It’s the one story.
It’s the imaginary red-draped banner that pollutes the skyline, trickling from the sky and staining the urban concretes creating dominion over news outlets.
This one story is often the topic of conversations when Chicago becomes the subject.
Homicides.
The psychosocial phenomena that depicts the tragic end of a certain group of people who are the victims of their own circumstance – poverty.
In social work, we call that blaming the victim. We blame the victim for creating a set of paradigms that would eventually lead to its own problems like poverty, crime, murder and violence.
Crime advocates use it in rape cases when stating that the victim was in part responsible for the actions of the rapist.
Absurd, right?
Why, then, should we believe that three centuries of monstrous, inhumane treatment of a particular group should be absolved from the equation when calculating the experience of African Americans of past, present and future?
It’s not like they crawled in holes across the desert, jumped in flatbed trucks and evaded border patrol.
It’s not like there is a national debate about legalizing African Americans who infiltrated the country in droves.
We are not demanding to become citizens because we were not born here.
There are American citizens being treated worst than illegal aliens. These citizens from the onset have been demonized, marginalized, criminalized and ostracized from the founding of this nation, or when “Plymouth Rock landed on them.”
I routinely hear that African Americans in certain detached neighborhoods are lazy and defiant, but the truth is the government and its policies have repeatedly let them down.
Companies were never given diversity training before disinvesting.
Police have longed worn invisible “I am Darren Wilson” bracelets as a united ideology toward handling racially sensitive issues especially in black ghettos.
Personal responsibility is not the subject here, nor should anyone get away with murder.
How do we create a Frankenstein without taking responsibility for the destruction it caused?