For some time I have known that I was more likely to be victimized in a deliberate act of crime by a black male teenager or a young black male than any other physical threat, even cancer or other serious disease... this had deeply troubled me. When these kinds of moods hit us the very first question we ask ourselves is, “Where were the young black males parents’ when all this madness transpired”? Since I would not be sitting as a juror in this case I guess I will not know until after it is decided and the results are made into a public record.
One of the hallmarks of American life I will never fault is freedom of the public to participate in the proceedings of the law. But in the world in which we live we must truly be cautions of how such freedoms may be misused. I noticed that almost half of the jurors bowed out right at the beginning. Did they sense something? The judge and attorneys on both sides were clearly confused, they were all white. I knew that something very unexpected had transpired because the jury selection lasted well beyond 5:00pm.
Although I would have been glad to serve my Fair City as juror in this case I must say I was relieved not to have been chosen. And under the circumstances, one cannot say what would have transpired… My imagination took flight with the two young hoods but it was merely a fictional construct, they might have been the children of one of the jurors… they may have been gathering data for a High School research paper on the criminal court system processes for all I knew… Technically I should have been ashamed of myself for even conceiving such a thing. Me of all people… always positive minded and optimistic about life. I would have surely scolded another person for sharing such a thing with me and advised them to buy out of the racist stereotypes that oppress us as Black men. I guess this revealed another vulnerability of mine… That deep rooted instinct for self-preservation that questions and rationalizes its way to the surface of our consciousness before being super-egoe’d away by what we call street etiquette.
Street Etiquette is a unique brand of bravado that allows us to proceed even and especially amidst dangerous circumstances to show that we are both aware of the danger and unafraid of it. I knew in my mind that I would have been a fair and just juror... but that would never be able to be proved... Knowing the odds I even corrected myself... having taken the most obvious bottom line, the one that as a Black man would be easily taken with me. I have since repaired my sense of dignity and objectivity, after all I am far from being perfect. But somehow then and even now I cannot shake the possibility that I had narrowly missed walking out of the courthouse and into the fire.
FIN
Written by David Vollin on 3/6/12
The Streets are full of options... which choices will a young man make... too young to even be on the streets but nonetheless.... there? Who has failed him? His parents, his community or Both?
Clear consequences follow the mishandling of freedoms we take for granted... In some cases these consequences may not be deserved but what about those in which they are? Is the struggle of the Black man to gain respect on the street sufficient excuse for crimes committed against innocent human beings? Will we allow those who have not sufficiently prepared themselves to re-enter civilized society return to our already assailed communities to push it deeper into the abyss or will we take back our communities from those who have turned them into degenerate slums redolent with crime?
Knowing that the ranks of America's prisons are replete with Black men, what has the Black community done to push for legislation for programs that will properly rehabilitate them and teach them skills they can use to gain employment and self-respect once they return to the civilized world? Has the Black community fought for legislation to allow criminal records to be suppressed in certain circumstances when a criminals debt to society has been met? Ask yourslef why men are being released and then forced to suffer further descrimination whenever they apply for a job if they have truly paid their debts to society? If the debt is not fully paid better to keep them, tech, train and heal them before releasing them into the world...
At the turn of the last century, 1900, Blacks were eager to become educated, education having been denied them for all of the 400 plus, centuries of their enslavement in the Americas. Education was seen as a clear way out of the spiral of poverty and ignorance. Educated Blacks were held in highest esteem by their communities. It was a privilage and honer to be educated and no one respected that more than Black Americans did. We nourtured our children and even though parents had not been formally educated they went through great pains to make sure that their children were properly educated. Black men and women devoted their lives to the education of young Black children. The educated classess of Black Americans gradually opened up new jobs and economic opportunities for Blacks since we were denied access to the established white economic stratification.
Finally when schools and government were desegregated Blacks had the chance to forge ahead into the general economic world of America. Blacks fled from many historically Black institutions to get their 40 Acres and a Mule which they felt was owed to them for centuries of free slave labor, which had allowed these businesses to enjoy thier healthy level of economic prosperity. Unlike many other ethnic goups which had come to America, Blacks did not preserve and protect their communities. After the Civil rights leaders of the 1960's had been assassinated they became disillusioned against the intellectual movement for Black liberation and turned to contraband, pandering and drughs as part of a massive street movement. Numbers rackets, including pandering and drugs had always been present in the Black community historically as an underground source of income off the radar of white Americans. But after the 1960's this subculture gained such momentum that it overtook the intellectual movement and became the primary focus of the Black communities besiged in the ghettos of Urban America. Drugs and compromised ethics only drove the Black community further into the gutter compromising efforts to uplift itself. Because post WWII America was untouched by the devastation of that debacle we became the worlds leaders in manufacturing. The millions of manufacturing jobs requiring unskilled labor allowed Blacks that had no education a chance to earn wealth. But as those jobs failed gradually moving toward the twenty-first century a growing number of Black Americans, having no or insuficient formal education to fall back on in an increasingly technical society were again both unemployed and unemployable. But while drug money still looked lucrative the Black community still did not recognize how important education was. By then many urban Black communities had become so dangerous to live in that education was the least of concerns for young children that struggled to just survive in a world that had no use for Baldwin, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, or any other Black American intellectual and the educational tradition they represented. Today we have a very dismembered Black community that cultivates a culture which moves in the opposite direction of the ethics and standards of the great Heroes of African American History, our legacy of intelligentsia. The Black American think thanks seem to have failed to capture the imagination and attention of thier own community or devised a sucessful strategy to jump-start and clean them up. It's not just a Black thing... the trend apperars to be a cultural one invoving all Americans of all races. Black Americans seem to have been hit the hardest by this trend... I hope and believe that we will but sometimes wonder if we can ever pick oursleves up again... I sometimes sit and wonder, "What would Frederick Douglass think, what would he do"?
FIN
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