When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality
Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived, Brooks said. You got a security point. You don’t need no protection. But if you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.
The Guardian of North Lawndale
We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka Q , e and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.
We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. No respect, no shame, Brooks said. That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.
Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached
He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son-That’s my boy, Billy, Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to, he said, because I wanted him with me.
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship-homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for the thrill of the chase and the kill. Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success-and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson payday loans in Ventura CA area may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that Negro poverty is not white poverty. But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
