The new factionalism

Have you seen the “Justice for Shakir” signs?

Or read the headlines lamenting that “A black child can’t even attend a birthday party without getting shot”?

Probably not.

In the news section of Google, a search returned only 13 results, which is mildly astonishing since Shakir Williams was a 17-year-old black victim of a shooting on the very day the George Zimmerman jury began deliberations.

His family might feel a little shortchanged that with all the publicity surrounding the Trayvon Martin case (which earned 113 million Google news results), young Shakir’s death is essentially a non-event.

There’s a reason the Trenton, N.J., murder isn’t a big media story.

It’s because Shakir Williams was shot by another black teenager.

And sadly that’s not news, it’s normal.

According to the latest FBI statistics (2011), almost all homicides are intraracial. In murders in which the victim was black, nine times out of 10, so was the offender.

Interracial homicide is rare, as documented by the FBI: Out of 2,695 single offender/single victim murders with black victims, only 193 were killed by whites; out of 3,172 murders with white victims, only 448 were killed by blacks.

Even in cases of justifiable homicide, when the criminal killed is black, 70 percent of the time so is the citizen who killed that criminal.

As has become excruciatingly clear to any reasonable person, the prosecution and persecution of George Zimmerman have nothing to do with concern for the lives of black male youth.

All crime data are convincing: The greatest threat to the Trayvon Martins in the U.S. is other Trayvon Martins.

Even if all interracial crime in which blacks are the victims were eradicated, young black males would still be killing-and dying-at a heartbreaking rate.

But that’s never been the issue. If it were, the NAACP and Al Sharpton and the major media pundits would be going all out to try and create a national intervention to reduce black crime against black victims.

The real issue is the age-old one of factionalism and political power, which was forewarned by none other than George Washington 217 years ago, in surprisingly pertinent language.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissention … is itself a frightful despotism,” he wrote in his Farewell Address.

He defined a faction as “often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community” seeking to create “artificial and extraordinary force-to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party.”

Their goal is to “make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.”

That’s a flowery way of saying factions unrepentantly put their narrow goals ahead of the national good.

The “continual mischief” of factions, he warned, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another.”

The new factionalism involves not political parties, as Washington envisioned, but special-interest groups and organizations where a fascism of conformity and tyranny of ideas rule.

These groups feel no fidelity toward facts or truth, and welcome no dissent or diversity among their ranks. Organizational progress is measured only in terms of furthering their cause for political advantage-easier achieved through discord than harmony.

The loss of a teenage black male to gun violence is a tragedy in both the Shakir Williams and Trayvon Martin instances, but only one case offered an opportunity of factional exploitation for race hustlers looking to advance their political agenda (or their personal ambition).

Washington worried that the “disorders and miseries” (a profoundly apt description) resulting from vengeful factions bent on dividing the citizenry rather than uniting it would lead the people to seek security in the absolute power of a despot.

He feared a monarchy, as fitted the power structure of governments at the time. Today’s equivalent isn’t an American king, but despotic federal authority.

Racial factionalism isn’t the only example confirming Washington’s foresight, of course, just a prominent one at the moment. The broader list includes factions militantly furthering customary causes including abortion, homosexuality, secularism, gun control, global warming, warmongers, even education.

Public school leadership has embraced factional influence in everything from curricula to policies-often to the detriment of students and learning.

A specific Arkansas failing is the continuing refusal to repeal or amend consolidation law, which subordinates every measure of education to an arbitrary enrollment minimum.

One would think the state would be trying to bottle the undying dedication of parents and patrons in Weiner, who have applied for an open-enrollment charter school focusing on agriculture after their high school was closed and consolidated July 1.

So many schools today are fraught with stories of empty PTA meetings and unsupportive parents, and correspondingly poor student performance measures.

When a community cares about educating its children as much as Weiner, it should be encouraged and rewarded.

Anything less reveals misplaced priorities typical of modern “facts don’t count” factionalism.

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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.