"I told myself: 'If I keep smoking like this, I'm going to kill myself'." He told me about kicking his old habit more than once because I asked more than once. I draw strength from that story like a lock of Samson's hair.

"I put a pack of cigarettes on the bureau in the bedroom and every day I looked at it and said: 'I'm gonna beat you!' I was a mean sonovabitch for about two or three weeks though," he says, flashing his heart-warming smile.

From him I learned that ultimately individuals are responsible for their own lives and the decisions they make. What baffles me is why so many people seem to think social analysis is synonymous with "making excuses," or "not taking responsibility for one's actions."

If my grandfather were to suggest that tobacco corporations ought to be held accountable for selling the most destructive drug-concoction in American society, lying about the addictive additives put in the product, and for not disclosing that information to unwitting consumers, he is not "making excuses" for smokers who are not taking responsibility for their own bad habit.

This seems rather obvious. But why isn't it equally obvious when the social analysis turns to race matters in America?

Example: Joe Black says that lack of real economic opportunity, especially in a consumer culture, is one major factor in explaining why a disproportionate number of black men are in prison for "street crimes."

Therefore, Joe Black suggests, if we as a society are interested in transforming that situation, we ought to be committed to creating in black communities, at the very least, dignified living-wage employment and the infrastructure needed for any community to thrive; not just survive.

Joe White says: "Man, you're just making excuses for black criminals. They have to take responsibility for their own lives. I have no sympathy for them or this victim-culture."

See, right there. Joe White is responding as if social analysis and "making excuses" is synonymous. The economic conditions strangling many black communities does not "excuse" black criminal behavior. But it does aid and abet the incarceration of an alarming number of poor blacks.

But don't blacks commit more crime? Well, in California, felony arrests for black and brown youth have declined by a third since the 1970s, while the rate for white adults over 30 has increased 171 percent.

Nationally, whites commit about 56 percent of all violent crime, the Justice Department reports. Whites are twice as likely as blacks to be involved in child sexual molestation and are also more than twice as likely as black youth to kill their own parents, according to Howard Snyder and Melissa Sickmund's 1999 National Report for the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

Whites are nearly twice as likely to drive drunk and more likely to bring a weapon to school with them than are black males, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "2000 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Survey Summary."

These well-documented but infrequently discussed statistics pull back the veil of white myth that shrouds black America. But one must look deeper to see the hidden reality of how ("serious") crime is self-servingly defined by a mostly white overclass.

Do blacks commit more crime? The Nashville-based (white) antiracist activist, writer and lecturer Tim Wise has an interesting answer. "Well yes, if by 'crime' you mean the traditional interpretation of the term: violence or property offenses committed on the street or in the home, which are punished as crimes in the justice system," he writes.

"Since these kind of offenses are highly correlated with low socioeconomic status, there will be a higher rate of offending in communities of color, which thanks to the interplay of race and economic marginalization will tend to be poorer," Wise observes.

"Then again, if we thought of crimes as any behaviors that result in the unnecessary deaths, injury or illness (like the manufacturing of tobacco and numerous faulty consumer products, as well as corporate pollution, which contributes to occupational disease and death at three times the rate of homicides), then the answer would be no. But we don't think of it that way, so we stay focused on the violence of the dark and poor, over that of the white and wealthy," Wise continues.

If we don't stop inhaling smoke from the legacy of white supremacy, the cancer of racial injustice will kill us. And why not stop, cold turkey, like my grandfather?

Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columinist. He can be reached via email: sgonsalves@capecodonline.com

Copyright © 2001 Cape Cod Times

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