Charles M. Blow: Black Men, Violence and ‘Fierce Urgency’
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Our society treated black bodies as disposable, if not bound for eradication. Generations of educational, employment, housing, lending and criminal justice policies form the substrata roots of this problem, and they are deeper and more complex than the visible weed of community violence that is so tall and tangled.
Even urban infrastructure like highways were used as a tool to distance and destroy black neighborhoods, as Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx explained in March at the Center for American Progress. As Foxx put it, “The growing gaps between the wealthy, the poor and the middle class have been exacerbated by our transportation system,” and “Attitudes about race and the poor have been embedded in our infrastructure for far too long.”
The roads to America’s prosperity either plowed through black and poor communities or were literally designed to pass them by.
It is easy to argue that these policies took centuries to carve their scars and will likely take a long time to heal (that is, once the country truly decides to begin that healing, instead of plunging the shiv deeper into the wound).
But that is the long view. What do we do now, in the short term, about the disproportionate number of black lives caught in a vortex of violence? What do we do in the meantime? In the space between where we are and where we must arrive, how do we stop filling the cemeteries with the bodies of ever more young black men?
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much, much, much more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/opinion/black-men-violence-and-fierce-urgency.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0
