October 8, 2009 - Issue 345 |
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Chicago School Violence and the Urban
Crisis |
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It was with
some concern that when the 16 year-old student Derrion Albert was killed recently by other youth wielding
wooden clubs in Chicago, the White House responded by deciding to send
Attorney General Eric Holder and Schools Chief Arne Duncan into the fray.
First of all, we should be pleased that this incident attracted action
by the White House at all, but my concern is that at base it is really
not an issue of policing or one of school administration, since 400 youths
have been killed in The missing piece of this was the White House Office on Urban Affairs. In his latest book, More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (Issues of Our Time), Professor William Julius Wilson’s legendary research on Chicago poverty concludes that people behave the way they are socialized and structural racism has had a big role in developing the culture through which blacks view and engage the world. He means by structural racism, segregation – isolation - from other races through systematic patterns of housing placement and discrimination, the lack of productive work and its replacement by illicit activity, intractable poverty and the psychological reinforcement of negative status stereotypes, and other things. These things undercut positive parenting and shape the response of youth to events in their environment. Where This has to do with Urban
policy, but when I look at what the new White House Office is doing, it
seems from the tour in which Director Adolfo Carrion has initiated, stopping
in Well, on one hand I get it, Urban policy has been so maligned in the past 30 years by conservatives that it has been ignored because it was problem oriented and peoples of color were pegged as the reason for the problems as opposed to the conditions under which most were forced to live. The Obama Administration is attempting to change the image of cities by connecting them to metro areas and placing them in the role of the engines of growth for the country and for their impact on the global economy. This fair enough, but I don’t see how it works with Blacks and Hispanics becoming a larger share of the population and constituting populations that experience many of the social problems that drove whites away from cities into the suburbs in the first place. And now that whites are coming back into many cities and Blacks are moving to the suburbs, the problems that were once considered strictly “Urban” are now part of the Metro areas. So, there still needs to be strong programs dealing with poverty elimination, job creation, excellent education in the public schools, and the like. All of the research I have seen suggests when this happens and the environment improves, violence will decrease. Without urgent action, the White House had better get ready for an increase in such violent incidents among youth in other cities as the unemployment rate for Blacks moves from 16% now to over 20% by next year. So, I would hope that the White House does not make
the BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board member Dr.
Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African
American Leadership Center and Professor of Government and Politics at
the |
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