One of the harshest realities, is waking up knowing that death could be the next thing you do. This reality plagues the mind’s of youth that live in the Southside of Chicago. I’m reminded of this reality myself experiencing the condition’s such as growing up in a selfish and dysfunctional family, having been recruited on numerous occasions by the gangs, being in the mist of gun battles, and worst of all being educated in a degraded school system. At every turn youth in Chicago face negative perception’s that they are forced to embrace.
There is no coincidence that the years leading up to the election of President Barak Obama, that since 2005 Chicago has led the nation in homicides, peaking in 2008 where the homicide rate surpassed 600 deaths. A disproportion number of deaths were kids ranging from 10 to 17. The case of Derrion Albert, a honor roll student who was beaten to death September 2009, a year after the election of our so-called “black president” shocked the world, but the dismay quickly subsided, as the case with any black person being killed in America. There was no substantial call for change in gun laws, there was no speech that specifically challenged the black community to address the violence, and President Obama was at best quiet , if not totally mute.
Issue’s that are the core of the violence in Chicago are not the gang’s and the drugs, or the guns. These elements are a by-product of generations of former slaves, who had been systematically oppressed, systematically stricken with poverty, and continued to be lynched, mutilated, and maimed. While all the long the rest of the world, particularly whites, was building generational wealth, securing the high-end jobs, building school’s that propagate white superiority, and continued segregation by isolating and confining large numbers of black in project’s, which had become a preverbal funnel for mass deaths and mass incarceration of black men. So, the violence in Chicago is not just the gangs who have no concern for human life or their own people. It’s imperative t hat historical factor’s be address, that will ultimately open the eyes of black men in particular.
People often say why is the past important, how are we to move forward if we continue to dwell on the past. I have a simple answer for them, “BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW IT”! If we as a people knew or understood the past or knew the past, then it would be easy to recognize the core of the violence that hunt black youths in Chicago and worldwide. We would understand that there is a structure, a system design to stamp out remnants of black indigenous culture which is worldwide looking at antiquities of other ancient cultures. This system aims to cover the facts that blacks have been roaming the earth for millions of years, the fact that blacks developed the first concepts of spirituality and gods, and ultimately stamp us out because once we wake up, accountability will show no mercy.
So here we are in 2014 and just this past July 4, 2014, independence day, in which July 4, 1776 black’s had not been free, I digress! This past weekend there was nearly 100 shooting and 14 deaths. Where is the call for gun control in the black community, where is Obama with some sort of message to the black community, where is Jesse and Al marching. Yet, when the kids at Sandy hook was killed, Obama cried, and screamed for gun control. At what point did we think that we was really considered Americans, when the emancipation proclamation happened, or when Jim Crow was over, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or when the war on drugs started, or when they gave us welfare instead of jobs, or when Barak Obama was elected.
At what point do we stop deluding ourselves and each other. If we knew anything as a people, while they’re lynching in Delaware, we would know that we never been free. While in 1999 the CIA and FBI readily admit that they had been shipping drugs and guns into the black community for decades, at what point in the time line of America had a black person been free, while millions of blacks are in prison. When did we become free when our school and holding cells and the project’s were nothing but traps. Then in the mean-time in-between time the rest of the world is build, while our great achievement is staying alive for a day.
Ataensic Media 