When I was a child, I lived in a housing project, the St. Thomas housing project, on Religious Street in New Orleans. We lived there for four years while my father was in dental school. It was a lot like living in an apartment complex with a nice courtyard. I played outside and walked to school and back home with no fear whatsoever.
Years later, when I was studying Constitutional Criminal Procedure in law school, the professor, who had been a federal prosecutor, used to set up a night where the law students could ride around with a cop on the beat for one night just to see what cops face in the real world. By coincidence, the cop I rode with had a beat which included the St. Thomas Housing Project. When I mentioned that to her, we drove by and looked at the old neighborhood. It was pitch dark, the lights had all been broken, there was garbage and broken glass everywhere and graffiti on everything. I pointed out my old apartment to her. She told me that the month before, the police had taken a bunch of kids out of the place that were sleeping on urine soaked mattresses without bedding, and wiping shit off their butts with their hands and smearing it on the walls because they had no toilet paper.
No, I don't pretend to understand that. Neither did the cop, who, of course, was black, too.
Maintaining the status quo to keep people like that from trying to start a revolution is disgusting, IMO. It's also ludicrous.
As for my generalizing, it's not from one example, as I told you, it's from many. |
