ninme

City-Journal - In the Heart of Freedom, in Chains, by Myron Magnet
Elite hypocrisy, gangsta culture, and failure in black America

It’s a long (looong) essay (but a quick read), but of all of it this part stood out, because it’s something I was pondering on the other day (forget why):

A vicious circle now operates between the gangsta kids and the police. The kids dislike and fear the cops; the cops—looking for suspects whom victims have described as black, or seeing youths dressed as gangstas behaving as if they might be carrying weapons—stop law-abiding blacks, who then feel all the more victimized, angry, and resentful. And when frightened officers, black or white, mistakenly kill an innocent black man, like Amadou Diallo, such kids—and their mothers and neighbors, who write to City Journal often to say so—take it as proof that the cops are out to kill blacks on purpose. “I am scared for my son,” one mother wrote us recently. “The police always harassing the wrong people & jumping out of cars spot checking, . . . while the criminals sit around the neighborhood all day. . . . Was 50 shots necessary for Sean Bell? Or 45 shots for Diallo? . . . Come on, we all know none of these situations would ever happen to any white kids.” And you understand how she feels.

But one solution, if the mother knows who the real criminals are, is to “snitch.” Another, as a former juvenile-court chief prosecutor puts it, is: “If you don’t want to be treated like a thug, don’t dress like a thug. It’s an invitation to ‘probable cause.’ ” After all, urban black culture wasn’t always like this. Just look through old photos of Harlem and see young men and women dressed up like fashion plates out of Henry James or Thomas Mann, or like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Look at the black musical celebrities who took such care and made such an impression on people my age: Count Basie, with his elegant mustache, always in a tie and jacket; Duke Ellington, debonair in white tie and jauntily cocked top hat; gorgeous Lena Horne, radiant in her shimmering evening gown—all with the bearing of counts and dukes. What would they make of the gangstas?

sigh