In Solidarity

Today I read an article that reported 72 people were shot in Chicago during the 4th of July weekend and 12 of those people were killed.  That weekend of staggering violence prompted an emergency summit on gun violence in Chicago: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/25/gun-violence-in-chicago-black-leaders-convene-emergency-summit/.  As of Wednesday (7/24/13) there have been 226 murders this year in the city of Chicago.  As of today there now have been at least 227 murders.  For those of you familiar with National Public Radio’s This American Life (TAL), you may have heard the story documenting the lives of students attending Harper High School, where last year alone 29 students were shot.  TAL reporters spent... “five months at Harper High School in Chicago, to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances.”  http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one.  This evening TAL reported, “a sophomore named Darryl Green was found dead behind an abandoned building just four blocks west of the school. Chicago Police and the medical examiner’s office say he’d been killed by a gunshot wound to the head. He was 17. “  

When I left work tonight, I stopped by a neighborhood barbecue hosted by the on-line school located on the other side of the building from my office.  Several students I work with also attended the event.  Additionally, there was a baby-faced 16 year old student who looked like any other teenager, except for the nervous energy he exuded as he paced back and forth in front of the school.  A rival gang in the area, has put a hit out on him.  They’ve ordered him dead.  While people were eating hot dogs and eagerly waiting to see if their raffle ticket would be drawn for a gift card to the nearby grocery store, I noticed it.  We were being stalked.  In all my years of working with youth in communities with a high concentration of gangs, this was the first time the hair on the back of my neck stood up from the danger in the air.  For the fist time ever, I briefly felt the uneasiness that most of the young people I work with feel daily. Older teenage boys slowly walked by in groups of 2 and 3, from all sides of the block.  Cars rolled by, pausing for long dramatic stares.  Students I typically only see in leadership roles were on high alert applying their leadership skills in a different way, scanning the streets for approaching enemies without missing a beat in conversation.

I surveyed the scene, people were sitting at tables, old and young.  Many of them looked weathered from a life of struggle.  There were young children running around laughing, several of whom were younger siblings of students I’ve known for many years. I often make lunch for these children for during the long summer days and I’ve grown to care about them like family.  Then, as if I didn’t have control of my own thoughts, I imagined it, I imagined a shooting breaking out, right there on the corner where I was standing, where a community was finding respite from the heat and I wanted to leave.  The risk of violence was so close I could taste it and yet the only thing I was swallowing was my privilege.  I could get in my car and drive away.  I would be safe and I could focus on my plans to run in the mountains and go climbing over the weekend.  Instead, I chose to stay, at least for a little while, and stand in solidarity with a community that can’t leave.

I don’t understand a world where the lives of young people are not all valued. I don’t know how to reconcile the national coverage mass shootings in white, affluent communities receive that inspire waves of overwhelming support while shootings that occur en masse in low-income black and latino communities are normalized.  I feel helpless, sad, and angry.  This kind of violence is a direct consequence of white privilege, economic privilege, and institutional racism.  I don’t understand why we are not all in the streets, outraged and protesting until young lives are no longer a casualty of this war.