Respect Killings in Oakland and "Going Dumb"

Very ugly and more a testament to human brutality then any socio-economic factor. First despite the violence Oakland has some thriving areas and could almost be described as ready for a Renaissance:

Such violence is by no means unique to Oakland. But the city presents a special puzzle. It is bursting with “signs of success everywhere, of flourishing urbanism”, says Kevin Starr, a historian of California. Oakland has grown since 1852 from a wooded suburb of San Francisco into an industrial city with a port despatching wine from Napa and fruit from the Central Valley. One district, Piedmont, technically an autonomous city for the past century, is among the wealthiest in the country. Oakland boasts architectural gems, a zoo, several sports teams, a picturesque downtown lake and trendy gallery districts.

On Going Dumb:

With about 150 languages, it is also among the most diverse cities in the world. The largest single group in the 2000 census was blacks; now they come a close second behind whites and not far ahead of Latinos. Oakland has a thriving black middle class. Three of its past four mayors have been black. The city has spawned many national trends in black culture, most recently “hyphy”, a largely black rap, dance and fashion style. Adherents like to wear T-shirts down to their knees and have the motto “Go Dumb”.

A favoured way of going dumb is to attend drag races at which cars are wrecked and fights often break out. For, despite all the city has to offer, Oakland’s violent-crime rates are the highest in California and among the highest in the country. Whereas in most American cities murders and many other crimes have gone down or remained stable over the past decade, they have gone up in Oakland.

What kind of local culture encourages people to "Go Dumb"? I am guessing the phrase encompasses a complete destruction of the self in favor of violence, drugs, sex, and death, but who the hell knows?

Respect Killings:

Poverty cannot be the primary reason, says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. Oakland has much less poverty than cities such as Hartford, Baltimore or Memphis, which also have high crime rates. Nor is it racial tension, since the overwhelming majority of Oakland’s violent crime is black-on-black. In the late 1980s much of it could be blamed on the twin epidemics of crack cocaine and handguns. But today’s shootings, often among men who were “crack babies”, are more likely, says Mr Levin, to happen for “respect”.

Respect killings defy reason. A wrong look, a casual gesture, can lead to a full-blown shoot-out. The murders, says Mr Tagami, tend to happen in the two or three areas where black former prisoners—by his estimate, about 7.5% of Oakland’s population of 400,000—are to be found. Most of them go in and out of prison, getting more brutal as they go. “Three-time offenders are killing four-time offenders,” he says, because younger criminals are fighting for the turf of older ones, and for the respect of their peer group.

Oakland’s liberal politicians, at least as left-wing as their colleagues in Berkeley and San Francisco, do not know what to do about the problem or even, according to Mr Starr, how to talk about it. This “nihilist insurgency”, he says, leaves them tongue-tied: at the ceremony for the fallen policemen, Ronald Dellums, Oakland’s current mayor—a black hero of the anti-apartheid era—had nothing to say at all.

Left Wing Elites silent on the subject, go figure.