6#64-01: day, under a minute, first-person defender

Haynes was eighteen years old in the early 1970s, and had just come to Baltimore from South Carolina. He had hard time understanding how people in the city behaved. It seemed that, as he went off to work at the railroad yard, that he was one of the few black fellows in his West Baltimore neighborhood who worked, or wanted to work.

The white men ignored him or scowled at him, police of both races harassed him and arrested him for no good cause, and the black men “gave” him “shit.”

As he was walking to work on a side street, headed to the main street to grab the bus across town, a larger older man approached him and shouted, “Give it up, boy!”

“When I was a young man this guy thought he would rob me on the street ‘cause he was bigga than me. I ran down the alley and grabbed a two-by-four. Brought it down right ova ‘is head—down the middle. Stitches, concussion. Wore a space helmet ta court en the judge made me apologize for it—like I was wrong for not lettin’ ‘im rob me.”

The mugger, after getting his head split open, had his sister call the police, and the police arrested Haynes and he was charged by The State of Maryland [He committed a crime against the State of Maryland, not against the mugger, who was a mere place-holding victim for the State’s Rights] with assault with a deadly weapon. The fact that the man was a known criminal with a record, and that judges in the early 70s were largely conservative holdovers from a different time, helped Haynes beat the assault charges.

Hayes would go into amateur boxing and take up TaeKwonDo to help defend himself against the criminal “city boys.” Even so, in his late 50s he was arrested for defending unarmed against three innocent unarmed black youths. By the time I met him in 1998 he was in his late 50s and playing in a band that did old Motown music, and was carrying a knife for protection. His epic knife defense story can be found in The Logic of Steel.

Note that the laws and media ethics that are now being turned on white men who defend themselves against black mobs were honed in the hands of white officials at the expense of black men. Just as early colonial slavery was perfected on the backs of Native Americans and kidnapped whites, only later to be used against blacks bought in Africa, our own postmodern ethos, which seeks to lynch any white man who defends himself against an oppressed class of person, was developed by persecuting decent black men like Haynes, who just wanted to be left alone, for the crime of defending themselves.

Our society—especially law enforcement, the black community and the media—which enjoy a very close—if not cozy—relationship abide by a deeply ingrained ethic that any recourse to a weapon between two men—whether one is a massive hulk and the other is a twerp—is an unnecessary escalation of violence. Likewise, mob attacks are not seen as justifying the use of a weapon by the individual being attacked. The third clearly prejudicial aspect of this effort, is that if no weapons are involved in the altercation, the media—even if it is a 30-to-1 fatal stomping—will characterize the action as a “fight,” which reflects the habit in the black community of characterizing all violence between men as mutual combats in order to keep the police at bay. This management of the criminal justice system by the black mob has now become the default American ethic as reflected in virtually every media newscast. Note that this “ethos” comes not from black culture, but from the efforts of blacks to manage the intrusive American legal system. The end result is a matrix in which unarmed aggressors—no matter if they are giants or armies—are cast as victims and any successful defender—who must necessarily be armed to be successful—as a criminal.

This state of things is the logical conclusion of the criminal evolution as seen back in Haynes’ youth, logic slowly eroding in the face of The State’s imperative to limit violence employed in self-defense. Like it or not, by criminalizing the black underclass in America’s failing cities, this society has adopted the very criminal morality of those it sought to control, and now stands as the advocate of mob criminality nationwide.

Phillip K. Dick could not have made this up!