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Why Chicago kids kill one another --- gang inevitability.
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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.
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