No Place for Race (BOOK REVIEW)
No
Place for Race:
Why We Need to Address Economic and Social Factors
That Are
Crushing Us Every Day
by Rodney L. Demery
RootSky Books
Paperback, $15.95
136 pages
ISBN: 978-0615908700
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“Law
enforcement isn’t about the white man out to get the black man, as so many in
the media and social leadership would have us believe…. In most cases, the
person riding in the police cruiser isn’t out to get you because of your race
or because of how you look.
As
a police officer, I know that we’ve seen way too much death and drama to be so
superficial. Yet, this suspicion remains... I think we can get beyond all this…
if we acknowledge the historical reasons for certain issues, take
responsibility for current circumstances, and honestly open ourselves to the
possibility of change—uncomfortable as it may be.”
--
Excerpted from Introduction (pages 15-17)
Rodney
Demery is a homicide detective with the Shreveport,
Louisiana Police Department who has
investigated many a murder over the course of a 25-year career in law
enforcement. He says, “Numbers don’t lie,” in observing that “94% of black
victims are killed by other blacks.”
That’s why
he’s so frustrated by the widespread TV and newspaper coverage attracted by
those very rare occasions when a white slays a black person. He points out that
“George Zimmerman was the exception, not the rule: The most vital threat to a
black man is a black man.”
He believes
that the media circuses surrounding protests and marches led by hypocritical
religious and civil rights leaders with “their own agendas” suggests that hate
crimes are the norm, thereby obscuring the day-to-day reality of young
African-American males slaughtering each other on inner-city streets all over
the country.
Officer
Demery knows the latter to be the truth, as a first-hand witness whose job it
is to handle all the fallout, from drawing chalk lines, to collecting evidence,
to informing next of kin, to apprehending and interrogating suspects. Out of
utter frustration, he was moved to write No Place for Race: Why We Need to Address
Economic and Social Factors.
In this
sobering book, the author indicts preachers for having “failed their
communities and perpetuated a fear of nonexistent systemic racism—to profit
from the fear.” He sees the society as arguably post-racial since both the
President and the Attorney General, the country’s top lawyer, are
African-American.
According
to Demery, the solutions to the problems plaguing the ghetto start at home. He
calls for black folks to make better cultural choices in terms of family,
child-raising, education, etcetera. But the brother also has bones to pick with
the white community which he calls upon to “acknowledge this nation’s history.”
A
persuasive polemic in favor of focusing attention on lowering the entire murder
rate rather than on obsessing whether or not a particular perpetrator is or is
not a racist.
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