I grew up off brand beer poor. It was poor, but a safe neighborhood poor. Sure a couple of rednecks would get loud from time to time, but generally, we looked after each other and kept the mischief to a minimum. Now this was the 1980’s. It was also a time where guns had not become fashion accessories to the extent they are now.
Kids rode their ramshackle bikes to school, and wore hand-me-down clothes. We met at the local sno-cone stand for a treat, and played at the park. Not a one of us thought we were going to be rock stars or doctors. In fact, if there is perhaps one singular insight I can give to growing up this way, is that kids in poverty rarely pick a dream to go with. Food insecurity clouds the mind. It also has a way of making someone hyper-focused on the now, rather than strategizing their future.
In this respect, we had much in common with black youth in blighted urban areas today. Like us, too few feel a need to plan for a future they don’t even believe is coming. Read that again, please.
Then read this passage:
Gun homicide (mass shootings, so-called “everyday” violence, and police-involved shootings) is a universal American threat. But Black Americans are 10 times more likely than White Americans to die from it. And Black youth fare even worse. Black children and teens are 14 times more likely to die from gun homicide than their White counterparts.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (“CERD”) called out the United States’ “high number of gun-related deaths and injuries which disproportionately affect members of racial and ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans.” CERD then urged the U.S. government to take action, including implementing universal background checks for all private sales, prohibiting concealed carry in public; increasing transparency concerning crime guns by repealing the Tiahrt Amendments; and reviewing “stand your ground” laws for principles of proportionality and necessity.
So what happens is a cycle. White flighters see such statistics then panic, never stopping to think that their very flight exacerbates the problem. Or perhaps they don’t care. Most likely they don’t care. They want a bubble. But if they kept reading..
Black people are not inherently more violent. Sadly, violence is a capacity that all humans share. White men, for instance, commit the majority of mass shootings and when faced with “poverty, unemployment, and single-parent households, they are more likely to commit homicide and other violent crimes than black men confronting a similar set of structural impediments.”
Black people are not inherently more violent. There is no innate biological impedient to peace in the genes of black Americans. In the mid 20th century, redlining and the freeways themselves became lines of demarcation for racial inequality. That is the truth. Opportunities were not missed because children ignored them. There was no opportunity to be seen. Read that again as well, please and thank you.
Let me show you the view of a blighted neighborhood:
From 1947.
This is the demographic map from 2010.
If you are going to bang your head against the wall after seeing this, pick a sturdy one. I did.
Now let’s add grocery store density to the mix.
But we’re talking about black on black crime here, I forgot. Ok, so before I rebut the concern among “patriots” about how not enough 12 year-old black children born into poverty and surviving on a diet that leave some with scurvy are tried as adults, let’s take a look at a view from a front porch.
Now let’s try an actual address, 631 E 92nd Pl. Chicago.
The purpose of this excercise, is for you to tell me within a 1 mile radius what is the most likely location a citizen in this neighborhood would procure food for dinner.
Take a good look. Tell me where.
Community investment patterns are often influenced by race as well as wealth. Analyzing the distribution of grocery stores in several large U.S. cities, we find that premium grocery stores are less likely to be located in Black-majority neighborhoods, regardless of the average household income of those neighborhoods, and are substantially more likely to be located in neighborhoods where the Black population share is less than 10%.
The devaluation of Black neighborhoods is linked with redlining and mid-20th century “urban renewal” projects that labeled many Black neighborhoods as “slums” and demolished them. Meanwhile, federal, state, and local leaders invested in infrastructure that brought suburban white residents to and from urban cores, signaling the higher intrinsic value of white communities. These policies acted on the presumed lower value of people and assets in Black communities, which shows up in the kinds of amenities a community offers.
There are children right now in this country of ours either going to bed hungry or going to bed having eaten potato chips or candy for dinner. And they do this everyday. Every day. These children, after years of seeing no progress, no discernible hope for escape become angry, and yes, some act out. Some commit heinous crimes. And while I am not saying they should escape all punishment, because in the end we do make our own decisions, is there no capacity at all for self-reflection among the clueless Fox Newsians castigating black babies as future drug addicts or “animals?”
If they survive the streets, they are many times more likely to suffer from nutritional related ailments. But the right does not care.
The same neighborhoods that were blighted 76 years ago are blighted today. If a 14 year-old kid sees the same tired dilapidated hopeless situation his great-grandfather did, are they still willing to say it is all on him? Look below. This is how society has kept this situation stuck in a state of inertia.
The policy makers, underfund schools, they leave streets pockmarked, they cordon off entire blocks with endless construction detours. They allow systemic and persistent discrimination to persist but it is all the child’s fault, all of it, the child whose nightly life is a bag of Sour Cream Lays for dinner.
I don’t want to hear preaching to me about upbringing when there is not a business to be found within miles of some of these neighborhoods. Republicans tell me insurance won’t cover it. Perhaps. But the government could underwrite projects. They tell me Democrats won’t clean up the neighborhoods. They don’t give them the funding to. And then when they do, it is nearly always the intent of Republicans to treat them like threats, rather than equal members of society.
Pre-COVID, non-White children already experienced a disproportionate burden of gun violence compared to White children. During the pandemic, this disparity in risk of being shot nearly quadrupled between Black and White children. Compared to White children, Black children were 100 times more likely to experience firearm assaults, as of December 2021—up from 27 times more likely before the pandemic. Similarly, the risk of firearm injury tripled between Hispanic children and White children, and nearly tripled between Asian children and White children.
“Racism and poverty are at the heart of both violence and its punitive policy response in the US,” says study senior author Jessica Simes, assistant professor of sociology at Boston University College of Arts & Sciences. “The profound disparities in gun victimization among children that we report in this paper demand comprehensive, anti-poverty policy reforms that center racial justice and the communities most harmed by gun violence.”
“Community violence interventions can stop violence from escalating and break cycles of violence,” (Jonathan, assistant professor of community health sciences and director of the Research on Innovations for Safety and Equity (RISE) Lab.) Jay says. “In the long term, we also need to address more root causes, such assegregation and economic disparities and the ways these issues play out in neighborhood environments.” For example, a previous study he led indicated that increasing tree canopy in underinvested neighborhoods may help reduce gun violence rates and disparities in gun violence.
There is so much more to do, so much more I could share. There are literal volumes that I, as a white man, could not possibly hope to process in a lifetime of dedicated study. I can’t know what it is like to be followed around a jewelry store as a black man. I can’t know the fear or pain Tamir Rice felt, or the last moments of Trayvon Martin because while the poverty as a child is similar, the opportunities and risks were not.
At the beginning of this piece, I mentioned off brand beer. You can get that at a liquor store. But if my family did purchase off brand beer, it was at a Kroger. And at Kroger, we had the ability to buy proper meat and vegetables, along with juices and vitamins. So even poor, by virtue of being white, even in a poor white neighborhood, my health was set on a course far different than poor black children in America. That is the truth.
So cycles of violence continue, while right-wing propaganda absolves white America of any and all responsibility for the problem.
No doubt some of you will see the video stating “73 shot, 11 dead in July 4th violence in Chicago.”
You will see comments like, “I’d like to solve the puzzle, Pat.” Or, “I would like to at this time take the opportunity to thank black Americans for their contributions to society.” There is a concerted effort to paint black Americans as subhuman, and you see it in most every comment board.
These people are doing what weak people do, walking away from the problem instead of actually fighting it.
Today, children are born all over this country, and about 15 percent of them are black, and most of those are in poverty.
Now picture one baby. Just one. This child has dark skin. This child has been born in a community hospital. This child might be driven home to the sound of gunshots. If I accept that the people being led away in handcuffs responsible for those shots, beaten down by poverty, swayed by gang leaders, is this baby’s blueprint for life, “we the people” will have failed this child, and this country long before this baby grows into Mac Davis’s vision of an angry young man in the ghetto. I will have wasted 14 years or so where new schools could have been built, where investments could have been made, where love could have been shown where hope could have been sown.
And those wasted years will have been exactly like the last 76 years documented in this piece.
This is not about guilt, or a need to rescue, this is about decency. This is about honoring the mission of this nation, a better life for all. This is about trying to make the United stop being a lie about the states.
This is about humanity.
And ask why children become orphans. And wives become widows. And mothers bury their children.
Ask yourself these things, as the snow flies, and as you listen to Elvis’ words about the last breath of a child that dies..
As his momma cries.
-ROC