The documentary “On The Frontline: Taking Back Our Streets,” produced by brothers David and Derek Grace of Grace Boyz Productions, focused on youth, gang and gun violence that has continued to plague primarily the black and brown communities o
The documentary “On The Frontline: Taking Back Our Streets,” produced by brothers David and Derek Grace of Grace Boyz Productions, focused on youth, gang and gun violence that has continued to plague primarily the black and brown communities of Chicago and what can be done to reach some attainable and realistic solutions.
As I recently viewed the film, I had an epiphany. Why not address the issue of “cultural attitude vs. cultural violence.”
We’ve had dialogue, marched, held prayer vigils, mentored at-risk youth, talked with parents and educators and increased community outreach. Faith-based groups have begun to “open the doors to the church,” as well as the Chicago Police Department utilizing many resources in high-crime areas of the city.
The CAPS Implementation Office is creating at least two outreach components: speaking with Chicago Public Schools students about staying away from gangs, guns, drugs and the culture of violence, and youth forums where the youth can address the police directly throughout the city.
Lets look at how cultural attitude influences cultural violence.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was once quoted: “There is nothing more dangerous in all of the world than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. You have the moral obligation to be intelligent.”
In other words, where does it say if you are poor, lacking education, surviving in substandard living conditions from a single-parent household, and dare I say, without gainful employment, that taking someone else’s life has to become part of the misery?
Camiella Williams, youth educator director of the Blair Holt Peace Alliance, said in the documentary she was angry about the murders of many of her friends over the years that she wanted other people to “literally” feel her pain. She had thoughts of physically lashing out at people. She was so hurt that she wanted to hurt other people. She admitted to hurting a person once but regretted her actions and realized that she was wrong. She matured with wisdom.
Our culture and attitude towards how we deal with, address and achieve conflict resolution without resorting to life-ending acts of violence has to consciously turn the corner and turn the page to the “moral obligation to be intelligent.” This moral obligation and intelligence emanates from whence one came.
Bill Cosby said, of which I will paraphrase, “young mothers and young fathers who do not know how to be parents are a large reason for our problems [cultural violence].”
A conscious awareness to know who you are and your capacity to raise a child in an already hostile environment, will speak volumes to the community that you refuse to lose your child to a culture of violence.
African Americans are historically part of the working-class-poor, as are many Caucasians, within the American diaspora. The difference is that African-Americans were systemically forced, feared and cowered into the crabs-in-a-barrel syndrome of unfair social practices that intentionally denied them “forty acres and a mule.”
But perseverance to break the glass ceiling continues to prevail.
While attending an August 30 community meeting at Morgan Park High School, the Retro-Current organization was awarded funding to establish their version of a CPS community watch group in the Morgan Park area because of gang and interpersonal outbreaks of public violence, which have caused many students to be subjected to what I have coined as “peer predators.”
These peer predators, gangs, street tribes, block-busters, or bullies, according to four parents, gave varying accounts of the constant challenge of their children having been approached, accosted, beaten, stabbed and sometimes shot by a crew of teens and young adults in the Morgan Park area known as “the jungle boys.”
According to the parents the group consists of 50 to 60 young males, who troll this once safe and sound Morgan Park community, intimidating, threatening and beating unsuspecting teen victims who attend Morgan Park and or are new to the neighborhood, into joining them. The ones who resist have run the risk of being brutally accosted.
One parent said her husband was attacked when he went to save their son from a near-death beating. One parent grew up in the Morgan Park community and knew many of the parents of the children who belonged to the “jungle boys.” She went to their homes and told the parents about their child’s destructive and criminal behavior, only to be met with resistance, denial and anti-accusatory responses mixed with a dose of expletive diatribe.
When parents consciously condone, defend and deny their child’s bad behavior it eludes to, and rewards bad behavior, and only exacerbates, fuels the fire and fans the flames for the cultural violence to continue and destroy our most precious resources that God has to offer, and that is our children…their children.
A cultural attitude adjustment is in tall order at this time for adults with out-of-control children to become conscientious parents from day one of birthing a child into the world.
In order for us to change the mindsets, bad patterns, loose lifestyles and choices that give rise to decadent cultural attitude and cultural violence, we must cut the cancer of self-hate and self-depredation out of our purview and rebuild the village on vocation and education with the moral capacity and political will to reclaim, reaffirm and rebuild the family structure on an impenetrable foundation with a spiritual center.
Copyright 2010 Chicago Defender
*Youth membership orientation for the Blair Holt Memorial Foundation is Sept. 4 from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. at Saint Sabina Church, 1210 West 78th Pl.
Ronald M. Holt, a veteran Chicago police officer, is the Director of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) Implementation Office. He’s also a founding member of the Purpose Over Pain organization. www.purposeoverpain.org.
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