11 Black Women Dead and Counting: There Goes the Neighborhood

(Photo of first victim found, Tonia Carmichael)

When a man who passes out bar-be-que (let's hope it was cow's meat), served in the US Marine Corps and has a pacemaker is arrested for raping, stranging and burying at least 11 black women in your neighborhood, do the neighbors question themselves?

There are reports of the residents often smelling the foul, decomposition of bodies, but somehow no one put two-and-two together.

Could it be perhaps that the missing were low on the social totem pole? Black women with "checkered" pasts, some in-and-out of jail. Others who had fractured family relationships.

What do I mean. A news outlet in Cleveland opened up its story about the first victim Tonia Carmichael with the the following leading sentence, "Tonia Carmichael often left her family for days at a time, searching Cleveland's streets for happiness."

So who in the world would even look for someone who is described as "often hanging" out on street corners rather than saying something like "she was a local socialite who knew many of the neighborhood residents." The way people and things are framed invites readers to dismiss a serial murderer who probably has done a lot more murdering than three black women.

What even gets more frustrating is that a woman named Tanja Doss reported a kidnapping and assault by the suspect Anthony Sowell in 2005 when he forced her to strip and started chocking her after they had a beer in his home. She said that she reported the incident, but police officials simply did not call her back.

Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly. Many disturbances in black communities are not addressed by law enforcement, especially when it comes to domestic issues, and complaints of abuse by men against women.

When it gets down to it, I question the level of elasticity in black neighborhoods that at one time were close-knit communities where everyone knew each other's business. Up to the point of who beat their wives, who drank too much, and who had a maybe baby with the pastor.

As a product of growing up in a black neighborhood, I know the power of communal rearing. And I have seen the effects of residents allowing the one fucked up family on the block to reak total havoc. Okay, maybe two or three families on my block post-crack epidemic in urban cities.

Frankly, in many neighborhoods in America, we have employed turning the other cheek to our detriment. Look at Jaycee Dugard's case.

Nevertheless, we have people allowing a drunken, young black woman wander the streets of Malibu! That one still gets me. And now, we have black women who have gone missing for months, are found out to be buried in their neighbor's backyards.