Walter Gholson, III, Ed.D
Published in Temple University Faculty Herald, 36(1), October 4, 2005
In 1976, Bob Marley and the Wailers released Rastaman Vibration. The lyrics for one song on the album entitled “War” came from a 1968 speech delivered by His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I in which he said, “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, there will be war. Until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation, and until the color of a person’s skin is of no more significance than the color of their eyes, there will be war. Until basic human rights are equally guaranteed without regard to race…the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship or international morality, will remain a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained and there will be war.”
A perusal of minor news stories in major American newspapers will uncover accounts of violence where the victims and perpetrators are younger than eighteen. These deaths may have been gang related or the victims may have just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The body count for young people killed in what is an undeclared war has already exceeded the total number of American casualties during the Vietnam Conflict. This phenomenon is particularly disturbing to the parents of children in urban schools and to those educators who are trying to teach students suffering from the kinds of post-traumatic stress disorders usually associated with surviving combat situations.
By conservative estimates, there are more than one-hundred active street gangs operating in the U.S. with an estimated half million members. What used to be called street gangs has now evolved into sophisticated criminal enterprises whose violent feuding continues to terrorize communities from New York City to Los Angeles. For example, In Monster: The Autobiography of An L.A. Gang Member, Sanyika Shakur also known as Monster Kody Scott explained: “Squads of five usually make raids into neighboring territories for preemptive strikes or retaliatory hits on enemies and targets useful to the opposition. Although both armies are predominantly made up of males, there are females involved in the fighting. These infrastructures were built on robberies and extortions. Today, however, they are maintained from major narcotic deals and distribution throughout America. Each army has a distinct territory, its own flag to which total allegiance is pledged, its own language, customs and philosophy and its own gross national product”(xi-xii).
What we are seeing as anti-social behavior or a lack of discipline in young people may be a direct result of our inability to explain away a history of national violence that silenced both the nonviolent message of Martin Luther King as well as the self-defense call of Malcolm X and the intellectual resistance to any authority figure who does not understand who and what gangs represent.
In his Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?, Haki Madhubuti had an alternative suggestion for a culturally relevant curriculum plan: “Think of the possibilities, if before graduation, all Black high-school students had to study and digest the works of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Chester Himes, Margaret Walker Alexander, Langston Hughes, Maulana Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, Lerone Bennett, Harold Cruse, Sam Yette, Chancellor Williams, Mari Evans, W.E.B. Du Bois and others. What would the result be?”(14-15).
But that kind of lesson plan is seldom implemented, so most of the news written about young people is usually about guns, drugs, and crime and not about the reality of the worlds Black and Latino youths must face each day. There are few stories that focus on how we are trying to fix the multitude of problems, resulting from a non-existent business and residential tax base, which causes failing public schools to miseducate young people, who then look for jobs in a cocaine-based street economy. However negative these minor new stories in the back of big city newspapers are, they do raise major concerns not just about the future of young people, but about the future of America as a whole.
While much of the supporting literature for my ideas here can be found in any Black bookstore, the bulk of my information comes from my daily discussions with members of the students I taught at the Daniel Boone School, one of the alternative schools in The School District of Philadelphia for “at risk” youths. From these candid talks, I began to see and understand what many of us who are over thirty only hear about. One of the central issues in these conversations was how joblessness, crime and family poverty had caused them to see only a future that was bleak and hostile. Many of my students do not believe they will live to be twenty-one. And because of this mind set, these bright and energetic young adults are being programmed for failure, and each night on the streets of their neighborhoods, they play the ghetto version of Russian Roulette. In this version, they challenge whoever confronts them to shoot it out. The person with the most bullets wins.
According to George Knox in his Introduction to Gangs, gang-related homicide rates in most American cities have tripled those at the peak of the Capone era of gangster Chicago. Today, even low-level street criminals have access to high-powered weapons and large sums of cash from narcotics trafficking. In most cities, gangs have constitutions, chains of command, communication systems, retained attorneys, legal investments, and six figure CEO’s. So how did we get to this point and who or what is responsible for what some believe to be a self-inflicted form of modern genocide?
As a reluctant participant in some of the social experiments devised by the U.S. government over the last thirty years to solve problems created by 375 years of chattel slavery, institutional racism, government miseducation, physical abuse and economic oppression, I have learned a few things that tend to color my daily disposition. One of these things is that many of America’s minority citizens have become inexpensive imitations of their Euro-American neighbors. Many of us have become people who have learned too well the lesson of American violence. And as a result of this excellent education, we have shown an alarmingly superior propensity for theft and deceit and because we have learned so well, we have pardoned America for her centuries of oppression and exploitation of non-white nations.
For years people of color in America watched the behavior of the elite class in America, noting that its historic hatred of people of color had created an economic system that discriminated against non-white persons while providing an excellent lifestyle for most white people. But in spite of America’s long history of warfare against her dark-skinned cultures, African Americans have achieved a remarkable record of accomplishments.
Unfortunately, however, most American citizens have almost no knowledge of the true story of America because what they had been taught is a one-sided version and not a full and integrated account of the accomplishments of minority peoples in this country. For example, if someone says that something is the “real Mc Coy,” most people think of Walter Brennan from West Virginia, but not Elijah McCoy, the Black-American inventor who, according to Louis Haber’s Black Pioneers of Science and Invention, held over fifty patents including a lubrication system for locomotive machinery. His system came into such extensive use that people inspecting a new piece of machinery would make sure that it had automatic lubrication by asking, “Is it the real McCoy?” Today, the expression “the real McCoy” is used to indicate perfection (58-59).
Because of this limited educational insight about the accomplishments of our ancestors, many Blacks who are miseducated in American public schools have no standards by which to measure their true abilities, except for the Eurocentric models that have presented them with the lovely state of madness going on in the world today.
Therefore, for the sake of this argument, let us presume that America no longer has a compelling reason to ensure that its minority citizens enjoy a decent standard of living for their families, that after centuries of nonviolence and peaceful protests by their elders, young Americans suddenly have become aware that the dreams their parents had for “America the Beautiful” have become their nightmares on Elm Street. Instead of prosperity, they experience layoffs and downsizing. Educational opportunities have become teachers’ strikes and the end of affirmative action policies. They see the dreams their parents had for a better life for them in America not working. These children born decades after the Civil Rights Era have little respect, if any, for the logic of civil rights philosophies and its nonviolent pacifism. These young people witness real horror stories on the streets of major American cities, watching their relatives wait in vain for the day to come when they could enjoy the lifestyles that non-Black citizens take for granted. These children have grown up seeing on network television how willing the U.S. military is to wage war on any dark-skinned people whose countries are rich with the raw materials needed by Western industrialized nations. These same young people are educated in a public-school system that cannot or will not explain why the sexual proclivities of a President was front-page news or why the government continues to send weapons and CIA mercenaries to teach people effective ways to kill each other.
However, harsh this picture is drawn, the intelligence of these young people continues to be amazing. While they may have all but abandoned belief in the American dream, they have created an international movement based on the economy of rap music. Spoken word artists, producers, musicians have changed the rules of English grammar and developed an economic subculture, which they support by whatever means necessary.
They even know how flawed some adults are because they see us on the streets of America, looking and acting just as lost and hopeless as some of them often feel. And these young people want to know. They want to know why we gave up so quickly on our dreams for equality without fighting like our ancestors did. They also want us to know that they know that many adults are afraid of the young criminals, and they know that this is the reason why we do not or will not tell the police who the murderers of their children are. Some of these adults, they say, are so afraid of losing their drug, gambling, and prostitution connections that they won’t talk about what is really happening. Some of my students say that because of these fears, their relatives always leave someone at home during the day. And at night, they imprison themselves in their apartments while their children sleep on make shift beds on the floor away from windows, thin walls and flying bullets.
And while I realize that there are young people who are healthy, have positive plans, intact support systems, take care of themselves and receive the positive responses that motivate them to great accomplishments, we are also facing a mass exodus (the deaths) of our best and our brightest suggesting that either we don’t care about them or we don’t know how to fix the problems.
During the last few years, all kinds of programs have been tried to put a dent in the youth crime enterprise: things like private correctional facilities, super max prisons, home monitoring devices, boot camp prisons, three felony life convictions, children tried as adults. Most of these innovations are not working because they do not address the source of our problems.
So is the violence in these urban centers part of a larger conspiracy to reduce the minority population drastically. Or is it just another indication of our preoccupation with self-hatred and self-destruction. In their book Educating African American Males: Detroit’s Malcolm X Academy Solution, Clifford Watson and Geneva Smitherman write, “although the deteriorating status of Black American males has become an issue of national focus in the 1990’s plans for their destruction have been a long time in the making. During the seventeenth century Europeans’ fear was not only related to the possibility of physical violence, but also the economic threat posed by Black men who deployed their West African entrepreneurial skill throughout Britain’s North American colonies”(1-2).
Long before the historic Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Amendments, before the assassinations of Malcolm X, Medger Evers and Martin Luther King, Black communities in most American cities were open markets for anybody and anything. These communities, by virtue of their position in the city planning scheme, have, for the most part, been places that were referred to as being “cross the track,” or “uptown,” or on the “South side,” where “everything is everything.” This last saying usually meant that if something was immoral, illegal or illicit, it was probably available in those neighborhoods. Therefore, it should be logical to presume that some of the people who have lived in the so-called inner city for a few years know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows where the “everything” is. And as such is the case, we should then know who the incorporated criminals in our communities are. But even when we see some of the “everything,” many of us claim that we do not. And our children have grown up watching us act like we don’t know and because of this pretension of ignorance, young people have lost most of the respect they had for established authority.
Let us presume that minority groups don’t know or care about the number of families being destroyed by these criminal activities. Let us also imagine that these minority groups have pooled their money to import assault rifles, automatic hand guns, South American cocaine and South East Asian heroin to create neighborhoods of drug addicts and young people who kill each other for profit and fill the nations’ correctional facilities. If we include those who have died indirectly as a result of the conditions in the inner city community, i.e., drug overdoses, stress related illnesses, poor living conditions, inadequate medical care, domestic abuse, the body count would resemble that of a war-torn Third World country.
What seems wrong with this picture is that if this is the real story and if this is what our youth see and talk about in their music, then we should be able to see that this level of war in our communities is one part strategy and one part greed, designed by people with deep pockets who lurk in the shadows of established authority.
And while these young men and women sell narcotic death to their neighbors, kill each other over customer base and product location feuds, the motion picture and record industries are raking in billions of dollars selling movies, videos, C.D’s, T-shirts and other items that celebrate the destruction of our communities and the deaths our children. These media mobsters have seduced us and our children by selling them images of young people who “look” like they are getting paid. These young people dress only in the latest, most expensive fashion, rap about eating only the finest food, drink only top-shelf beverages, drive or are driven in the best automobiles. This glamorous life is what many of these young people see as their image of success and what they want to experience, and they want to experience it now.
Most of them will never find out that their favorite hard-core-gangster-take-it-to-the-street artist is really named Earl from a middle-class family in up-state New York, who is only getting a very small percent of the big money and who has one chance in sixty-six of not ending up a broke junkie-alcoholic-has-been before he is twenty-one. And if he tries to buck the system, he may end up dead.
Is the new music just a form of neo-propaganda designed to divide us so that we can be conquered without protest and without acknowledging that somebody is being paid to help divide us and that we have a common enemy? One of my colleagues’ solution for this genocidal phenomenon mislabeled “Black on Black Crime” is a simple choice of mandatory re-education or mass execution. Although his solution may sound simplistic at best, harsh at the worst, or no solution at all, it does pose the question of what to do with people who have become traitors to their race, culture, and humanity, people who are proud to be part of a mercenary force paid to help us kill us.
But short of this kind of vigilante justice, the only thing that will counter this self-destructive behavior is a real education that is culture centered and relevant and utilizes established as well as innovative educational theories to solve some of the current problems in inner-city communities. We need community colleges that help the surrounding community. We need university urban education programs that produce teachers who still live in those communities. We need more education courses that focus on establishing neighborhood businesses.
So when I hear students trying to emulate the behavior of their favorite rap star by calling each other names white people cannot say in public, I know that it is only because they were not taught their true history and culture, and as such know little or nothing about the spirituality or scholarship of their ancestors.
In his The Miseducation of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson writes that when you control a person's mind, you do not need to restrain him or her physically. Woodson's observations were based on his analysis of an educational system that in his estimation had conspired to teach black people to hate themselves. He was talking about an education devoid of little or any reference to the history of African or African-American accomplishments.
However, before we can undo years of misinformation/miseducation and misfortune, we must first accept the fact that we have been moving in the wrong direction and that attempting to see ourselves as just like other citizens have been major mistakes. While we have been so busy trying to be like the Other, our children have evolved into the kinds of human beings who are hell bent on becoming rich and powerful, regardless of whom they have to hurt, lie to, steal from or kill.
The war in our backyards is a daily battle of attrition for street space in the marketplace. These backyard battles include nightly fire fights for control of street corners and project buildings. Most of the students I talk to already know that there is a war going on in their neighborhoods. They know because they hear the gun shots and they attend the funerals of their friends and classmates who died young.
So as we continue to debate our options, we are damning our children to a life choice of becoming predator or being prey. When what they really need is to hear from us that we understand their frustrations, that there is a way out of this violence, that we are willing and able to support them in the positive efforts and that we will we fight for their right to the good life, and finally, that we love them.