I am trying really hard to give Questlove the benefit of the doubt. I know that I have tried to write something sometimes and then realized that the words I wrote didn’t match up with the thought I was trying to convey. That is what I think/hope happened here. Otherwise, his post is complete bullshit.
He starts his plea for forgiveness with “I too at one point was an 18 year old black kid from Philadelphia.” And? So what? There is nothing, NOTHING, that Ahmir shares with this kid besides his skin color and a common socioeconomic background when he was 18, and trying to find a common thread is ridiculous. But he seems to think that those circumstances make he and Donte kindred spirits.
Questlove writes: just as all the women in that neighborhood internalized sabina’s murder as “that could have been me or any of us!!!” i internalized donte.” This is perhaps the stupidest segment of the whole thing. Should I internalize Jeffrey Dahmer? After all, we are both white guys from middle class backgrounds. We were both once 18. And while Questlove wants to learn what conditions drove this boy to this ugly act, I could really give a damn as to what drove Jeffrey Dahmer to eat people. “He is a f***ing monster” is a good enough answer to me. There are plenty of remarkable mysteries in our world that our more deserving of our attention than trying to figure out why a sociopath acts like a sociopath.
Questlove seems to attribute poverty and growing up in a dangerous community as the major contributors to why this kid turned out to be a monster. Yes, poverty is a major contributer to many problems in our city and our world. But 99.9% of people who we consider “poor” do not rape and strangle people. To lump them all in as being somehow related to this kid because they share a race or a economic background or even a history of abuse is patently unfair to the tens of thousands of people in this city who overcome racism, poverty, abuse, etc. and lead productive lives…and is in fact unfair to those who are not productive but are still certainly NOT RAPISTS AND MURDERERS.
To try to relate with a person who makes a mistake is a sign of empathy and is a wonderful quality. This was not a mistake. This was a series of sadistic, EVIL decisions made by an adult male. After he brutally raped and murdered a helpless young girl, he tried to break into her house and steal a few of her things while he was at it. He was remorseless and ruthless. This is not someone to try to understand. This is not a baby. This is the very definition of a f***ing monster. They exist, they have always existed, and they will always exist. Try to figure them out if you’d like to waste your time doing so, but do not empathise with them. They do not deserve it. Donte Johnson only deserves one thing, and that is to spend the rest of his worthless life in prison.
