MANSFIELD: Taking Back Our Streets – Part 2

By Mansfield Frazier

As some of my readers already know, I host a weekly radio show, The Forum, on Sunday nights from 7 to 10 pm on WTAM. (Yeah, I know Clear Channel owns the station, which, in turn, is owned by Beelzebub). Nonetheless, I’m in need of an intern who wants to learn how to produce radio. Unfortunately, all I can offer in terms of compensation is a foot in the door for some young person interested in this field. Any interested parties can contact me at Info@CoolCleveland.com.

 

Taking Back Our Streets – Part 2

Last week I put forth what I thought was a reasonable solution to at least one form of urban violence, the form that is organized by young people utilizing social media to mob up and wreak havoc, as they did at a festival on Coventry in Cleveland Heights a few years ago. There are federal laws on the books prohibiting the use of FCC-regulated devices to break the law (and planning to riot is certainly breaking the law). All the FBI has to do is to step to a couple of the young people sending out such messages soliciting violence and confiscate their devices. The other young people will immediately cease and desist. Trust that no young person wants their phone taken away.

However, that’s a stopgap measure at best … a more permanent solution to youth violence has to spring from a close examination of the root causes of the negative behaviors these kids engage in, and taking some concrete steps to addressing those issues. This, of course, takes more time, effort and concern … but the payoff is worth it. If we solve their problems we’ll be solving problems for ourselves, indeed, for all of society.

Granted, as conservative commentators love to point out, black youth engage in negative behavior — including killing each other — at a rate that far surpasses any other demographic. That’s simply a fact. But what these closet racists want to conclude from the statistics is that something is inherently wrong — morally and otherwise — with young black males … but the truth is, nothing is wrong with them, something was done to them that causes them to act out in this manner.

And that “something” is a legacy of slavery that morphed into Jim Crow, and morphed again into institutionalized racism that keeps too large of a percentage of persons of color locked out of America’s prosperity. Redlining, limiting access to credit (as with the case of black farmers who recently won a billion dollar-plus lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for denying them loans … loans their white neighbors have access to), and other government-sanctioned actions that were designed specifically to keep a race of people impoverished is what is meant by the term “institutionalized.”

Once and for all we have to realize the primary cause of urban youth violence all across America is poverty. Four million slaves were freed but were left without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. The institution was replaced by slavery by another name: Sharecropping, which is debt peonage. While two-thirds of black Americans have managed to shake off the shackles of poverty, one-third of my race has not yet been able to accomplish what my parents and grandparents did: Become economically whole.

And I submit that if a poll was taken of the young people who acted out on Coventry a few years ago (and in other places since), we’d discover that few, if any of these young people were employed, with most of them never holding an after school or summer job. The unemployment rate among youth of color is five times greater than that of white youth in America. It’s “institutionalized.”

When we hear the term “drug-related shooting,” we need to know it for what it is: the more accurate term should be “poverty-related shooting.” Young black kids are killing each other for “two and few” … really insignificant amounts of money — but it’s a lot when you don’t have any.

We need to realize how incredibly hard it is to be flat broke in an iPod and iPhone world — a world in which we are constantly bombarded advertisements which tell us the things we absolutely must have. And do we really expect that young people from impoverished backgrounds will simply ignore such messages and simply go without? No, they will rob, steal, sell dope and even kill to acquire these markers of success … simply because they have no choice, no other option.

When puberty hits adolescent boys, it’s easy to tell: They start washing under their arms. The hormones that have just begun coursing through their bodies are telling them — indeed, forcing them — to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex. The mating instinct is how species survive … and it’s overpowering.

Females, on the other hand, are attracted (at least initially) to power and wealth. Later, as tastes become more refined due to experience, things such as intelligence and a sense of humor come into play … but from the jump it’s the biggest, coolest dude that has a slick ride, perhaps is a jock, and has all of the trappings of success that attracts young females.

So the young male (black or otherwise … remember, they are being driven by hormones) will do whatever it takes to not be left out … this is a law of nature akin to gravity.

In some other countries, and even in other parts of the U.S., young people from economically deprived backgrounds are being provided with opportunities to earn money and the results have been nothing short of amazing.

We need to create opportunities for at-risk youth to earn money; we also need to pay them for good grades. I know some folks will say they don’t believe in offering kids incentives (as they board a plane to take their kids to Disney World as a reward for achieving good marks in school). But know this: behaviors can be controlled with incentives; in fact, it’s done all the time throughout cultures the world over. The poor urban black child is primarily the one left out — so he joins a gang.

It’s easy to posit (as conservatives like to do) that these are issues that need to be addressed by parents; but, in many cases, minority parents are themselves economically struggling … and hanging on by the skin of the financial teeth. All of their energies often are devoted to simply keeping a roof overhead and food on the table. They simply don’t have the wherewithal to provide their children with the same incentives more economically viable parents offer their progeny.

But there is a bit of light at the end of the dark economic tunnel minority youth find themselves struggling to get out of. Urban agriculture, once it achieves its full potential, can become economic engines that provide youth with steady, reliable — albeit modest — incomes. Those of us working in this field can visualize it as clear as day … and are working to make it a reality. More on that next week.

Read Part One here

 

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

 

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