The Psychological and Genetic Roots OF Urban Violence

By Harry Davidson, Ph.D. -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Oct 26, 2009 - 2:38:52 PM

Other types of violence take place daily in the guise of inadequate housing, health care and schools, chronic unemployment and Wall Street theft. Violence saturates our lives.

In reaction to the brutal killing of a young Chicago student, a Web article, “Violent America makes for violent youth,” September 30 by Noel Anderson, challenged all Americans to “transfigure ourselves and the American society. Certainly we should abhor the actions of these young men. However, we should also look at the pervasive violence in our ‘youth culture' and its relationship to a violent America. “Black youth do not live in isolation, away from a violent America. The sickness of violence affects everyone and permeates our society.”

I wish to add that America applauds violence, rudely disrespects foreign leaders and rejects any notion that America utilizes nonviolent diplomacy in an attempt to resolve conflicts with other nations. Hence, it is hypocritical to somehow expect that our youth be better able to govern and control their behavior while those in our government and contrived media continue to advocate and act out violent aggression against any one who dares to impede the elitist “noble conquest” for dominance over the whole world.

To quote Mr. Anderson: “On any given night you can turn on the television or Internet and get news that reveals plots to kill the president. You'll see images of wailing mothers in front of bombed-out targets from U.S. wars in distance lands and grimace at cases of excessive force by police in inner cities. Yet, other types of violence take place daily in the guise of inadequate housing, health care and schools, chronic unemployment and Wall Street theft. Violence saturates our lives. It's used to sell merchandise, and it is also the language invoked when civility breaks down.”

As a behavioral scientist, I must look even deeper for explanations of unexplainable behavior on the part of our youth. I have attempted to do this in my books “Somebody's Trying To Kill You: The Psychodynamics of White Racism and Black Pathology,” and “God Save America,” only to be labeled as a conspiracy peddler. What if someone is chemically or genetically inducing the violence that was not always there? Studies have led to a belief that lead poisoning is a major concern in America. The researchers suggested that in too many cases, lead-based products such as paint, gasoline, and cans have not been properly disposed of. One study suggested that. Another study suggested that urban residents change their cars' oil in their front yards which then contaminates the soil and the water supply. Another one theorized that lead-based bullets are present in large quantity in urban soil. Researchers examined urban patients who suffered gunshot wounds. They took X-rays and ran blood tests. One patient had symptoms of what is called plumbism. She reported fatigue and constipation. Both these symptoms went away when the bullet fragment was removed. The authors of the study say that with increasing urban violence, the number of gunshot wounds to the spine is also going up. They conclude that patients with gunshot fragments in the spine should be followed carefully on a long-term basis. Any signs of lead poisoning is a signal that the fragment should be taken out. The fragment could also move into the spinal canal, putting the spinal cord and spinal nerves at risk of injury.

The above studies suggest that somebody knows that foreign chemical agents are contributing to urban violence. One must not only listen to what we are being told. We must dig deeper and at least eliminate the possibility that the foreign contaminates that are finding their way into our children are not necessarily by accident. We will only get the right answers when we dare to ask the right questions. Instead, we blame our children, our Black men and even ourselves. Could it be possible that we are looking in all the wrong places for the causes?

It's not like there is no evidence. The January 24, 1994 issue of U.S. News and World Report featured an article titled, “Cold War Guinea Pigs,” documenting the government's cold war experiments which exposed thousands of Americans to radiation and other facets of a vast Cold War research program. The article stated that from the end of World War II until well into the 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Department, the military services, the CIA and other agencies used prisoners, drug addicts, mental patients, college students, soldiers, and even bar patrons in a vast range of government run experiments to test the effects of everything from radiation, LSD and nerve gas to intense electric shocks and prolonged sensory deprivation. “Many of the stories of people whose lives were destroyed by mind-altering drugs, electroshock treatments and other military and CIA experiments involving toxic chemicals or behavior modification have been known for almost 20 years.”

A major objective of the experiments was to produce violence in certain populations. The movie “Jacob's Ladder” provided an alleged factious account of a Vietnam experiment in which violence was chemically induced into American soldiers to increase their ferocity against North Vietnamese soldiers. In the movie “Jacob's Ladder,” the American soldiers turned on each other, as is the case with today's Black youth who are excessively violent toward each other.

The biblical accounting of Jacob's ladder tells of Jacob as experiencing a dream (a vision, an altered state of consciousness) in which he visualizes a ladder leading to heaven. Is it possible that mind altering chemicals are being induced in Black youth or that a genetic alteration that was conceived in Vietnam is showing up in this generation? What populations were the real targets for increased violence?

The genetics conspiracy

Whereas America has repeatedly spread fears that Iraq, Iran or so-called terrorist countries could attack us with some form of biological agent (dirty bomb); America has domestically perpetrated a genetic and chemical assault against its citizens. Dr. John Waller Jr., director of Wayne State University's Center for Prevention and Control of Interpersonal Violence, has distinguished himself as a leader in the movement to categorize violence as a public health issue.

In an article in the 1991 Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Durado D. Brooks, a Dallas-based Black physician addressed the great divide between Black Americans and the health care system. Dr. Brooks called it “medical apartheid,” and said it leads to separate and unequal care. Dr. Brooks points to the infamous Tuskegee Study of the 1930s as one reason for the distrust. Do I need to remind you that the government funded study involved White medical researchers in Alabama, who observed more than 400 Black men with syphilis over decades to, determine the effects of the disease. Even when penicillin was discovered, the doctors failed to give them the cure.

One faction of the psychiatric establishment, the biochemical wing, has gained control of a powerful, well-financed institution, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). It is positioned to shape public policy regarding a highly visible social problem, inner-city violence. This targets as the “undesirables” Brown and Black inner-city youth whose behavior is increasingly threatening and offensive to large segments of the population. It proposes a mechanism of control—biochemical agents (drugs). People prescribed these drugs, promoted as treatment, will become permanently drug dependent, providing a means of control of undesirables and a source of vast profits for the pharmaceutical companies.

Hence, closely akin to the public health issue is the so-called violence initiative, which proposed to use biochemistry and genetics to facilitate early identification and treatment of five-to-nine year old children in “high impact inner cities.” Most of these children will be Black and Brown. This becomes an economic concern in as much as the initiative will relieve the system of the responsibility associated with social, economic or political issues such as racism, poverty, unemployment, the degradation of inner-city schools, and the general deterioration of urban life.

(For more information send $20.00 each for my books “God Save America” and “Somebody's Trying to Kill You: The Psychodynamics of White Racism and Black Pathology,” to Harry R. Davidson, Ph.D., P.O. Box 11783, Kansas City, Missouri 64138.)

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