John Mitchell: Just another victim of melanated fratricide

For years, the 18-year-old sprinter had listened intently for the blast of a starter’s gun. And this past spring, all those hours of training paid off. Marche was the top high school sprinter in the city in 2018, the proof being the 100- and 200-meter Public League sprint crowns he captured for Imhotep Institute Charter High School.
And all those disciplined hours Marche committed to training – in all kinds of weather – and anticipating the explosion of the starter’s gun and the simultaneous explosion required out of the starting block culminated in a four-year scholarship to Penn State University, valued at approximately $145,000, according to collegedata.com.

Marche’s single-mindedness had transformed his brief life.
Tragically, he will never reap the benefits of the life he was in the early stages of building. Ironically, the gun Marche heard go off a week ago Monday night as he stood in the driveway behind his home on the 1800 block of East Pastorious Street would be the last thing he ever heard. This one was loaded with real bullets, not blanks, and it lodged a single bullet in his skull.
Scheduled to head from his West Oak Lane neighborhood to the school in Happy Valley early the next morning, Marche never saw the sun rise. He never regained consciousness and died last Tuesday in Einstein Medical Center.
So often, maybe too often, I write about police shooting unarmed Black men. It’s a disturbing, soul-devouring optic that, due to technology, we see far too often. How dark must a heart be to shoot a fleeing teenager posing no threat, which is what prosecutors say occurred in June when East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld shot and killed 17-year-old Antwon Rose.
Rightfully so, we are weary of it. And personally, I detest police that act lawlessly, which appears to have happened in the Rose case.
But in full disclosure, I detest, even more, young Black men that kill other Black men here, in Chicago, Baltimore and anywhere else. Simply put, no one stalks Black men like other Black men.
We don’t know the race of the barbarian who put a period behind Marche’s promising, all-too-brief time on this earth, but more than likely he is Black like me. In 2016, the FBI reported nationwide that Blacks that year killed other Blacks 90.1 percent of the time; whites killed other whites 83.5 percent of the time.

As of Monday morning, the “Murder Meter” – the name I’ve coined for the Philadelphia Police Department’s method of counting, as close to real time as possible, homicides across the city — reached 201. Of that number, 150, or 74.6 percent of the victims have been African American. It is a virtual certainty that the overwhelming majority of them were killed by other Black men.
Ominously, it reached that number faster than it did last year, when the city experienced 194 killings at the same period. Overall, homicides hit 308 last year, the highest total since the 331 in 2012, when 250 of those killed, or 78.8, were African American.
During last year’s surge, whites represented a paltry 8.2 percent of city homicides (26). Latinos accounted for 12.9 percent (41). Asian-Americans operate stores in some of our worst neighborhoods into the wee hours of the morning yet not one lost his or her life in 2017 as the result of a homicide.
One would think that all this melanated fratricide would have us outraged. Have you seen it? Where is the uproar in the city over Marche’s killing? Gun buy backs and marches? Seriously, they are political photo opportunities that don’t move the needle.
Is it because we have accepted Black people killing other Black people as normal? If so, don’t feign outrage when someone suggests gentrification is good for the city. Don’t be stunned when someone interjects “what about Black-on-Black crime in Chicago” the next time you’re engaged in a heated conversation about the next controversial police shooting somewhere.
The irony is that the sound that Marche used to to propel his life in the right direction also ended it. The tragedy is that enough of us just don’t seem to care.