I spent the first 10 years of my life growing up in the south side of Chicago. It was at a time when there was a great migration of black folk from the southern states and many settled on the south side. There was a great flight of white people from the south side to the north side and suburbs. Some people never gave the new people a chance.
These white people fled from a wonderful place. Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, the lake front, the museums, and other landmarks. They took their wealth with them and left the newcomers to their own devices.
When I was 5 years old, a black boy asked me if he could ride my bike. Sure, I said, and then I watched him ride away on it, never to return. The cops found the bike a few weeks later and returned it. What struck me was that the kid had tricked it out, and I pretty much regretted that he didn't get to keep it. He sure seemed to care about it a lot more than I did.
We had a german shepherd, a wonderful dog. There were two times my father came to pick me up from school with that dog and a gun, both in 1968. One was during the riots at the democratic national convention, the other was the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
There were a couple of times I was outright robbed on the street by black boys much bigger and older than I was. I think that was the reason my father decided to move the family away from the south side. But damned if he didn't give it every opportunity for us to stay.
I played organized baseball for 14 years, t-ball through varsity and babe ruth league and all that. I discovered basketball as a sport to play in the offseason, and became an addict.
I played basketball every day. When I had a free hour in school, I was in the gym with a few other guys playing pickup games. When school was out, I jammed a basketball in the tubing of my bike and rode to the playgrounds near DePaul University to play against college guys. I remember a few times breaking or dislocating fingers and having a black medical student jerk them back into place so I could keep playing.
When I wanted a change of scenery, I'd ride down to the Mayor Daley's Youth Foundation and Fire Deptartment Gym. This was a huge building, much like an airplane hanger (probably was at some point) with 14 full basketball courts and a boxing ring, and it was right on Navy Pier. When I played there, I was one of the shortest guys there and many times the only white guy there. When it came time to pick teams, they honored me by asking me to play for their team, often the first guy picked when choosing sides. None of them gave me any reason to fear them.
The bottom line is that if you give people, who might seem different on the surface, a chance, you might find they're human beings just like you - they put their pants on one leg at a time (or in barfo's case, who knows how he puts on his pants). This is true for white people who don't know black people, or don't know hispanic people, or don't know gay people...
My observations are that Maris is right (for once) about it being about racism. The white people fled because of race and fears about people they didn't even know.
To make things worse, the city planned based on racism. They built "projects" that were shiney new apartment buildings all packed together on some vacant land. They invited the "poor black people" to move in and subsidized their rent. Then they built freeways around the places to keep the black people in and made it difficult for anyone to create any enterprise there. Then they let the buildings decay to the point where (lead) paint peels off the walls, the elevators don't work so mothers have to carry bags of groceries up 12 flights of stairs, there'd be no heat in the winter, etc.
This kind of bullshit is still going on by the govt. there. Black men are targeted for arrest and then taken into back rooms and beaten with rubber hoses and burned on radiators and that sort of thing.
How much has the city of Chicago paid out to victims of police torture? The cities also located toxic waste dumps in minority neighborhoods.
These socio-economic conditions, as well as numerous others, clearly have a negative effect on family and opportunity for those discriminated against. In the absence of these things, gangs are seen as a valid support mechanism as a sort of replacement. It's unfortunate that the gangs don't ultimately do more to promote legal enterprise, IMO.
All this is my roundabout way of getting to ignorance. As I wrote, if you don't give people a chance, you are only contributing to your own ignorance. Ignorance is prevalent in a number of posts in this thread, and some people need to get a grip on reality about these things.
HCP is a perfect example that what I say is true. In my book, he's such a good natured and friendly fellow who's succeeded against odds white people never face, and you wouldn't know it if you didn't give yourself the chance to get to know him.
