Authors: Eugene Robinson
According to police, the story began a week before the mass shooting, when a young man’s “gold-tone” bracelet went missing. The bracelet owner believed he knew who had taken it, so he and his brother went to find the alleged thief, a twenty-year-old
man. When they found him, they allegedly shot him dead. The bracelet owner was subsequently arrested and charged with the alleged thief’s murder.
The bracelet owner’s brother was not apprehended. A few days later, someone shot him in the face—probably as an act of revenge or street justice, police theorize. The shooting actually was more of a grazing, and the brother was not seriously injured.
The alleged thief’s funeral was an all-day affair, involving a church service downtown, burial at a local cemetery, and finally a repast for family and friends. Some of those friends gathered later at the corner of South Capitol and Brandywine, in front of that decrepit little apartment building—a convenient spot, across from a modest commercial strip, which was known as a safe, no-beefs-allowed demilitarized zone between the territories of several drug-selling “crews.”
The bracelet owner’s brother and several of his friends, meanwhile, were allegedly cruising the streets on their own mission of justice or revenge. Police say they rented a minivan and went first to a housing project and shot one man, apparently believing that he had some connection to the bracelet affair. Then the shooters happened to drive down South Capitol Street, a major thoroughfare, and recognized some of the alleged thief’s friends among the post-funeral crowd.
Through the open windows of the minivan came a deadly spray of indiscriminate gunfire from at least two pistols and an AK-47-style assault weapon. It is not clear whether the intended targets of the rampage were among the nine people who fell. It is possible that the bracelet owner’s brother, still nursing his face wound, was aiming for his assailant. It is possible that the shooters wanted to eliminate someone who
might testify against the bracelet owner at his eventual trial. It is also possible that the shooters believed someone in the crowd had cooperated with police in identifying and apprehending the bracelet owner for allegedly killing the alleged thief. In tit-for-tat violent disputes like this one, “snitching” is a capital offense.
The assailants led police on a wild, action-movie-style chase that sped into nearby Prince George’s County, where three police cars crashed in a spectacular accident, and then back into Washington. Finally the assailants were cornered and caught. The brother of the bracelet owner and another man were charged with murder. Later a third man was arrested on murder charges and a fourth on gun charges for allegedly supplying the assault rifle. All the suspects were black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-six.
5
After Obama’s visit to the neighborhood, I went out to the site of the shooting. There I saw an all-too-familiar tableau—a mound of flowers and teddy bears, an impromptu memorial to the dead. In front of a habitually ignored
NO LOITERING
sign, there was a collection of liquor bottles—probably a special tribute to one or more of the dead from fellow members of a “crew,” which is the euphemism that authorities in Washington use when they talk about gangs. I went back to my office to write a column, but I could not find anything original to say. There was the contrast between the presidential visit and the shooting, between hope and hopelessness. But beyond that, what else? What should have happened so that there would have been no sad, improvised memorial on that corner for me to visit? If we could have turned back the clock to keep nine people from being shot, and four of them from dying, what moment would we have chosen in which to intervene? Just
before the minivan drove up? Before the bracelet was stolen? Even then would have been too late. The time to avert the killings was before any of the young men involved—as assailants, victims, or both—came to understand that a missing ten-dollar bracelet was reason to kill or be killed.
Obama did not speak at the Easter service, and some critics complained that he should have taken to the pulpit and preached about the killings. I’m not sure what he could have said, though, beyond acknowledging the tragedy and expressing the same shock, horror, outrage, and regret that everyone already felt. Between the White House and Anacostia, the president had traveled just a few miles. But the distance might as well have been measured in light-years.
Sociologist Elijah Anderson, whose 1999 book,
Code of the Street
, helped explain why some low-income young people make choices that seem illogical or self-defeating, has written that “the story of the inner-city black community … is at heart one of profound isolation—economic, physical, and social.”
6
Just as a remote island will develop an ecosystem that is functional but perhaps radically different from that of the mainland, so did Abandoned black America—increasingly isolated from the Mainstream—develop a cultural ecosystem that makes sense internally but nowhere else. Outsiders do not often get to see the private behavior that is not just familiar but universal: a mother’s tenderness as she combs her young daughter’s hair, a boy’s nervous indecision as he chooses an outfit for his first day of high school. What we see instead is public behavior that often seems bizarrely self-defeating.
Anderson studied inner-city Philadelphia (which happens to be Bill Cosby’s hometown). In a 1998 essay, “The Social Ecology of Youth Violence,” he explained:
Almost everyone in poor inner-city neighborhoods is struggling financially and therefore feels a certain distance from the rest of America, but there are degrees of alienation, captured by the labels “decent” and “street.” Residents use these labels as judgments on themselves or others. People of both orientations often coexist in the same extended family. There is also a great deal of “code-switching”: a person may exhibit both decent and street orientations, depending on the occasion. Decent people, especially young people, put a premium on the ability to code-switch. They share many of the “decent” middle-class values of the wider society, but know that the open display of such values carries little weight on the street: it does not provide the emblems that say “I can take care of myself.” So they develop a repertoire of behaviors that provide that security. Those who are “street,” having had less exposure to the wider society, may have difficulty code-switching. They are strongly imbued with the code of the street and either do not know the rules for decent behavior or may see little value in displaying such knowledge.
7
In Anderson’s lexicon, both “decent” and “street” families in Abandoned black communities understand that they are essentially on their own—and that because of their isolation and estrangement from the larger society, following the “code” is a more urgent imperative than living up to middle-class expectations. “At the heart of the code is the issue of respect—loosely defined as being treated ‘right’ or being granted … the deference one deserves,” Anderson wrote.
8
Failure to demand
the proper respect is seen as weakness—an invitation to further mistreatment.
This means that not even minor slights can be ignored. Stepping on someone’s foot or bumping someone’s shoulder while passing on the sidewalk can lead to words or even a fight. Maintaining eye contact for too long is seen as an act of aggression. In public, it is never seen as wise to confront the world with anything other than one’s game face. In that sense, life is like one long ride on the New York City subway.
This heightened appreciation of respect and disrespect sometimes works in counterintuitive ways. Anderson described an episode he witnessed in inner-city Philadelphia. On a busy street, a woman stopped her car—entirely blocking a lane of traffic—and waited ten minutes for a man, perhaps a husband or boyfriend, to come out of a barbershop. In the suburbs, impatient drivers would have honked their horns and flashed their lights until the offending car moved out of the way. But in North Philadelphia, no one complained; drivers simply maneuvered around the woman’s car and went about their business. The calculation was that to challenge her would provoke a confrontation because the woman—or her male friend—would feel compelled to respond with defiance. The inconvenience the woman had caused wasn’t worth a potential conflict in which no one would be able to back down.
9
For young people especially, material possessions, such as the most fashionable brand-name clothing and jewelry, are important because they command respect. The same is true in Mainstream society, of course, but the stakes are higher in communities where people struggle to afford necessities, let alone luxuries. Any teenager who obtains and flaunts high-status items—the
right
North Face jacket, for example,
or the
right
Timberland boots—has to be willing and able to defend them. Taking such accoutrements by intimidation or force from the owner is the kind of bold action that can enhance another young man’s status among his peers, and in turn provide inoculation against those who might be tempted to try something like that with him.
“Every young person in deprived inner-city black neighborhoods must learn to live with the code of the street,” Anderson wrote. “The street kids must prove their manhood and achieve their identity under the intricate rules of the code. The decent kids must learn to coexist with it.”
10
The value system in Abandoned communities has a certain internal logic, but it plays an enormous role in separating the Abandoned from the Mainstream and everyone else. Mainstream youths may listen to the same music, wear the same clothes, and even make a show of displaying the same don’t-mess-with-me attitude, but there’s a difference between simply listening to violent or misogynistic hip-hop lyrics and actually accepting them as authentic, nonfiction narrative.
To dwell on violence, or the threat of violence, is of course unfair to the great majority of African Americans in Abandoned communities who are law-abiding, churchgoing citizens seeking only a better life for themselves and their families. Never, in more than three decades as a journalist, have I gone into a dangerous housing project or driven down a godforsaken country road and met a mother who did not love her children and want the best for them. I have met mothers and fathers who were ignorant of how to instruct their children and provide for them, but none who did not want to do so.
Since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was allowed to peter out in the 1980s, government policies have essentially
left the Abandoned to their own devices. The absence of work and the disintegration of the public schools eliminated traditional routes of advancement; knowing that there were no good jobs and that the schools were dysfunctional made people apathetic and resigned. Still, the unwritten code of insult, umbrage, and retribution that holds sway in Abandoned communities—enforced by a few, but followed by many—plays an enormously destructive role by choking off ambition and creating an atmosphere of randomness and uncertainty.
Those capable of code-switching have a chance of leaping the chasm—those who understand, for example, that while “acting white” in school is seen as a sign of softness and weakness, it is possible to avoid showing vulnerability in public and at the same time earn the kind of grades that make it possible to go to college. Those who cannot live in both worlds, who do not understand both sets of values, are all but lost.
The essential, and tragic, problem is that “keeping it real”—adhering to the code—requires either engaging in all manner of self-defeating behavior or finding elaborate subterfuges to avoid shooting oneself in the foot. The warping of values in Abandoned black America means that being successful requires being duplicitous—being literally two-faced. And that is never an easy way to live.
* * *
Some call it trickle-down, some talk about a rising tide lifting all boats. Whatever metaphor you use for Ronald Reagan’s notion of how to run an economy, it obviously hasn’t worked for low-income African Americans. I would argue that it hasn’t worked for poor, working-class, or middle-class
Americans of any race, creed, or color, for that matter. In the past three decades, the economy has seen enormous growth and wealth-creation—but in boom-and-bust cycles that have destroyed too many industries, communities, and families. Middle-class incomes have been as stagnant as an algae-choked pond, while a Niagara of income has cascaded onto the wealthy and the superrich. It is ironic when the wealthy complain of having to shoulder an increasing share of the nation’s overall tax burden. Surely they realize that this is because they have an increasing share of the money.
Worsening income distribution has been accompanied by a decline in economic and social mobility, once our nation’s great pride and still a cherished element of the American dream. To be born poor and rise to wealth is now a much more difficult and less common feat in the United States than it was forty or fifty years ago, when industries such as automobile and steel factories provided a path into the middle class and working-class families could easily afford public higher education for their children. It is also increasingly difficult for someone born rich to fall into poverty—although this kind of downward mobility is more common for African Americans than for whites or any other group.
The recession brought on by the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 demonstrated how precarious the situation of the middle class has become—and how much more tenuous middle-class status is for the black Mainstream. While joblessness overall climbed just past 10 percent, unemployment for African Americans surpassed 16 percent; among young black men in Abandoned neighborhoods, the rate was as high as 50 percent.
11
Black homeowners were disproportionately likely to find themselves trapped in mortgages they could not pay or
legally committed to paying far more than their houses were currently worth, and thus became disproportionately likely to suffer foreclosures and evictions.