Mon Aug 31, 2020 2:54 pm
Wow. That was well said. And your earlier post, too. I tip my cap to you.
I dont want get all political here. This place is a refuge from societal problems. I would just note that certain deaths cause more trauma than other deaths. Only about 3,000 died in the terrorism on 9-11 but that was an immensively traumatic societal event.Only 58,000 US soldiers died in the Vietnam War but again that was an immensively traumatic event in our history. Those deaths in Chicago do cause a lot of grief but the death of George Floyd and others are the tip of the iceberg overlaid on top of uncountable indignities suffered over the years by black people at the hands of a dominant white power structure. And so they cause a far deeper wound.
And the roots of the violence in Chicago come from somewhere and pretty clearly the roots of that violence are largely segregation and discrimination by whites who held the reins of power over them. Black gangs developed as a coping mechanism to deal with a white culture that projected negative images of black people at them. Black gangs are where young black people have gained a sense of belonging, purpose, and worth the dominant culture would not give them. But of course now those gangs are a scourge on their own communities. If you want to cure the black gang problem...you need to cure the problems that caused those gangs to arise in the first place.
And that is not to absolve the people who commit the violence. People have free will and they are still responsible for their actions. Most black people in Chicago do not commit violent acts and have faced the same obstacles of those that do. But gangs and the resultant gang violence did not arise from problems internal to those communities but from external causes, from discrimination and mistreatment by whites who held power over them.