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Our friends at Windy Citizen tipped us off to a letter written by 'Anonymous', a 17-year old girl according to Salon.com who is a senior at Fenger High School near Agape Community Center where fellow student Derrion Albert was beaten to death.
Her letter is an honest account of what it's like to be a student from Altgeld Gardens housing project attending Fenger where she was shifted after Carver High School was closed. She talks about gang violence before Derrion's death - "When I was a sophomore, the night before prom, a boy got shot. He was playing Russian roulette at his house." And after - "They have people patting us down, on the chest and in between the cleavage when we go into school every day."
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I think the people who commented on the Carver story from earlier ought to read this letter. It's not about letting the gangs dictate who goes where, it's about kids who want to learn getting to and from school safely. There's a reason that "divide and conquer" is an axiom.
The letter only convinces me more that the people in these neighborhoods have already arbitrarily divided themselves, and they want to maintain that division.
That's fucking idiotic.
You think these people have a choice? You think they have options? They're the end product of a decades long experiment in marginalizing the black and poor in this city. They're at the ass-end of a generational poverty. Most of these kids accept a level of violence, intimidation and harassment that would cause you're average middle class kid to run screaming for the hills. The police are a militarized force keeping them penned in, leaving gangs to fill the social vacuum and actually "police" the streets. No jobs, crumbling infrastructure, a city that has long since moved on to bigger and brighter (and whiter) things.
But yea, it's just those blacks dividing themselves. They're animals, let them lose their souls right?
I don't endorse segregating them into reservations simply because I don't believe they're animals. They're better than this, and yes, they do have a choice. According to this girl's letter, they choose to subdivide themselves according to street ... 119th, 123rd, and so on. How does allowing that separation to continue encourage unity?
And no, I'm not reducing this to a black problem. Look at Eastern Europe. How do you think Croatia happened? Or Bosnia? Serbia? A dozen other names of smaller and smaller divisions on almost the neighborhood level which were allowed to fester for centuries. What we're seeing here is the birth of the future's genocides. Further isolating them onto their own little patches of turf only reinforces that.
Oh, is this the same Anonymous that bought us such good "true life stories, ya'll" like Go Ask Alice and Jay's Journal?"
Anonymous = 28 year old bored grad student who submitted this to Salon to conduct a "social experiment."