The outspoken host of ESPN’s “First Take” and “The Stephen A. Smith Show” podcast is fed up with black-on-black crime and the silence that surrounds it. This week Smith said during his eponymous podcast that he “had no choice” but to talk about it. Lamenting the high number of shootings in Chicago over the long Memorial Day Weekend, Smith had a question for the black community: “When are we going to look at ourselves when it comes to black people being killed in the streets of America?”
As Smith pointed out, this weekend wasn’t the first time these shootings have happened and Chicago isn’t the only city, either. “It’s been happening year after year after year,” said Smith. “Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, the list goes on and on.” And as Smith pointed out, clearly it’s time to look to the black community itself to solve this devastating and violent problem.
Smith says it’s time to ask the black community why it isn’t angry enough to protest and riot over the unending shootings and black-on-black violence. “If one black person was killed by the police,” Smith said, “we’d raise holy hell, and in some cases, there’d be riots in the streets.”
But this isn’t about the police, is it? It’s about blacks killing blacks. So why the silence? When will black Americans recognize black Americans are killing each other on America’s streets without blaming the police, Smith asked:
When will the black community see that it is killing itself on our nation’s streets and take responsibility for it in order to stop it? That’s an excellent question, and as a black man in the media, Smith is extremely brave to ask it. “Let me tell you something,” Smith concluded. “Nothing else matters if we’re dead. Nothing else matters if we’re killing each other.”