the city. More than 100,000 have been wounded, most of them Black, thousands of them innocent bystanders, including hundreds of children.
If you extrapolate that number and timeframe across other large American cities, you will discover — shockingly — that those killed in our nation’s urban areas equals or exceeds all U.S. soldiers killed and wounded during World War II. Again, the vast majority being Black men, women and children.
Why are we not screaming out in protest against such a preventable perversion of justice?
Going back to Chicago and speaking of children, a shocking headline from the Chicago Sun-Times a few years ago stated, “Violence in some Chicago neighborhoods puts young men at greater risk than U.S. troops faced in Iraq, Afghanistan war zones, study finds.”
As the paper reported, “The risk of a man 18 to 29 years old dying in a shooting in the most violent ZIP code in Chicago … was higher than the death rate for U.S. soldiers in the Afghanistan war or for soldiers in an Army combat brigade that fought in Iraq.”
Think about that: Almost twice as deadly as a heavily-engaged combat brigade. And now here is a truth I would like to bring to the attention of Charlamagne: Children must cross those “war zones” five days a week to get to and from school.
Again, it is but one more truth political forces from both sides have decided must never be admitted or discussed. An obscene reality that again can — and must be — extrapolated across multiple inner cities. These are innocent young boys and girls, children whose futures are being robbed from them in broad daylight. Yet we are told to look the other way.
I believe Charlamagne tha God knows the a true problem when he sees it. He has an outstanding record of casting aside partisanship to speak truth to power — most especially for the disadvantaged. I am hoping he will laser-focus on this subject at some point and address it on his program.
This is not about politics or choosing a side. It is only about exposing a crime against humanity and finally telling the millions living in orchestrated misery, “We see you.”
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.