Yes.,I'm from Orange Mound Memphis, Tenn...the hood...my mother lived in Chicago and then moved to Mississippi and I have family that lives there......everything you are saying is what you read in a magazine.
You might have missed what I said earlier - I spend time in Englewood working with young men. I'm sharing based on what I've learned first hand, as a white outsider who went into a community in pain where everyone was suspicious of me and my intentions. I had to win the trust of guys who only know by narrative and experience that 1) you can't trust white people, and 2) they're own lives aren't worth anything.
My wife works in a hospital on the south side. She is right in the thick of it as well. We grew up very in privileged and conservative communities. We were exactly what you would expect before we moved to Chicago. Then we started to experience what is really going on, and we understood that things got to the way they are today because of generations of mistreatment of the black community. People think these communities just need to bootstrap it up and fix their problems (as if they have any resources to do so), that they caused their own problems, etc. That is the ignorance I'm talking about. People who think like that have no clue what in the heck they're talking about.
You're right, they need opportunities. And you're right, it doesn't excuse criminal behavior. But do you know the percentage of folks in those neighborhoods who are truly criminals? Or are you making a blanket statement? When there aren't opportunities and you are convinced by how you are treated that your life isn't worthy anything, what do you expect people to do? The public schools are terrible, there is no one investing in the communities to provide hope or opportunities, most of these young men don't have fathers at home, and for the most part they have to worry about their safety and their next meal, do you expect them to be able to build a business plan for solving their economic problems? They get recruited to the safety of gangs either by force or by being told they're cared about for the first time in their lives. Once you're in, you can't get out.
The complexities of their issues are a tangled mess, pretty much none of which they brought on themselves, they just happen to be the next generation of young men to be brought up in the hood. And we just expect them to succeed like their fellow man, like me, who had everything I needed growing up and was given every opportunity to succeed. Was taught how to respect and love and give and learn. I had had 3-4 meals a day. I slept in a bed, in a house with heat and air conditioning. Meanwhile my black 32 year old counterpart who by no choice of his own is born to a mother who lives in the hood - who was in danger every day he walked to and from school, who only got one crappy meal a day at school and was expected to be able to think and learn, who slept on the floor to be protected from errant gun fire at night, who didn't have male role models in his life teaching him how to become a man, who, if they were lucky enough to dodge gangs through their high school years and had someone encouraging them to seek higher education and applied and got accepted into college - is expected to be a completely normal, functioning, productive member of society. And it can happen, but those are the miracle success stories. I didn't need a miracle to get to where I'm at. I had every opportunity to succeed. My counterpart had to beat all of the obstacles.
My issue is that people don't understand everything it takes for a person in that situation to beat the odds, especially when they themselves were blessed with so many opportunities to succeed, and then they think they did it themselves, and the folks who can't do it, who "
choose" to live in the hood because they must love murder and drugs and guns and crime, are scum. And that's the tip of the iceberg. White America doesn't understand, but we sure can judge Black America for anything they try to do to raise awareness to the plight and injustice their people have to fight uphill against every day.
So to ball all of that and more into some statistic about a small percentage of black gangbangers who wreak havoc on their communities, yeah, I have a problem with it.
