Jason doesn't quite get it

Have you lived in a college town on homecoming weekend? I have gone to both black and white colleges and wicked behavior prevails in both environments during sports seasons. However, I have noticed that white debauchery is downplayed relative to black. I lived in Tallahassee for a while and witnessed first hand the double standard shown to FSU and FAMU students.

Also, have you witnessed the behavior that goes on when a hometown team wins a championship. I seem to recall a few NCAA, NBA, NFL, and baseball victories that resulted in vandalism and all out insanity in their respective towns. Crowds of people that would be characterized as rioters and looters if they were black.

Regarding Eng: Perhaps, if he was a Asian female he would be more apppreciated by whites, especially the males.

Moreover, I understand the political nature of charactering events and oddities bethey mnegave or others  based on ethnic considerations in the US especially.

Therefore, it calls for a special kind of discipline of sorts, if, in fact, you understand that on one level, a block party in the surburbs, would be characterized as a riot in da hood calls for  a kind of group control or discipline. However, human nature being what it is, regardless of the group makeup in general, when large groups of people gather, shit happens. All all know is I think of Biggie / Tupac / the ball player in Denver / The multiple murder Ray Lewis was in AT but acquitted for / on an on...... I can't think of any other group in the US, so afflicted with such behavoral issues.

Cause: Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome as postulated by a sister on the West coast. I believe there is such an mental illness, although you will not find it in the DSM to date.

Good Piece T3!

I hate to ask this question because I don't pay any attention to the NBA All-Star game. None at all.

What happened that weekend in Las Vegas that doesn't usually happen in Las Vegas? Why is Jason upset? 

According to reports, there were 403 arrests made in Vegas over the five-day All-Star Weekend (Thursday through Monday). Not saying that's a good thing, not defending the acts that got those 403 people locked up. But in order to see the truth behind that number, we need to look at what that 403 means.

As the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, according to the Las Vegas Police Department there was an average of 80.6 arrests made every 24 hours in Vegas over those five days. Compare that to New Year's Eve, when 130 arrests were made in a 12-hour period.

Now, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor's Authority, there were 302,000 people in town for All-Star weekend, about the same number of people (300,000) estimated in Vegas for New Year's Eve. That means the rate for arrests for New Year's Eve was more than three times that of All-Star Weekend.

I've read Whitlock's piece three times. I agree with what I believe is the main thrust of his argument that some folks have serious problems controlling their public behavior but I think he uses a rhetorical shotgun when a .22 pistol fired at short range would have done the job. I think his editor(s) are also at fault for not insisting that he be more focused in his criticisms.

There is no clearly discernible connection, for example, between folks who are engaging in publicly boorish behavior as Whitlock described witnessing and protesting against to his credit at the airport and the disputed claim that too many young blacks view acquiring an education as acting white or being anti-black. My opinion is that Whitlock should have kept his ire directed toward an element in our community that seems to have forgotten that rude loutish public behavior is the antithesis of cool. Tagging them as the black Ku Klux Klan is way over the top and makes no sense other than to demonstrate one's own penchant for being sensational.

I do believe that Whitlock is expressing a real fear on the part of some black people, myself included, that far too many public gatherings in clubs, sporting events etc. involving large numbers of black folks erupt into violent confrontations as the result of real or imagined slights. I'm old enough to remember, for example, that there was a time when you saw trouble brewing between young brothers you could modestly intervene even if you were a complete stranger and get them to cool down and relax.

Something has changed, however, both within the larger American culture and within the African American community in which theatrical melodramatic displays of anger and an obsession with receiving respect seems to be more influential than having a good time and enjoying the party, music or the game. One of the "somethings" that I believe has heightened the volatility of these confrontations is the availability and use of handguns. When I was a teenager and young adult it was easy to walk away from a situation where guys were starting to throw punches at each other but when folks who use guns and don't know jack-shit about how to actually aim a gun and fire it start popping caps in crowds then panic and stampedes occur.

For what its worth and to add some clarity to the arresting figures, as a I recall, of the 400 arrests or so, half were from prostititution.

Further, I understand the tendency of some of our folks, myself included, can get a bit testy regarding the seeming immature and often dangeorus behavior that can manifest itself at large gathering, especially when it involves our folks. It's like watching the 6 o'clock news, seeing a terrible story, and then praying that the perpertrators are not Black. I dunno. If we're being too harsh on these folks, or just getting tired of the seeming reflexive 'knukkle head factor' that screws things up for everyone.  I repeat, I don't see the same BS to the extent it happen with us in other communities. I mean there are thousands of Latino gangbangers. Do they act a fools the World Cup or soccer events to he extent we do. At the latin grammys versus the Source Awards, do we see the same BS for example? Just asking.

Good post, T3. Very thoughtful and illuminating. I don't agree with everything you wrote, for example, I do not believe the Bloods and the Crips will ever have the discipline and understanding required to modify their business model but I think you are largely right about the need for them to do so.

In addition, the murder and mayhem inflicted on civilians has gone way over the line and it reveals a failure to police themselves and to permanently alter the vertical posture of those who do not accept the rules. The Irish gunman Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll was given a one way ticket to see St. Peter when his penchant for firing machine guns at other gangsters in residential neighborhoods proved injurious to the Mob's business. Albert Anastasia was gunned down in a barber's chair, in part, when his fellow mobsters discovered that he had ordered a hit on a civilian who had recognized the bank robber Willie Sutton on the street and turned him in to the police. The heads of the other families thought that Anastasia was becoming a little bit too imperial in exercising life and death decisions. 

I know a brother who used to live in Washington, D.C. He worked in the first Bush Administration and his father served in both Democratic and Republican Administrations. This brother was also a Vietnam-era veteran. I can clearly recall him telling me one night that what black men like he and I needed to do was to form clandestine para-military squads that would operate as vigilantes to restore order, if not law, to our communities. In other words, these death squads would simply cause the criminal elements plaguing our community to disappear one body at a time.

but you venerable brothas ain't gonna do jack shit....,

here's what's real and feasible..., and I'll tell you what, it's the same model I've employed here in KC. It Worked in Wichita, and it has Worked in Kansas City. The way you effect change in the cliques is to become a respected friend and mentor to strong individuals within the cliques. What all young men gravitate to like a moth gravitates to flame is an older man who gives them respect, attention, and to whom they can speak freely and from whom they can learn and profit greatly, without recrimination or extra judgement.

This is not rocket science..., and, it confers numerous indirect benefits as these social networks have a great deal of latent, practical value. young brothas can DO a lot and with the quickness when they're so inclined.

like Prof. Stephens say, his big buffet busting boohunkus just straight scurred of young Black men..,

I would expect Mr. Simmions to be afraid but not Mr, Whitlock. I am 6'2" and barely 180 pounds but I am not afraid of anyone. The only thing I am afraid of is not being able to take care of, provide, and protect my family. However, Whitlock basically said that he was afraid of his own folk in 2007. Now I am hard, extremely hard on my folk but I am not afraid of them nor promote to feel uncomfortable or threatened by people that look like me. Mr. Whitlock I still respect you but let’s attempt to expose the problems without stereotyping all our folks. We do need to check our behavior. Especially those behaviors that are self-destructive and artifical and rooted around money defining who we are. However, you have picked the wrong side, and may even be the personification of what Frantz Fanon called “Black Skin White Mask.� I do respect your opinion, I am just not afraid of my own kind.

he lives far enough out in Kansas as remote from Black folks as it's humanly possible to be short of Utah, Wyoming, or Montana...,

you received on the other site...the bottom line about being grounded and connected is most meaningful...that's not for everyone, but everyone can do something with what they have - where they are - in a method that is authentic and real for them.

that's a security solution.

"the reason gangsta culture thrives and grows is because you have no presence in the lives of young people surrounded by its presence. you can't practice guardian culture ethos unless you directly engage as a guardian...,"

CN - I have profound respect for you and there is a lot of truth in what you wrote. My late father was one of those iconic black men who touched and changed the lives of many young black men. I tried to carry on the tradition and did so for years. I was 35 years old, however, before I got a job paying more than $21,000 a year and I now have three young children to raise who have no families to turn to except for the families that my wife and I are a part of and who have embraced them. I think the brothers and sisters who took advantage of the doors that opened for us in the late 1960s, 1970s and beyond can afford to pay some of these  dues. I already gave at the office and at home. Over and over again. 

"lack the intellectual sophistication to understand the 'real' struggle..."

Kingpins, middle management, street soldiers, couriers? 

If you see a shortage of black folk with whom you can reliably launder money - and have hired a Jewish lawyer/finance rep. and work through Italians or Columbians for your supplies and re-ups and purchase your guns from white supremacists and buy guns made in Russia or China or Israel - and your exit strategy does not include bouncing to a black nation that makes you invisible, what part of this do you not understand?

Black folk are not locked in a struggle to be perfect.  Our redemption is not about our perfection.  If each of us have to be good and right to get "free" it'll never happen.  Vice is an international game and if Black folk don't get into that game, it's going to be a long century.  These gangs are facing the same limitations that "the average brother" is facing at his 9-5, but the terms of the game are different.  The power relationships are nearly identical...

Participation as labor...separated from means of production or limited capacity to own distribution networks and establish regular, residual income streams based on ownership...under-capitalization...limited access to capital and credit...subsidies to competitors by sovereign nation states.  Now extrapolate that from individuals to firms or black nation states. 

Gang members have about as much clarity on this matter as any other pool of black folk I know.  If you really want to meet some clueless bastards, go to business school.

in your world, there are no profits based on anything other than labor exploitation...that's an interesting world...it's really small and has no electricity.  turn on the lights.

if your only approach is moralizing, you'd best keep quiet since you have nothing to add.  as i said, back to your regularly scheduled programming: the one with electricity and business models not predicated solely on labor exploitation.  next you'll be telling me that money, gold, diamonds and ideas and markets are all inherently evil...even markets for used goods and memorabilia...because if someone made it, someone got robbed because there is no fair exchange anywhere, ever, for anything...keep those lights off!!

This pattern is a result of two inherent shortcomings, not of markets, but of capitalist ideology. The first and most fundamental is that there is no real incentive to respect the rules of the game. The most advantageous course of action in a truly capitalist society—where life is all about getting what you can, while you can—is to break the rules, while simultaneously urging others to preserve them so that you can take advantage of those who follow them. To accomplish this when you’re a weak member of society, you devise clever ways of cheating to avoid detection and punishment. If you’re strong, you simply write rules calculated to give you as much advantage as you can forcibly obtain without provoking massive revolt within the system, while simultaneously suppressing cheating as much as possible. This results in a system that is not much more than a cynical game of tactical deception and manipulation played by individuals, businesses and governments, all seeking to get as much gold from the proverbial goose as they possibly can without killing it. Ultimately, this leads to masses of impoverished people (the losers) essentially living as servants of an entrenched economic oligarchy (the winners)."

There's more to that for anyone who cares to read it. As I said, I don't care if no one listens, but I'll damned if I let someone tell me to shut up about the truth.

a solid and compelling argument could be made that television, not non-violence, was the decisive factor in the victories of SCLC over southern hegemony. king was not the first advocate or practitioner of non-violent tactics. he was, however, the first leader to benefit from the unforgiving eye of the camera. booker t. washington didn't have television or similarly compelling and widely-infused mass media at his disposal. the same could be said of garvey, elijah muhammad and a. philip randolph. imagine, if you will, a televised march on washington in 1942 (carried on despite the federal concession of Executive Order 8802) followed by mass black labor movements in cities across the nation.

can you envision garvey's unia on national television? imagine the 1940's and the removal of blacks from the Central Avenue train station on national television in millions of homes - and imagine protests for jobs with defense contractors along the Pacific coast. pt cruiser can recount these stories in detail, but there is no video. the CRM benefited from a confluence of factors that shamed the devil. moral suasion requires a mirror - and external observation.

we've had the moral highground for four centuries. alexis de tocqueville was crystal clear about the immorality of american white folk with respect to africans. the moral highground and appeals for fairness are not necessarily connected to the work of self-determination...and that is why black individuals often work as appendages to white institutions (the state, firms, etc.) - and those who fight for scraps, but do not work as appendages, must be criminalized...think of the dollar van drivers in New York City who were criminalized by the state for providing a direct service to their people.

I have tons of examples just like that - but the fact remains, an enduring economic solution is required. The moral highgorund (from where I sit) is irrelevant.

properly configured Black male intergenerational relationships would go a long way toward solving/expediting lots of guardian/cohesion and representational/leadership problems plagueing our beleaguered communities...,

the onus for implementing these solutions falls to the elders..., unfortunately, there are lots of elders who're operationally and topologically divorced from the youngers who've been left to fend for themselves or be mentored by suboptimal O.G. mentors..,

too gottdam many punkazz black face white mask elders competing with rather than collaborating with the youngers....,

True, but it doesn't do much when somebody is showing his ass in an airport, bar or some other public venue and you try to approach them in a respectful manner and get threatened or, worse, injured or killed.

PT, in my opinion, you're never entitled to approach a stranger like that and expect anything but the worst.  Personally, I gave up that type of intervention a long time ago, along about the same time I stopped routinely packing heat.

When and if I intervene in a public setting nowadays, it's only ever with folk I know and who take for granted that I care about them 

GDAWG, do they appear to have an autonomous respect subsystem in operation among themselves, which subsystem is clearly oppositional defiant toward the contextualizing, mainstream respect subsystem?

IOW, do they seem to be at equilibrium with one another, but don't give a flying phuk about you, me, or anybody else? If so, that's because they're suffering from a profound deficit in intergenerational, interpersonal socialization...., IMOHO.

and it's simply too late to try to anonymously and authoritatively correct they shit in real time.....,

PT, in my opinion, you're never entitled to approach a stranger like that and expect anything but the worst.

You're probably right but I can remember as a teenager times when my friends and I were getting too loud and boisterous in public areas (we knew better) and some older black person would approach us and ask that we tone it down. It did not matter if that person was a stranger or not. We had sense enough to realize that we were being offensive. We always toned it down  and never back talked. Times have changed and I don't want to carry a gun.

I think what motivated our response when we were teenagers was that we did not want that black person, usually but not always a male, who approached us to be ashamed of us. As long as that person did not publicly shame us by calling us names or talking loudly we were willing to comply with his or her request. 

I think what motivated our response when we were teenagers was that we did not want that black person, usually but not always a male, who approached us to be ashamed of us.

Bingo!!! And because we were embedded in an intergenerational network of folks who we didn't want to be ashamed of us, we were conditioned to generalize this respect - and this was a great goodness.

What has changed is that there are now too many kneegrows in the burbs no longer routinely exemplifying in these young lives and letting the burden fall on unionized young white women with education degrees who can't connect and who aren't really qualified to teach their subject matters,

We have no one to blame for these changes but ourselves..., 

CN,

We lived in the Sunnydale Housing Projects for six years until my parents bought a home in the Ingleside in 1962. Sunnydale is located on the western slope of an area of San Francisco called Visitacion Valley. The San Bruno Mountains, which are in walking distance from Sunnydale, formed the southern border of the Valley. We would catch tadpoles there in the spring and release them back into small creeks and ponds that existed until mid-summer. We could see the San Francisco Bay and East Bay Hills from the upper portions of Sunnydale, Brookdale and Blythdale Avenues, which were the main streets in the development, and the most spectacular sunrises and sunsets except during the summer months because of the morning and evening fog.

Sunnydale was built during the Great Depression under the auspices of the WPA. Blacks, of course, were not allowed to live there until 1954 when the NAACP sued the City and County of San Francisco and the courts ruled in the NAACP's favor. When blacks began moving in no race riots or other violence took place as the Housing Authority Commission and its attorneys had claimed would occur. Folks got along, I believe, because we were all in the same boat. Last year I posted a photograph of one of my elementary school classes here. We were a mixed bag of kids.

Each unit in the development had an unfenced front and back yard. In addition, there were large grassy common areas in the front, back and side of each building. The Housing Authority took care of watering and mowing the grass in the common areas and yards but the residents of each unit were responsible for watering their front and rear yards. The Housing Authority would levy a modest fine against the person or persons whose name was on the lease if the yards were not watered.

Today, Sunnydale is considered so dangerous that folks I grew up with refuse to drive through the development even during the day. All the lawns are ruined and there is little grass to be found anywhere because the Housing Authority allows residents to park their cars directly in front of their units instead of requiring them to use the parking lots because auto thefts and car break-ins have become a major problem.

The lack of grass bothers me for personal reasons. A brother named Billy Ray Foster and I spent several days one summer in the grassy area between the two buildings where we lived looking for four leaf clovers. Billy found about ten and I got half that amount. We also found about six five leaf clovers too. We pressed them between sheets of wax paper inside hardbound books. 

John McLaren, the beautiful elementary school that was named after the man who is generally credited with leading the creation of Golden Gate Park (the Laborers Union, in true San Francisco fashion, believes that the credit should go to William Hammond Hall) which I consider to be an undiscovered modernist gem of architectural design for a school building and from where I graduated, is now closed because the NAACP lost its collective mind in the wake of the Brown decision. John McLaren was an excellent school with a dedicated and progressive faculty that loved teaching children.

Sunnydale was not a gritty urban area when my family and I were living there. It was, perhaps, unique and something rare in terms of public housing and urban America.