You know what Mark Twain said about statistics....I have never understood the obsessions with per centages in any situation....nor obsessions with color our race or any of that....having said that, to pretend that all is well in America's urban core, or that it's much ado about nothing or that it is the same everywhere is crazy.
I live i…
You know what Mark Twain said about statistics....I have never understood the obsessions with per centages in any situation....nor obsessions with color our race or any of that....having said that, to pretend that all is well in America's urban core, or that it's much ado about nothing or that it is the same everywhere is crazy.
I live in Detroit. I am white, although my father's father was off the boat from the deepest reaches of southern Italy and considered black by the Irish louts who ruled his neighborhood and terrorized his family. He became white through (Jesuit) (admission based on merit) schooling, which led to a PhD. My wife is black, black as can be. Born and raised in the bush in Kenya. Here are some observations, from both of us. I am well aware that correlation doesn't equal causation, that all of my stories are "anecdotal" (and thus generally perceived as having less value than "scientific" analysis)....I get it...
But still:
1. In my little corner of there world, in Detroit, which is 80=% black, as defined by the people themselves, the physical handling of firearms is so casual, so unsafe, so absolutely disconnected from the reality of what happens when that trigger is pulled or weapon dropped....it is mind blowing. There is an apparent close-to-total disconnect from the often-permanent consequences of what happens when a weapon is discharged that, to this day, after many years here, I can not wrap my head around. I'm not a squeamish liberal who shudders at the sight of a firearm. Every house had a gun where I grew up, and 4 years in the USMC infantry exposed me to a bunch more.
2. Related to point No.1 above, but distinct: the casualness with which disputes of ANY kind are settled with firearms as a FIRST resort is mind-boggling. When my neighbor called in her brother to assassinate her "man", casually, and her "man" (who wasn't even hit in the fusillade of gunfire) barely reacted to the gun battle (he was back with her 3-4 days later).....I could fill up Substack with moire non-scientific anecdotes like this... but
3. There is violence everywhere, but in the Detroit urban core (and seemingly in other cities) there is something----something--- going on that leads to off the charts rates of violence among African-Americans, more often men, but startlingly quite frequently women as well. The statistics, accurate or informative or not, on "black-on-black" violence are actually distorted by the "black" word....it is most definitively not "black" males...it is black-males-born-in-central/northern-American-cities who are both causing and being affected by the gun violence. The crime rate among African immigrants here is so negligible as to be unmeasurable....
4. My wife was recently called a "b**** wh***" by one of her students, a 6 year old boy. There are no consequences for that behavior, none, not even temporary suspension. When the mother of one of her students bursts into her classroom and says "I'm gonna f*** this b**** up", before she has even introduced herself, there are no consequences. When a 8-10 year old boy has reached into my work truck and stolen my phone and bought sneakers for his family and pizza for his boys using my CashApp, and is standing on the porch with a big smile while I'm trying to deal with his mother, and he is up on FB waving wads of $100 bills and cell phones, and there are NO consequences, none, it isn't a stretch to hazard a very educated guess that these kids are monsters in the making, and the mother in question is modeling behavior that makes it extremely likely that her children will be part of one set of grim statistics or an other.
5. So why is this? Is it the "hip-hop" culture? Too many video games? Really poor role modeling? A total breakdown of respect for anything? A lack of discipline at a really young age which leads to increasingly dysfunctional behavior? I don't know, but what I do know is that there is something unique in what I have seen here in terms of the casualness of gun violence. I have heard about, but not been exposed to the seemingly indiscriminate violence swirling around some of the Latin gangs, but that isn't part of my experience so I'll let others lead the way.
Great article, btw, and thought-provoking....as always.
I grew up in Saint Louis (left in 67 to enlist in the Marines) and went to an integrated vocational high school before they were generally integrated. As a white guy I was narrowly a minority. A large number came from the projects. It was a violent place. Before the age of guns, it was knives. Multiple stabbings and slashings every year. My locker was across the hall from the nurse's office in my freshman year and several times I couldn't go to it to swap book because there was a cop and a victim there.
An interesting observation was that the stabbings, slashings and one broken bottle to the face was black on black. One could conjure reasons. They were mostly in proximity to each other, people hung with their own. When a guy got stabbed rolling bones in the boy's room, you didn't see white guys gambling with black guys, so they weren't there to get stabbed. I whizzed and left quickly when that was going on.
Even back then I didn't see race as causal as much as environmental things were. People adapt to their environment and the projects were a bad environment to grow up in. Toxic culture spreads like cancer. I tend to view it as a cancer affecting (black in this case) people in the environment rather than the environment being what it is due to the racial makeup of that environment. What initiated that toxin is a whole subject where arguments tend to be more tribal than logic based.
I was raised in Texas and we moved to detroit in the sixties. We only stayed a couple of years. I was in the third grade and was constantly being beat up on by the black kids. They would gang up on me and push me to the ground, then they would all take turns hitting and kicking me. Soon I was sent to the school counselors office. The counselor asked me way those kids wanted to beat me up. My answer, “cause I’m from Texas.”
Now I know is was probably because I was a little red headed, blue eyed girl from Texas. They was just mad. And many are still mad today because they are never allowed to forget and move on like many many before them had to do.
You know what Mark Twain said about statistics....I have never understood the obsessions with per centages in any situation....nor obsessions with color our race or any of that....having said that, to pretend that all is well in America's urban core, or that it's much ado about nothing or that it is the same everywhere is crazy.
I live in Detroit. I am white, although my father's father was off the boat from the deepest reaches of southern Italy and considered black by the Irish louts who ruled his neighborhood and terrorized his family. He became white through (Jesuit) (admission based on merit) schooling, which led to a PhD. My wife is black, black as can be. Born and raised in the bush in Kenya. Here are some observations, from both of us. I am well aware that correlation doesn't equal causation, that all of my stories are "anecdotal" (and thus generally perceived as having less value than "scientific" analysis)....I get it...
But still:
1. In my little corner of there world, in Detroit, which is 80=% black, as defined by the people themselves, the physical handling of firearms is so casual, so unsafe, so absolutely disconnected from the reality of what happens when that trigger is pulled or weapon dropped....it is mind blowing. There is an apparent close-to-total disconnect from the often-permanent consequences of what happens when a weapon is discharged that, to this day, after many years here, I can not wrap my head around. I'm not a squeamish liberal who shudders at the sight of a firearm. Every house had a gun where I grew up, and 4 years in the USMC infantry exposed me to a bunch more.
2. Related to point No.1 above, but distinct: the casualness with which disputes of ANY kind are settled with firearms as a FIRST resort is mind-boggling. When my neighbor called in her brother to assassinate her "man", casually, and her "man" (who wasn't even hit in the fusillade of gunfire) barely reacted to the gun battle (he was back with her 3-4 days later).....I could fill up Substack with moire non-scientific anecdotes like this... but
3. There is violence everywhere, but in the Detroit urban core (and seemingly in other cities) there is something----something--- going on that leads to off the charts rates of violence among African-Americans, more often men, but startlingly quite frequently women as well. The statistics, accurate or informative or not, on "black-on-black" violence are actually distorted by the "black" word....it is most definitively not "black" males...it is black-males-born-in-central/northern-American-cities who are both causing and being affected by the gun violence. The crime rate among African immigrants here is so negligible as to be unmeasurable....
4. My wife was recently called a "b**** wh***" by one of her students, a 6 year old boy. There are no consequences for that behavior, none, not even temporary suspension. When the mother of one of her students bursts into her classroom and says "I'm gonna f*** this b**** up", before she has even introduced herself, there are no consequences. When a 8-10 year old boy has reached into my work truck and stolen my phone and bought sneakers for his family and pizza for his boys using my CashApp, and is standing on the porch with a big smile while I'm trying to deal with his mother, and he is up on FB waving wads of $100 bills and cell phones, and there are NO consequences, none, it isn't a stretch to hazard a very educated guess that these kids are monsters in the making, and the mother in question is modeling behavior that makes it extremely likely that her children will be part of one set of grim statistics or an other.
5. So why is this? Is it the "hip-hop" culture? Too many video games? Really poor role modeling? A total breakdown of respect for anything? A lack of discipline at a really young age which leads to increasingly dysfunctional behavior? I don't know, but what I do know is that there is something unique in what I have seen here in terms of the casualness of gun violence. I have heard about, but not been exposed to the seemingly indiscriminate violence swirling around some of the Latin gangs, but that isn't part of my experience so I'll let others lead the way.
Great article, btw, and thought-provoking....as always.
I grew up in Saint Louis (left in 67 to enlist in the Marines) and went to an integrated vocational high school before they were generally integrated. As a white guy I was narrowly a minority. A large number came from the projects. It was a violent place. Before the age of guns, it was knives. Multiple stabbings and slashings every year. My locker was across the hall from the nurse's office in my freshman year and several times I couldn't go to it to swap book because there was a cop and a victim there.
An interesting observation was that the stabbings, slashings and one broken bottle to the face was black on black. One could conjure reasons. They were mostly in proximity to each other, people hung with their own. When a guy got stabbed rolling bones in the boy's room, you didn't see white guys gambling with black guys, so they weren't there to get stabbed. I whizzed and left quickly when that was going on.
Even back then I didn't see race as causal as much as environmental things were. People adapt to their environment and the projects were a bad environment to grow up in. Toxic culture spreads like cancer. I tend to view it as a cancer affecting (black in this case) people in the environment rather than the environment being what it is due to the racial makeup of that environment. What initiated that toxin is a whole subject where arguments tend to be more tribal than logic based.
I was raised in Texas and we moved to detroit in the sixties. We only stayed a couple of years. I was in the third grade and was constantly being beat up on by the black kids. They would gang up on me and push me to the ground, then they would all take turns hitting and kicking me. Soon I was sent to the school counselors office. The counselor asked me way those kids wanted to beat me up. My answer, “cause I’m from Texas.”
Now I know is was probably because I was a little red headed, blue eyed girl from Texas. They was just mad. And many are still mad today because they are never allowed to forget and move on like many many before them had to do.