In his Daily News column, Stanley Crouch applauds the efforts of Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter for rising to the challenge of dealing with gang violence at a time when it is wiping out generations of young people in cities across the nation.
Those who seek to prevent the destruction of children have a hard way to go in our country, especially if and when they confront the problems faced by so-called minority children. All across our country, kids are red meat for neighborhood criminals.
Gang members and common criminals are our urban totalitarians, ready to murder, rape, rob and kill whenever they can.
They are much more dangerous in our time than white racists were in their heyday. Yes, racist murderers were a scourge — but they were eventually exposed and broken down.
The urban totalitarians who prey on “their own”? They are a different story.
Interestingly, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans see this as a central issue. Violent crime is down, we are told, as though there’s nothing to worry about or talk about anymore.
Meanwhile, too many black and Latino streets remain the killing fields of lower class communities all across this country. Families are terrorized. Kids are robbed of their childhoods.
That is why Mayors Michael Nutter of Philadelphia and Cory Booker of Newark are so important at this time. Both black men, both relentless in pursuit of safer streets, they realize that the pox on the nonwhite communities are the young men and women who have embraced the vision of street gangs, which means murder, drug dealing and anarchic violence.
Read Stanley Crouch's entire column at the Daily News.