What drove Belcher to kill his girlfriend

The NY Post has details on the events leading to Jovan Belcher’s murder of his girlfriend and the mother of his three-month old child. It comes down to the classic cause of the murder of a woman by a black man, seen in one news story after another. She told him she was leaving him. So he shot her—nine times. It’s very easy for a woman, black or white, to enter into a relationship with a black man, but, with a frequency that seems to surpass by far the same situations with non-black men, it’s not so easy for her to leave it.

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December 3

James P. writes:

You wrote:

It’s very easy for a woman, black or white, to enter into a relationship with a black man, but, with a frequency that seems to surpass by far the same situations with non-black men, it’s not so easy for her to leave it.

From The Aeneid, Book 6:

Then thus replied the prophetess divine:
“O goddess-born of great Anchises’ line,
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.”

Lisa F. writes:

The one surprise to me is that Belcher killed himself. I don’t often hear of Black men committing suicide, even after committing murder. I don’t know the suicide rate of Black men so I may be wrong, but lower suicide rates for Black men would jibe with their toxic levels of self esteem that you have described at VFR. Black men don’t feel guilt or shame. I think that if Belcher had not been an NFL player, he would not have killed himself.

LA replies:

I agree. That was my point at the start. If he was just an ordinary black who had killed his girlfriend, he would be like thousands of other blacks and it would make no difference. But for an NFL player to be a murderer was too much of a disgrace, too much of a come-down for him to handle. If Othello was just a regular “Moor,” he wouldn’t have been disgraced by his murder of Desdemona. But Othello was Venice’s top general. For him to be arrested, tried, and punished for this sordid murder would have been too much. He had to kill himself.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2012 10:27 PM | Send