gun whipped in Philly

The ground in front of the Virgin Mary statue seemed soft enough, but the handgun that had pistol-whipped me down outside my church was hard enough. They got away with a grand total of $23 dollars, plus my cell and my credit cards. They also at least temporarily ended my feelings of sympathy for young black men. Taken to a central precinct by Philly cops and asked for a description (black, mid-twenties, wearing a dark hoodie) the computer brought up 780-some pictures.
As a friend said, "round up the whole town."
The obvious caveat is that almost every other black person in or near the church and school, on N. 11th a few blocks north of Girard, had been nothing but good to me the few months I stayed there. How could I judge all of them against the two knuckelheads that robbed me?
The answer, unfortunately, is Darwinism. For weeks (OK maybe months) I gave young black men the evil eye when I passed them, even though I knew they hate that. I wanted to yell at all the Temple students wearing hooded sweatshirts, since they all looked like the Grim Reaper to me now.
Later I went to a half-way drug treatment house that's run by an incredibly couragous nun, who lived in a trailer in a half-abandoned area.
I would sit in the men's house in the morning and listen to street and prison hardened men talk about their pasts, "out there" in the badlands. They told me that many muggers are high when they commit their acts. Some just admitted to enjoying having that kind of power over others.
Young ghetto black men are the last and only group that has yet to fully participate in American society and the mainstream economy. They have become a kind of Barbarian class, to be feared and gotten as far away from as possible.
But remember, what Americans are trying is unprecedented in history: to be a great society that is great without subjugating someone or some group. The Greeks and the Romans had slaves, the British had an empire that spanned the globe which they could exploit. The US had a society where blacks where supposedly "free" after emancipation, but freed slaves had no money, no land, and eventually no vote. All of this ended not in 1865, as high school history texts might have it, but in 1964-1965 when legislation was passed making them full citizens.
But the civil rights movement was largely a struggle conducted by southern middle-class blacks. They were never really able to reach out to the "brothers" on the mean streets of northern cities.
It is this group, then, on which government needs to concentrate its resources. To do otherwise is to keep ghetto blacks as a permanent enemy class.
Instead, we hire private security companies, send children to private school, or move out to lily-white outer suburbs (often called "exurbs"). The last welfare reform was aimed at welfare mothers, as though they are the ones the rest of us are terrified by. To be obvious, it is young men that are the problem, and the principal domestic issue for the nation is how to finally include them in the greater society. Hopefully some day will come when being constantly suspicous of this group can be seen as truly bigoted. Right now, its considered being street smart.
People may say police departments are to blame with "racial profiling," but who is it that tacitly approves constant vigilance against this group? The wealthy and the upper-middle class.
The one year I lived in Detroit is an extreme example of this kind of thinking. The old money enclave of Grosse Pointe, on Lake St. Clair, was bordered on two sides by the decaying and crime-ridden East Side of Detroit. In a car, one could easily pass frame houses that were falling down upon themselves. But upon passing into Grosse Point, the scenery was magically transformed into mansions with manicured lawns rolling down into the lake.
The towns that make up Grosse Point wanted at one time to dredge a "flood-control" ditch on its eastern border. Black politicians in Detroit rightly called it what it was: a moat against the city.
The moat was never built, but police cars drive up and down the street that separates the two places constantly. Is this the idea of the police department, the majority of whom could never afford Grosse Pointe? No. They are simply following the tacit order of the town: keep Detroit (read: most blacks) out.
Blaming "racist cops" for what government and residents clearly want is, not to be cute about it, a cop-out. It lets the affluent pretend involvement and concern for ghetto blacks, while farming out the unpleasant security issues to working-class residents of nearby suburbs.
Republican candidates have prospered by stoking fear of the ghetto their domestic policy. It will take a couragous candidate to own up to our responsibilty, and , not coincidentally what the rest of us get in helping the ghetto poor.
To put it another way, wouldn't you like to walk without fear of black men. Wouldn't you like to be unafraid to someone pulling a gun on you? Wouldn't you like to be comfortable with your fellow man, instead of thinking of him as a constant threat? Or does America somehow need a chosen enemy?
There's a lot of talk about the US becoming a multiracial society. That's fine, so long as our original sin, or original "other" is part of it. One has to remember, as a British friend told me, that the ghetto is a canary in a coal mine. Whatever is done there, the children of mainstream society will imitate it in some way (clothes, music, gangsta-behavoir etc)
So the next time you pick up a newspaper or see a report on some horrific violence in the inner -city, just remember, it's coming soon to a suburb near you.