Discussion for article #238304
“Everybody from my neighborhood has a killer in their family.”
Hmm. I grew up as a African-American in the economically depressed black neighborhoods of Richmond, California, and no one in my family was a murderer. In fact, to my knowledge no one in my neighborhood was a murderer either.
It concerns me greatly that articles like this one will be cited by supremacist groups as evidence of what they have been falsely arguing for a century, that black people are all murderers responsible for the vast majority of this country’s crime.
After all, a black writer who grew up with black people also says its so, right?
1 Like
I share @seedoubleyou’s concern about how this article will be used. But I think the story has to be told. When I moved to Missouri in 1992, I was shocked by how segregated the neighborhoods were…very shocked. The homicide rate that hit a bit later was another shock. I was also shocked when I followed school buses picking up kids in my neighborhood and I exited after 5 miles of travel–the busing was just amazing…kids getting up at 5 and 6 am to be transported to school. I was shocked when I encountered a sobbing cafeteria worker who had a first grade child who was terrified to go to school because “people got hit”. I was shocked when businesses refused to come into the city to do any work on my home.
And I was beside myself when the white power structure sliced and diced the city across Congressional districts in order to dilute the voice of a mostly evenly split between white and black urban area. Black voices were cut down to size–as well as those of the urban whites.
I don’t have any answers other than political activism to keep important issues front and center.
4 Likes
The problem is that this:
And wherever there is segregation, poverty, failing schools and menial service jobs, there will also be violence.
isn’t really true, at least not in the extreme way it is in St. Louis. Some neighborhoods of Honolulu are economically depressed and segregated (with Hawaiians and other Pacific islanders), and yes there are drugs and more crime than in the surrounding areas. But the murder rate is still around 4 per 100,000.
A gut-wrenching story, yet much too wide a net has been cast. At a peak of 69 murders per 100K inhabitants and with this story pointing out that the killers are repeaters, it stretches arithmetic, although I’m hardly a statistician, to extrapolate killers in most families within the community. However illustrative and poignant a family situation as that narrated by the author, in the scheme of things one can hardly be accused of having an attitude if one spits out one’s porridge when told by a friend about killers in his family. It’s hardly normal, even in oppressed communities whose majority, carrying on with their lives, can easily find themselves brutalized by a handful of criminal individuals.
As an aside, James Baldwin needs to be remembered and quoted more as this author has done. All too often, the writings of, in my opinion, the most profound chronicler of America’s psyche have been unwisely forsaken.
6 Likes
Long before this article was written, even long before slavery was ended, white supremacists’ lies about black men’s brutality and inhumanity were already deeply embedded in our racist culture.
He’s telling a story about a family of drug dealers in St. Louis. If his surname was Corleone or Capone would you be so concerned about how this story might be used?
I hear an important American story being told about men with very few options who become criminals while staying involved in and hopeful for their children despite their version of doing what had to be done to survive.
8 Likes
the "War on (some people, who use some) Drugs, and the DEA were both the brainchild of Pres. Nixon, not Reagan. Reagan ramped it up, as part of the GOP “Southern Strategy” (also Nixon’s idea) but he never would have had the opportunity, had Nixon not paved the way.
this is a gut wrenching story well told. sadly, it hasn’t yet found an end because, well, we’re still doing the same things, while expecting different results. I believe Dr. Einstein would define us as a crazy society, but there it is.
Mr. Thompson, I’m glad you were able to escape the cycle that the rest of your family, and neighborhood, are caught up in. voices such as yours need to be out there, being heard, loudly and with no mercy given. the only chance your neighborhood, and all the neighborhoods like it, have to break free of the grip of economic and spiritual devastation, is if the sons and daughters of those neighborhoods tell those stories publicly and loudly, so they can’t continue to be ignored by the rest of us. myself, I am white man, getting up there in age. I grew up in a military family and, as I look back, probably lived in what was segregated neighborhoods, though at my young age, I wasn’t necessarily aware of it, they were just the places the Marine Corps sent us to, when my Dad got orders. You got orders, you moved, end of discussion.
I do wish you, and your old neighborhood well. grant me this much, I am at least much more cognizant of the horrors and injustices inflicted on people of color in this country, and do what I can to help. probably not enough, but at least I try to make my peers uncomfortable in their comfortableness. you have to start somewhere. so keep writing young man, we need people able to tell the stories, and inflict discomfort, you did good.
oh, one last thing. sure, some asshole will probably try and use this piece to “justify” doing nothing. fuck them. if you waited until it was 100% certain your words wouldn’t be used in an attempt to continue defending the indefensible, you’d never write another word. Ben Franklin and James Baldwin were right.
8 Likes
Donald, who bore an uncanny physical and personality resemblance to Wesley Snipes’ New Jack City character
This part made me laugh, if only because usually that’s the sort of sentence you’d expect to read from (say) Jim Hoft or someone similar. It’s hard for someone like me to imagine growing up in a situation where that was actually reality, though.
Would have liked to read more about the mechanisms by which institutionalized racism and poverty lead to murder, because I felt like the article somewhat glossed over that aspect (“poor people deal drugs and drug dealers kill each other”) in favor of focusing on just the personal story element. Obviously that was still worthwhile, but I think the balance could have been adjusted slightly in that respect.
What’s the tally for good “Slice” articles at now, 8 or 9? VINDICATED!
1 Like
Poverty in this country is the result of social engineering, that gave one group of people all the advantages and closed all doors to another group. I have no idea how we will dismantle the system. Ending the “war on drugs” would be a beginning. Massive, mandatory drug rehab for addicts and creating jobs in these neighborhoods are necessary steps to kick start economic life. Most of these neighborhoods are food deserts. The old fashion economy with barbers, markets, butcher’s shop, bakery, the family diner, a health clinic, urban orchards and gardens would breath life in these forgotten places. Crime and violence are the result of despair and hopelessness, not poverty.
1 Like
Actually, studies have repeatedly shown that criminal violence in a community is based upon economic level and not related in anyway to race. This is what I think the author was trying to say, though I felt his article made it seem that this was a problem endemic solely to the black community.
Actually, when The Godfather came out, there were many Italian groups who said that the film gave people biased impressions of Italians as all being mobsters and villains. A similar protest was heard when HBO’s The Sopranos was being broadcast.
From Reuters, April 6, 2001:
CHICAGO (Reuters) — In the town where Al Capone gave mobsters a bad name, an Italian-American legal group on Thursday sued the producers of cable TV’s smash show The Sopranos, alleging that it paints Italians as born criminals… “This is like no family I know,” said attorney Enrico Mirabelli, pointing to a poster of the fictitious mob family in whose name the letter R is depicted by a pistol… The association issued a statement saying the series ‘suggests that criminality is in the blood or in the genes of Italian Americans and that Italians as early immigrants to this country had little opportunity other than to turn to crime.’"
– http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=107139
1 Like
this is an important article. I wouldn’t worry too much about what racists will say about it. They will misinterpret everything.
What is important is that there is a problem, we need to recognize the problem to come up with a solution. If we deny that there’s a problem I don’t see any way that the society can come up with a solution. So I’m totally in favor of discussing this. I certainly don’t know why some groups become violent and some don’t. But I do think that we are getting more and more information about human behavior and that we should study it. Then we should do our best to ameliorate it.
Thank you, Juan, for speaking your truth unstintingly. Racists (who, of course, don’t see race) will likely use this story to buttress their narratives about the moral failings of “the blacks,” never acknowledging that your success and the success of millions of other black people defy their stereotypes. That’s the nature of racism: to only see race when it confirms negative views of “those” people.
But we must not let the racists stop us from telling home truths about what racism does to people and communities. We must look honestly at the outcomes of the system we’ve created in this country to isolate, criminalize and control the surplus labor pool – for that is what poorly educated African Americans are in the current economic, social and political arrangement. And, as the tide of globalization, 3D printing and robotics sweep more and more middle-class jobs out to sea, communities in white America have in many ways turned into a version of West St. Louis from the ravages of meth, heroin and oxycontin.
1 Like
I can’t recall any of these Slice articles that make sense, they are the equivalent of FOX’s race baiting type “journalism”.
And while poverty certainly can lead to more stealing and such, there is no excuse at all for murder. And as anyone can see, murderers have been of all races and all social classes. Wealthy people are frequently convicted of murder. And as you say, almost all poor people don’t kill. The ones that do can’t use poverty as an excuse, that’s just pathetic.