We easily become benumbed after years of tragic headlines about youth violence. Then we get jerked alert by horrific video images like the fatal gang-style beating 16-year-old Derrion Albert, an honor-roll student at Fenger High School.
In our horror, it is natural for us to look for someone to blame besides the suspects that police have rounded up with the help of the video that the Internet beams around the planet.
It just happens to be the bad fortune of President Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley that this tragedy coincides with their efforts to woo the International Olympic Committee, which decides today whether Chicago will beat out Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Madrid to host the 2016 Olympics.
As Richard Nixon once said of presidential campaigns, there are no silver medals in this race. The competition for the games is intense, and so is Chicago’s opposition. Chicagoans were about evenly split on hosting the games in a recent Chicago Tribune poll.
The Internet crackles with critics of the Olympics, Daley or Obama, or all three. Some raise the death of Derrion Albert and other young victims of local school or street violence to argue Chicago might be too unsafe, too corrupt or too indifferent to the plight of its poor to host the Olympics.
Unsafe? Compared to whom? Rio?
Here’s an Associated Press account of life in Rio during a week in early September: A police shootout “stopped a commuter train and sent passengers fleeing for cover.” Officers conducted a drug raid on a slum, “keeping 2,000 children out of school.” Police gun battles “killed more than a dozen suspected traffickers.” Yet that was the same week that the IOC released a report that gave high praise to Rio’s bid for the 2016 Games.
The sad fact is that most of the violence that plagues great metropolises like Rio or Chicago occurs in parts of town to which tourists do not usually go. Tragically this makes the pain of poverty and violence too easily ignored by those who could do something about it. Yet video and the Web have the power to break down the emotional walls that separate communities from one another, even when they transmit a misleading message.
For example, those who are moved by video to judge Chicago’s livability are no more ridiculous than Rush Limbaugh’s recent rant after the Drudge Report Web site posted another video of youth violence: a school bus security camera in downstate Illinois captured a black kid pounding on a white kid in the next seat.
Police reported, but then discounted the possibility that the incident was a hate crime. But Rush was not deterred by a mere lack of evidence. “Greetings, my friends. It’s Obama’s America, is it not?” he bellowed. “Obama’s America — white kids getting beat up on school buses now. I mean, you put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yeah, right on, right on, right on!’ ”
Note to Rush: Most black youths have not exclaimed “Right on!” since the days when you and I were young.
The truth is that race has little to do with youth violence compared to the impact of poverty and disconnection from hope. There is good news happening in some violence-plagued neighborhoods, even if it occurs too quietly to get as much media attention as the violence does.
One leading example of a neighborhood-based solution is the “violence-free zones” that police and school officials in Milwaukee, Baltimore, Atlanta, Dallas and Richmond have organized with assistance from the Washington-based Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.
“The Chicago tragedy is part of a plague sweeping the country,” said Robert Woodson, the center’s founder and president. “Kids are targeted not for being in a gang, but for coming from a different neighborhood.”
The key to a “violence-free zone,” as Woodson explains it, is adult “youth advisers” with enough local connections and street savvy to win the trust of teens, yet also pass rigorous criminal background checks.
Effective “advisers” build enough trust to serve as “antibodies” in a toxic atmosphere, so kids will alert them to looming troubles without fear of being stigmatized as “snitching.”
That makes sense. Before we waste our breath spouting off about what our kids need, we should listen to what the kids can tell us.
Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune. E-mail address: cpage@tribune.com.
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