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.…
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 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.