Shortly after the Darren Wilson news hit last week, there was a crime that took place in St. Louis: Bosnian immigrant Zemir Begic was attacked and killed by black teens wielding hammers. I don’t know why they did it - I wasn’t there, and you weren’t either - but the evidence seems to suggest that it was a hate crime spurred by the Darren Wilson decision.
Now another Bosnian immigrant in St. Louis has been attacked, although she survived. Apparently her Bosnian ancestry played a role, according to her report:
I have absolutely no clue why the St. Louis black community - or at least, whatever portion of the black community in STL is prone to racially-motivated violence - would have a beef against the Bosnian community specifically and not, say, the Italian community or the Czech community or the Liechtensteinian community.
IDK about St. Louis, but here’s a perspective from Des Moines, where I grew up and my parents still live there.
In the late 1990s, that city got a huge influx of Bosnian refugees. Like any other ethnicity, most of them are decent people, but some aren’t, and one thing that isn’t discussed much is the prevalence of Bosnian gangs. Conflict with black gangs may be a factor in St. Louis too.
Good point. A lot of times, prejudice becomes a problem when there is a perception of competition. “They took our jobs!” and “They aren’t like us!” can work together. Compare the anti-Irish prejudice that was widespread in the US in the late 1800’s. It’s pretty much dead now but there was a time in recent history where “No Irish Need Apply”.
If like Des Moines most of the immigrants were from Bosnia rather than elsewhere in the Balkans, then the attacker may have just been using it as a general term.
I lived in St. Louis for the last 20 years. I’ve just recently moved away.
Yes, the Bosnian influx was large. They also settled in the older parts of the city that were not totally falling down ghetto. In other words, they moved into the one-or-two-rungs-up-from-dead-last areas. And displaced the blacks who’d been living there.
Like most immigrant groups, most folks busted ass working hard & trying to get by. And another group were hard core gangsters. Neither of which sub-groups endeared themselves to the local underclass community. Which is almost entirely black.
When I first moved to St. Louis in the '90s I was struck by what a time warp race relations were in then. It really felt like the 1960s with the derelict inner city, white flight, mutual incomprehension and all the rest. In the last 20 years things there have advanced all the way to the late 1960s.
The Ferguson killing was certainly the latest event and most nationally prominent. But racially loaded crimes going both ways are depressingly frequent across the area and have been for years.
In the immediate aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury decision, a group of black guys beat a white guy to death with hammers, specifically citing his (presumed) ethnicity as the reason for the attack. A couple of days later, they do the same thing again, except the woman survives.
Why, may I ask, would anyone think these aren’t hate crimes?
I lived in St Louis in the 80’s and it sucked to go to school. Racial strife was common especially with the bussed in inner city kids. The education system was really poor and when I went to the flipside of the DC-area I almost got held back a year. Why it’s so bad is that a lot of money is spent on the education programs for the inner city youth. The rest of the school is left barely standard.
Except the community the Bosnians mostly moved into, the Bevo neighborhood and surroundings, wasn’t largely black. Prior to the Bosnians moving into the area, it was largely Vietnamese - and yes, there has been some conflict between what remains of the older Vietnamese community and the newer Bosnian community.
I’m not saying there’s not conflict between black and Bosnian communities in other parts of the city. But the Bevo neighborhood is known as the largest Bosnian community locally.