Guns and Race As Viewed Through the Lens of Personal Experience
My background does not encompass much time spent in urban jungles and on the streets, fending for survival.
Catholic schools and, eventually, seminary life led to Northwestern University, where I cannot claim to have ever seen a gun.
In fact, the only experiences I'd had with weapons were watching my dad - a former Chicago policeman and eventual lead investigator for the Cook County State's Attorney's office - clean his department issues.
Firearms were not his passion.
In fact, he only entered the profession as it was, 'one of the few jobs available' for black ex-military men during the years separating the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Unfortunately, the succeeding four decades ushered in a dip in African-American cultural standards coinciding with the implementation of government housing in urban areas (which, in turn, led to the ghettoization of black America), falling rates in black achievement and educational levels due to persistent school segregation, a crippling crack-cocaine epidemic that played a role in the decline of the black population as a whole, and gun proliferation that equipped gangs with the weapons of their own racial destruction.
'In every raid I ever led,' he recently recalled, 'we confiscated a large amount of knockoff AK-47 and ARX-160 military assault rifles.
' While those fortunate enough to have mirrored my own social pedigree are, largely, sheltered from such conditions, they are apparently familiar to those regularly subjected to these harsh realities.
After graduating from the university, I spent a decade in the Hollywood Hills, where drugs and guns are largely ignored in favor of celebrity trials and tribulations.
There, dealers own the boulevards and winding hillsides.
Theft and robbery were a natural part of the culture, and, in an incident typical of the false notion of 'to serve and protect,' when summoning the police to my residence following a break-in attempt by burglars, dispatchers incorrectly documented the address and, after two hours, relayed that officers had been, mistakenly, sent to the opposite side of the city.
Such disorganization - coupled with a total lack of care regarding the fates and living conditions of minority demographics (displayed in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin incident, where shooter George Zimmerman was arrested a month after the fact and only as a result of media and social pressure) - leads to the conclusion that non-white Americans receive unfair, unequal treatment not just limited to policing or cultural segregation.
As former President Dwight Eisenhower stated in response to civil rights, 'I don't believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,' and therein lies the true issue (News Conference, The American Presidency Project, June 26, 1957.
) Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes reported, 'The dangers that guns pose on our streets simply cannot be overstated' ('11 Indicted, More Than 140 Weapons Seized in Alleged Sting,' NY1, October 18, 2012.
) As much of this activity occurs in black areas, the same victims and their families continue to live in poverty, unemployed with enormous school drop-out rates while relying on such programs as affirmative action and welfare and existing at the mercy of the nearly all-white corporate establishment which, knowingly and silently, judges job applicants on the basis of race alone (studies have shown higher employment rates for white applicants who submit the exact same résumé for job consideration as their black counterparts) (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 'Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,' November 18, 2002.
) Even though I, as a top student at all schools I ever attended in my formative years, did not benefit from nor need affirmative action to achieve success, the practice of encouraging groups of impoverished people to solve their own problems and form their own communities without the necessary and proper resources to achieve benefit is a uniquely American folly with roots in the founders' Democratic-Republican political party and its split into factions during the early years of electoral politics.
Culturally, America operated on a 'caste system' based in Freemasonry; spoils were divided by nationality, with blacks receiving the least of all available racial groups as the constitutional equivalent of subhumans.
Later, this idea morphed into 'separate but equal' lifestyles, where blacks were provided inadequate facilities, prohibited from sharing in the spoils to an even greater degree, and still expected to prosper despite being prevented, socially, from fully doing so.
The families of the wealthiest and most privileged in the system did not fade away but survived into the Twenty-First Century, and anyone expecting the situation to have improved given the ascendancy of these people into all necessary aspects of human life is naive.
In a recorded tribute to the Occupy movement ('Occupy' from Holy Guitar!), I mention during an interview segment that, as a sophomore, the students would, after breaking into my locker, draw swastikas on the locker and my books.
These people were steadfastly opposed to any person of color achieving anything substantial at all, on any level.
Apparently, even reading a textbook was deemed a threat to the established power structure.
As the community there was quite small, I was informed of the perpetrators, but, in a twisted turn of fate not so unexpected given the current state of affairs in our nation, these once-bully racists, as adults, became badge and gun toting Chicago policemen with the luxury of picking and choosing punishments for citizens at will while allowing crime rates to spiral out of control in black communities (Effron and Janik, 'Chicago's Gang Violence Fueled Through Social Media,' ABC News, October 19, 2012.
) African-Americans cried out for equal housing, schooling, and employment opportunities during the Civil Rights era of the Fifties and Sixties, yet these institutions have each become more segregated than ever, with public opinion on nearly all important social issues divided in halves according to political allegiance (suggesting racial division since few minorities vote for Republican candidates.
) At U.
S.
colleges, the racism is woven even deeper into the social fabric, as many white Americans have been trained through right-wing media discourse and rhetoric to believe their liberties are, somehow, being eroded through the process of equality (Sherman, 'Fisher vs.
Texas: Supreme Court Takes Up Affirmative Action,' Huffington Post, October 10, 2012.
) At Northwestern, I was subjected to an enormous amount of discrimination that manifested itself in the form of being prevented from joining a fraternity on the basis of race, and a roommate being forced by his father, a Nebraska-based attorney, to either comply with demands to discontinue living with non-whites or face losing an inheritance.
People who were, then, bound by such ignorance can now be found within the judicial and political sectors, and within the machinations of such corporations as General Motors.
As for many of them, whose supposed higher intelligence led to the achievement of 'liberal' degrees, Fox's Bernie Goldberg responds, 'Let's see how those superior liberals feel if they recognize that they're the ones who perfected this form of slander' ('Is Jon Stewart Racist?', Fox News, June 28, 2011.
) As I entered the 'corporate workforce,' bosses at marketing firms railed against hiring female job applicants and displayed their personal dismay for me by dressing up in blackface - without ever truly being familiar with my mixed ethnic heritage.
This occurred during the first decade of the current century and, interestingly, these people were promoting black entertainers' products to the public.
Even though much of black America's detriments begin at the heels of pop culture icons who largely encourage sexism, thuggery, and violence, I wish you luck, dear reader.
As you are likely forced to rely on potential racists and their 'benevolence' for financial sustenance, you'll need it.
Follow Marcus Singletary on Twitter at www.
twitter.
com/IAmSingletary.
Catholic schools and, eventually, seminary life led to Northwestern University, where I cannot claim to have ever seen a gun.
In fact, the only experiences I'd had with weapons were watching my dad - a former Chicago policeman and eventual lead investigator for the Cook County State's Attorney's office - clean his department issues.
Firearms were not his passion.
In fact, he only entered the profession as it was, 'one of the few jobs available' for black ex-military men during the years separating the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Unfortunately, the succeeding four decades ushered in a dip in African-American cultural standards coinciding with the implementation of government housing in urban areas (which, in turn, led to the ghettoization of black America), falling rates in black achievement and educational levels due to persistent school segregation, a crippling crack-cocaine epidemic that played a role in the decline of the black population as a whole, and gun proliferation that equipped gangs with the weapons of their own racial destruction.
'In every raid I ever led,' he recently recalled, 'we confiscated a large amount of knockoff AK-47 and ARX-160 military assault rifles.
' While those fortunate enough to have mirrored my own social pedigree are, largely, sheltered from such conditions, they are apparently familiar to those regularly subjected to these harsh realities.
After graduating from the university, I spent a decade in the Hollywood Hills, where drugs and guns are largely ignored in favor of celebrity trials and tribulations.
There, dealers own the boulevards and winding hillsides.
Theft and robbery were a natural part of the culture, and, in an incident typical of the false notion of 'to serve and protect,' when summoning the police to my residence following a break-in attempt by burglars, dispatchers incorrectly documented the address and, after two hours, relayed that officers had been, mistakenly, sent to the opposite side of the city.
Such disorganization - coupled with a total lack of care regarding the fates and living conditions of minority demographics (displayed in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin incident, where shooter George Zimmerman was arrested a month after the fact and only as a result of media and social pressure) - leads to the conclusion that non-white Americans receive unfair, unequal treatment not just limited to policing or cultural segregation.
As former President Dwight Eisenhower stated in response to civil rights, 'I don't believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions,' and therein lies the true issue (News Conference, The American Presidency Project, June 26, 1957.
) Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes reported, 'The dangers that guns pose on our streets simply cannot be overstated' ('11 Indicted, More Than 140 Weapons Seized in Alleged Sting,' NY1, October 18, 2012.
) As much of this activity occurs in black areas, the same victims and their families continue to live in poverty, unemployed with enormous school drop-out rates while relying on such programs as affirmative action and welfare and existing at the mercy of the nearly all-white corporate establishment which, knowingly and silently, judges job applicants on the basis of race alone (studies have shown higher employment rates for white applicants who submit the exact same résumé for job consideration as their black counterparts) (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 'Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,' November 18, 2002.
) Even though I, as a top student at all schools I ever attended in my formative years, did not benefit from nor need affirmative action to achieve success, the practice of encouraging groups of impoverished people to solve their own problems and form their own communities without the necessary and proper resources to achieve benefit is a uniquely American folly with roots in the founders' Democratic-Republican political party and its split into factions during the early years of electoral politics.
Culturally, America operated on a 'caste system' based in Freemasonry; spoils were divided by nationality, with blacks receiving the least of all available racial groups as the constitutional equivalent of subhumans.
Later, this idea morphed into 'separate but equal' lifestyles, where blacks were provided inadequate facilities, prohibited from sharing in the spoils to an even greater degree, and still expected to prosper despite being prevented, socially, from fully doing so.
The families of the wealthiest and most privileged in the system did not fade away but survived into the Twenty-First Century, and anyone expecting the situation to have improved given the ascendancy of these people into all necessary aspects of human life is naive.
In a recorded tribute to the Occupy movement ('Occupy' from Holy Guitar!), I mention during an interview segment that, as a sophomore, the students would, after breaking into my locker, draw swastikas on the locker and my books.
These people were steadfastly opposed to any person of color achieving anything substantial at all, on any level.
Apparently, even reading a textbook was deemed a threat to the established power structure.
As the community there was quite small, I was informed of the perpetrators, but, in a twisted turn of fate not so unexpected given the current state of affairs in our nation, these once-bully racists, as adults, became badge and gun toting Chicago policemen with the luxury of picking and choosing punishments for citizens at will while allowing crime rates to spiral out of control in black communities (Effron and Janik, 'Chicago's Gang Violence Fueled Through Social Media,' ABC News, October 19, 2012.
) African-Americans cried out for equal housing, schooling, and employment opportunities during the Civil Rights era of the Fifties and Sixties, yet these institutions have each become more segregated than ever, with public opinion on nearly all important social issues divided in halves according to political allegiance (suggesting racial division since few minorities vote for Republican candidates.
) At U.
S.
colleges, the racism is woven even deeper into the social fabric, as many white Americans have been trained through right-wing media discourse and rhetoric to believe their liberties are, somehow, being eroded through the process of equality (Sherman, 'Fisher vs.
Texas: Supreme Court Takes Up Affirmative Action,' Huffington Post, October 10, 2012.
) At Northwestern, I was subjected to an enormous amount of discrimination that manifested itself in the form of being prevented from joining a fraternity on the basis of race, and a roommate being forced by his father, a Nebraska-based attorney, to either comply with demands to discontinue living with non-whites or face losing an inheritance.
People who were, then, bound by such ignorance can now be found within the judicial and political sectors, and within the machinations of such corporations as General Motors.
As for many of them, whose supposed higher intelligence led to the achievement of 'liberal' degrees, Fox's Bernie Goldberg responds, 'Let's see how those superior liberals feel if they recognize that they're the ones who perfected this form of slander' ('Is Jon Stewart Racist?', Fox News, June 28, 2011.
) As I entered the 'corporate workforce,' bosses at marketing firms railed against hiring female job applicants and displayed their personal dismay for me by dressing up in blackface - without ever truly being familiar with my mixed ethnic heritage.
This occurred during the first decade of the current century and, interestingly, these people were promoting black entertainers' products to the public.
Even though much of black America's detriments begin at the heels of pop culture icons who largely encourage sexism, thuggery, and violence, I wish you luck, dear reader.
As you are likely forced to rely on potential racists and their 'benevolence' for financial sustenance, you'll need it.
Follow Marcus Singletary on Twitter at www.
twitter.
com/IAmSingletary.
