BAYOUSIDE: Black deaths less important

What whites view as rhetoric and alarmism is merely old news to many blacks. Not always, not everywhere, not all the time, but enough for the suspicion that a little less attention is sometimes paid when victims of crime are minorities.

I wasn’t in this place three decades ago so I can’t say. And the modern record shows a concern for what occurs in local black communities displayed by law enforcement locally as admirably even-handed.

But some things carry through generations. Call it the result, perhaps, of mutating survival genes. Throughout this country the record shows that in too many places the loss of black lives – whether police were involved in the taking or not – didn’t matter quite as much.

In one Mississippi community where I worked years ago every black family I visited had a story of some loved one whose violent death nary raised an official eyebrow; the lemon thing again.

So as we move closer to a final telling of Houma’s own tragedy in the history of black kids – rightly or wrongly – killed by cops, there is a need for understanding. And there is a need now, as always, for all of us to remember that every life untimely lost really does matter, and to work in our own individual ways to make that the case.

That black lives have traditionally in this country mattered less is no secret to anyone who is truly informed…