Now that we have officially added the thirty-first child to our Chicago Public Schools (CPS) death watch, a morbid body count that was established here by super non-educator, Paul Vallas, let’s explore the chain-of-reasoning that drives children to kill one another. I’ve had hundreds of professional encounters with Chicago gangs, most often they were members of either the Vice Lords, or the Gangster Disciples, and over one two-year period, the Latin Kings and the Two-Sixers. However due to the limits of my experience and the mathematics of column space, I will confine my opinions to analysis of black-on-black mayhem. Notice that I capitalize gang names, and I also speak of them in the same tones I’d use when mentioning equivalent criminal enterprises like AIG, ENRON, or the Illinois Governor‘s office. Why? Because it is not smart to underestimate your adversary. The universal attraction to gangs: Despite what the ACLU, NOW and Code Pink might want to believe, boys have an anthropological attraction to strength, physical strength, demonstrative physical strength. It is no happenstance that men spend billions of dollars on sports, and go nuts with the beginning of the football season. The end of the college basketball season is called March Madness, not March Niceness. The first casualty of childhood: Long before the Santa Claus con is debunked, and the Easter Bunny is thrown overboard, the mommy myth is destroyed. Right about the third grade, boys start the physical process of becoming men. If you don’t believe me, grab an angry nine-year old, but put the coffee cup down first. Oh, they won’t say anything, but boys see that mom is kinda little and the only reason mom can punish them is because the boy permits it. The renown village fear of mama is merely ghetto code for respect. The ghetto nightmare: If a nine-year old can resist mommy, what in the heck can she do to fight off the barbarians when they storm the gate? Answer: Call daddy. Therein lies the rub. In seven out of ten black families, there is no daddy to answer the call. The third grade man-child realizes that he is the family protector, mama though beloved, is just noise. The cultural Imperative: Black boys are reared in homes where spanking is considered normal punishment. They go to schools where street fighting is not only expected, it is mandatory. The only reliable path out of poverty is contact sports. Before the Michael Jordan era, the community’s biggest heroes were always boxers: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali. Furthermore, the first American institution outside of sports to level the playing field for black men was the military. Visit Fort Huachuca in Arizona and you will be greeted by the larger than life statue of the legendary Buffalo Soldier that stands guard at the main gate. And you wonder why black men are have an affinity for violence? The urban way: As our nation developed from a mercantile colony to an industrial powerhouse, strong-hearted immigrants poured into our cities, rolled their sleeves up, joined with ex-slaves and built a super power. And while they were at work and their wives were struggling with the new language, their rough-and-tumble children were beating the socialism out of each other on the streets of New York, Chicago, and every other big city. The father of modern Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley (the elder) was himself a made member of a sometimes violent Irish street gang, the Hamburg Club. Theo Shirek in 2002, wrote: Even the Irish were in further separated into groups, the Dashed Irish lived in the north northwest of Bridgeport, the Canaryville Irish lived in the south of Bridgeport, and the little area around the church of the Nativity of Our Lord was where the Hamburg Irish lived. . . . And the youth of the area had the Hamburg Athletic Club, which functioned as a baseball club, a mechanism of the political machine, and even a youth gang. This club would be the start of Daley’s political life.
The guns: Street violence with fists, Louisville Sluggers, bicycle chains, and switchblades have been routine artifacts of urban existence, but it was the introduction of drugs that opened the door to handguns and tricked-out automobiles. It is here that we must insert the corporate element. Blacks do not control the importation of drugs, nor do they manufacture firearms. Nevertheless, once established, drug distribution networks must be defended. Big money, bigger guns. Besides, the explosive potential of a ergonomically perfect man-tool is as irresistible as the temptation to see what it can do. Power, as Chairman Mao Tse Sung famously said, ‘comes from the barrel of a gun.’
The killing: ENRON is not to blame when one child shoots another, the shooter is fully at fault. Angry, dysfunctional, and UNGUIDED children, when overwhelmed by the factors listed above, become an anti-social force so vile and irrational that they are no less lethal that the terrorists we are fighting in our ‘Overseas Contingency Operations.’ (Jeez!) The pathos: As a principal I was constantly at war with the silly attempts to give children self-esteem. Esteem is earned, not bestowed. Ironically, self-contempt is a dish served to structure-less children in mouth-size bites that take a collective toll early in life. Your typical CPS shooter values little in life, least of all himself. Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man captures this malady perfectly, and that was a half-century ago. Indeed, a boy starts off life in 70% of black homes without a father, then he enrolls in a sub-par school system with an 85% female faculty which has a 100% prohibition on prayer and patriotism, and little regard for developing manhood. On the other hand, street gangs have creeds, oaths, and multiple symbols of masculine allegiance. Connect-the-dots. Darwinian evolution: Any organism, once it grabs a foothold, will scratch, claw, and evolve to survive. The gang would enroll a member in that school just so the gang member could engage that teacher in an incident that would result in the teacher taking a punch at the kid so that the teacher’s reputation would diminish and he would lose the power he had to thwart their recruitment drive. Most excellent counter-insurgency. Never underestimate your enemy.
An eight-grade youngster, Danny, who’d just moved here from New York told me a chilling tale, and I don’t chill easily. Danny, a Latino lad, said that the gangs depended on two natural phenomena to sustain a continuing line of recruits. The first, single-parent homes, and the second, bad teachers. I was shocked when Danny told me that when the gangs encountered a caring teacher that was blocking the recruitment of a sought-after boy, the gang took action.
Comments
So what is a "bad teacher" -- a middle-aged woman who is not roaming the streets of Chicago, interfering with gang recruitment? If school administrators allow the building -- I can't even call some of them schools anymore -- to become adolescent playgrounds without student accountability, what is the role of the teacher beyond calling the single-parent, the other person you blame for violence? How does a "good teacher" inspire a classroom of 28 students, when the forceful minority have taken over the building?
I am sick to death of media blaming the single mom. Let me tell you about my child's experiences dealing with her dad. You know, the all-powerful, wonderful dad of whom you and the rest of your ilk like to extol the virtues of and sing the non-stop praises for at all hours of the day and night.
Dad is a brute. He not only bullies our child, but bullies his current wife and her children as well. He has taken my child to dark parking lots and threatened her; he has threatened her with a knife on one occasion. Until last year when I got a court order preventing him from calling my house, he would call often, yelling, screaming, and threatening to do this or that whenever he could not get his way. However, this is about all the courts would put a stop to.He continues to see our daughter, much to my chagrin.
He never allows our daughter, a straight-A, top of the class scholar, to do participate in extracurricular activities when she's with him. She is basically allowed to babysit his other children while he and his wife attend parties. They attend parties very often. He usually returns home fairly lit I understand.
Space does not allow me to cover things on a blow-by-blow, year-by-year basis, but trust me, it has been quite an experience overall.
And to add to it, the children that now reside with him are scared to death of him, so much so that they, much like my daughter in the past, are currently seeing therapists and counselors.
So...before anyone else writes additional crappy rhetoric about how problems can be solved by having a man in the house, please stop and think about the many people in the world and how a biased generalization can do more harm than good. There are good and bad parents, male and female, single or married. Let's not forget that and work together to attain more comprehensive solutions that address the overall culture of greed and violence in American society (not just African American society), enduring racism, the structure of capitalism and the like.
more than 50 % of all crime is committed by males between 15-25. 2/3rds of those males are from single parent homes (vast majority of which are female headed). 2/3rds of all teen pregnancies are from single mom run households. Do you see a trend?
"A 100% prohibition on prayer and patriotism" -- this is how you describe a district in which the Pledge of Allegiance and moments of silence are mandated? Where a principal got away with running an explicitly religious small school for years?
"Boys have an anthropological attraction to strength, physical strength, demonstrative physical strength" -- no. This is not true of all boys. This is, however, true of a large number of inner-city African-American boys. It's also true of the Highland Southern descendants of "Scots-Irish" border-dwellers from Northern England. In both cases, you're looking at poor, landless peoples who faced generations of exploitation and oppression at the hands of wealthy landowners from another culture; who experienced violence nearly every day of their lives; and whose only opportunities to gain glory and distinction were as warriors (the men) or breeders of warriors (the women). It's no coincidence that you see the same patterns of ad-hoc families, flaunting of sex and violence, lack of respect for education, suspicion of anything culturally foreign, and constant feuding across Appalachia and the mid-South as you see in the urban inner city. "Ghetto" blacks have more in common with the racist crackers who persecuted them for decades and drove them out of the South than either group realizes or would care to admit.
I have a theory that this anthropological pattern, while it appears frequently among African-American families that came north during the Great Migration, is probably much less common among the descendants of free Northern African-Americans. The North, by and large, doesn't promote the same kind of hypersensitive honor culture that exists in the South, and it's historically held education in much higher regard.
adsd
Thank you sick of it Chicago. I think single mothers are used as a scapegoat, and it is a distraction from the issue. I always wonder why there is little mention of male violence. Not so-called inherent male violence, but accepted male violence. Just as we talk around the issue of school violence, I think we ignore the issue of male violence--that it exists, that it is growing, that it needs attention.
I don't think he is blaming the mothers. It is about our men and what is happening to them! Where have all the cowboys gone? It is simply a fact that there are few good men who have been raised properly to be men. I believe the problem here is how we define men. Men are given superficial power that does not support the depth of their needs.
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