Pitts' poignancy on Taylor's death

Following sports columnist Jason Whitlock's comments on "the black KKK" and the death of football player Sean Taylor...

Now, syndicated news columnist Leonard Pitts weighs in with a more poignant and less accusatory remarks (hat tip: Monday's C-J). Although more tactful than Whitlock (even poetic), I'm not at all sure that his thoughts will be more helpful. In any case, excerpts from his effort is also worth reproducing...

And once again, this is how we die. Fallen, crumpled, bleeding from a bullet's hole. Woman and child left to wail, left to mourn....It was, of course, not a ''we'' who died that way last week in Miami, but a ''he,'' NFL star Sean Taylor, 24, shot in his home by a burglar. But maybe we can be forgiven, we black people in general, we black men in particular, for placing a ''we'' where others would a ''he,'' for seeing in the fate of this singular individual all the brothers and sisters we have wept and mourned and given back to the soil....

And this is how we die. We die in profligate numbers. Just under 15,000 Americans were murdered in 2006. Roughly half of them - 7,421 - were black. African-Americans are 12 percent of the nation's population. And this is how we die. We die young. Of the 7,421 African-American murder victims of 2006, 3,028 - better than 40 percent - were Sean Taylor's age or younger. And this is how we die. We kill one another. Of the 3,303 African-American murder victims whose assailants are known to authorities, 92 percent were killed by other blacks.

It's easy to make too much of that last statistic. After all, murder, like other violent crime, tends to be a segregated thing. About 82 percent of white murder victims owe their demise to another white person, yet one never hears lamentations about the scourge of ''white on white'' crime. Violent crime is, more than anything, a matter of proximity and opportunity.

Still, with all that said, that difference of 10 percentage points of likelihood whispers a soft suggestion that sometimes, we don't much value us, that some of us have learned to see our lives the way the nation historically has: as cheap and lacking in worth. Note that even before three suspects were detained Friday, it was being taken for granted by some Internet posters and at least one black columnist that Taylor's assailant would prove to be black. That was a dangerous, and could have been an embarrassing, assumption. But at the same time, was anyone really shocked when two of the three suspects turned out to be young black men? Because this is how we die....

One heartbeat stilled. One child fatherless. One family shattered. One. I understand all that. Still, maybe we can be forgiven for feeling that, in the broadest outlines, we've seen this story before. Because this is how we die. And yes, Sean Taylor is one man. But he's also one more.