What image do you conjure up when you think of the word 'gang'? Probably not a nice one. Probably a mean and perhaps even terrorizing one. I did too before I worked in Hartford, before I realized that a gang isn't as scary as I thought, and that gang members are victims more than culprits. I think that gets lost too often, and part of the cause is articles such as this one: Why 3 Of America's Most Dangerous Cities Are In Wealthy Connecticut
As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking, "The author has zero experience with what she's writing about. She took a few clippings from around the web and threw it together, making an article that points the finger in the wrong direction and so slightly grazes the root of the problem that I'm almost certain it was an accident or an editor inserted it."
Among the flimsy sentences, the author writes this, "While gangs in Bridgeport are primarily neighborhood-based and focus more on robberies than drugs, gangs in Hartford are more into drug trafficking. An internal police memo from 2009 discussed the "gang infestation" that has been plaguing Hartford, noting that "recruitment is at an all-time high."
More into drug trafficking? Like a good (white) person can be into golf? They can take it up or give it up on a whim? I'm sorry, but being in a gang is slightly more ingraining than a hobby that you get into. And gang infestation? These gangs are just pockets of pests to this author. Exterminate the pests and the city will be cured right as rain, right?
The problem is the gangs are made up of good people and good kids who got fucked by being born in a zip code that offers them a miniscule chance at even a competent education, forget a good one. They were born in a school district that has no money to get their shit together–a temporary destination for teachers and administrators who, before they even start working here, are thinking Hartford or Bridgeport or New Haven is their stepping stone to their next, better-paying and whiter-kids job. That's not even a big deal to me because, as most of the teachers are already white and affluent, it's my opinion that these white-whashed staffs in these schools need to graciously exit if real change is ever going to happen. The only problem is that if all the affluent white people left right now, there wouldn't be enough educated members of the community to fill those empty roles. Why is that? It's not their fault. It's because the white knights, we affluent saviors have failed at righting a system that ensures their failure, and it's been like this for so long (and for so many reasons that it's nauseating), that it's left the community without much hope of bucking it.
But back to the gang "infestation" and bullshit articles that paint fear and contempt across the Internet (which allows white affluent people to feel good about their affluence and their turning a blind eye while saying to themselves, "I'd love to help, but I'm not going to if these people continue choosing gangs and violence and drugs. Hmmph").
To you that do that, don't get mad–just read more about it and maybe even go into a poor area and meet some gang members. These kids choose violence about as much as I chose to go to college. After eighteen years of being hammered with the idea that college is a necessity, that I have to go if I want to do anything with my life, I went unthinkingly. It was never a question. I never sat there–as I looked at my high SAT scores and great grades from my functioning high school–and pondered to myself, "Well, I wonder if college is right for me?" That shit never entered my mind.
And that's what's happening here to these kids in Hartford–it's the same thing that happened to me but on the opposite end of the spectrum. These kids know no other reality but violence. They're surrounded by hardship and aggression in their community, in their homes, and in school. Say one day all their friends enter a gang. Do you think these kids for one second sit on their bedroom floor and think, "I wonder if I should join this gang despite the fact that it may be a bad influence on me and take away from my studies?" That shit doesn't happen in the same way that me sitting on my floor pondering college didn't happen.
The point here is that the problem isn't rooted in the gang members, it's rooted in poverty and racism and these systems that were set up by white people (housing, education, food stamps that practically ensure poor people have bad diets). So speaking in broad terms, it's white people's fault that this came to be, yet it's these impoverished and many times non-white people's problem to not only survive but to solve as well.
Anyway, back to the article, where the author states that police authorities have been meeting with gang members to "persuade" them to stop the violence. Shit. If, during my freshman year of college, somebody completely different than me made me sit down and tried to "persuade" me to drop out, I would have punched him, or at least thought about punching him. The same goes for these kids in Connecticut.
The only solution to all this is education, in my opinion, and one can't simply be persuaded into being educated. You can't show a person the way you live and say, "Look, you need to erase your entire understanding of this world and accept my way of living because it's right and you're wrong."
Fuck.
But that's what the author makes it sound like, and that just further belittles the problem and elevates the white policeman authority of our country, who (it probably appears to the white affluent viewing all this from afar), is working away diligently to save these dark-skinned communities.
Finally, wanna know the worst part of all this? The only people that can read and understand everything I just wrote are the ones who aren't suffering from the problem. If one of my students or even one of my student's parents sat down to read this, he or she likely wouldn't get it, wouldn't have the ability to grasp the ideas that I touch on in this article. And that is almost too much to bear even without reading bullshitty articles like the one I came across this morning.
As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking, "The author has zero experience with what she's writing about. She took a few clippings from around the web and threw it together, making an article that points the finger in the wrong direction and so slightly grazes the root of the problem that I'm almost certain it was an accident or an editor inserted it."
Among the flimsy sentences, the author writes this, "While gangs in Bridgeport are primarily neighborhood-based and focus more on robberies than drugs, gangs in Hartford are more into drug trafficking. An internal police memo from 2009 discussed the "gang infestation" that has been plaguing Hartford, noting that "recruitment is at an all-time high."
More into drug trafficking? Like a good (white) person can be into golf? They can take it up or give it up on a whim? I'm sorry, but being in a gang is slightly more ingraining than a hobby that you get into. And gang infestation? These gangs are just pockets of pests to this author. Exterminate the pests and the city will be cured right as rain, right?
The problem is the gangs are made up of good people and good kids who got fucked by being born in a zip code that offers them a miniscule chance at even a competent education, forget a good one. They were born in a school district that has no money to get their shit together–a temporary destination for teachers and administrators who, before they even start working here, are thinking Hartford or Bridgeport or New Haven is their stepping stone to their next, better-paying and whiter-kids job. That's not even a big deal to me because, as most of the teachers are already white and affluent, it's my opinion that these white-whashed staffs in these schools need to graciously exit if real change is ever going to happen. The only problem is that if all the affluent white people left right now, there wouldn't be enough educated members of the community to fill those empty roles. Why is that? It's not their fault. It's because the white knights, we affluent saviors have failed at righting a system that ensures their failure, and it's been like this for so long (and for so many reasons that it's nauseating), that it's left the community without much hope of bucking it.
But back to the gang "infestation" and bullshit articles that paint fear and contempt across the Internet (which allows white affluent people to feel good about their affluence and their turning a blind eye while saying to themselves, "I'd love to help, but I'm not going to if these people continue choosing gangs and violence and drugs. Hmmph").
To you that do that, don't get mad–just read more about it and maybe even go into a poor area and meet some gang members. These kids choose violence about as much as I chose to go to college. After eighteen years of being hammered with the idea that college is a necessity, that I have to go if I want to do anything with my life, I went unthinkingly. It was never a question. I never sat there–as I looked at my high SAT scores and great grades from my functioning high school–and pondered to myself, "Well, I wonder if college is right for me?" That shit never entered my mind.
And that's what's happening here to these kids in Hartford–it's the same thing that happened to me but on the opposite end of the spectrum. These kids know no other reality but violence. They're surrounded by hardship and aggression in their community, in their homes, and in school. Say one day all their friends enter a gang. Do you think these kids for one second sit on their bedroom floor and think, "I wonder if I should join this gang despite the fact that it may be a bad influence on me and take away from my studies?" That shit doesn't happen in the same way that me sitting on my floor pondering college didn't happen.
The point here is that the problem isn't rooted in the gang members, it's rooted in poverty and racism and these systems that were set up by white people (housing, education, food stamps that practically ensure poor people have bad diets). So speaking in broad terms, it's white people's fault that this came to be, yet it's these impoverished and many times non-white people's problem to not only survive but to solve as well.
Anyway, back to the article, where the author states that police authorities have been meeting with gang members to "persuade" them to stop the violence. Shit. If, during my freshman year of college, somebody completely different than me made me sit down and tried to "persuade" me to drop out, I would have punched him, or at least thought about punching him. The same goes for these kids in Connecticut.
The only solution to all this is education, in my opinion, and one can't simply be persuaded into being educated. You can't show a person the way you live and say, "Look, you need to erase your entire understanding of this world and accept my way of living because it's right and you're wrong."
Fuck.
But that's what the author makes it sound like, and that just further belittles the problem and elevates the white policeman authority of our country, who (it probably appears to the white affluent viewing all this from afar), is working away diligently to save these dark-skinned communities.
Finally, wanna know the worst part of all this? The only people that can read and understand everything I just wrote are the ones who aren't suffering from the problem. If one of my students or even one of my student's parents sat down to read this, he or she likely wouldn't get it, wouldn't have the ability to grasp the ideas that I touch on in this article. And that is almost too much to bear even without reading bullshitty articles like the one I came across this morning.