10 Comments

You could be writing the exact same article about Italian towns and cities, especially in Sicily and Calabria. It’s all the same patterns of criminality and the same patterns of passive acquiescence to protect it. It has taken enormous individual acts of courage to tear at that social ‘contract’ with a large portion of those people paying with their lives and blood.

Every crime oppressed community needs a Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in law enforcement. Their courage, persistence, legal success and assassinations in the 1990s changed Sicily in a way that the last 200 years haven’t been able to. I hope the Black Community finds men and women like them who actually care enough about the people in their neighbourhoods to be as courageous and driven.

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The analysis of the issue is comprehensive - well done. But perhaps no examination of it is truly complete without reference to Jill Leovy’s “Ghettoside”, which emphasizes the lack of protection afforded witnesses by the justice system. Left- leaning opinion misses the actual attendant civil rights issue: the passivity of law enforcement and prosecutors that allows their inaction to masquerade as a bug instead of a feature. It isn’t crying wolf to call it ‘structural racism’, despite the overuse of the term by many on the left.

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Excellent point! Great example of systemic complacency that is external to the communities.

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100% you get it. It's exactly this attitude that allows so much violence to perpetuate in my hood. It's corrosive and while "I get it" at some crude level, it ultimately handicaps everyone and is not a productive worldview. The past few years our family has felt increasingly unsafe locally, after many years of living well. Now, even during the daylight hours on a weekday, anything goes. We need to separate criminality from identity. Get the criminals sorted out and then all the imperfections in policy and everything else are much easier to deal with seriously.

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"We need to separate criminality from identity". YES!! Thanks for reading.

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Great job Tekeita!!

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I use “M.” like the French do, for Monsieur but ALSO for Madam and Mademoiselle EQUALLY. That’s just me.

Thank You, M. Owens, and congratulations on a life well-lived. I'm sure that's why the article was so great. Thought-provoking, which brought out some good comments as well.

Perfecto. TYTY.

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Thank you so much!

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Great read.

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A black police woman pointed out to me that in these low-income neighborhoods the black community is ever so lightly being held hostage. Pretty much everyone. Like I explained previously it's a violent subculture that is historically White. Takeita, please help me make this movie even if it's just helping me find someone who can do filmmaking. We need to break this hostage situation.

luv1st9@gmail.com

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