Defunding Durham or Hoodwinkin’ the Hood
Defunding Durham or Hoodwinkin’ the Hood
Min. Paul Scott
“There’s a war going on outside no man is safe from”
Survival of the Fittest- Mobb Deep
In the Bull City, there is a turf war going on. This is not between the Bloods and the Crips, but between those who want more police and those who want to defund them. Meanwhile, innocent citizens are getting caught in the crossfire.
Durham, NC is a city with around 280,000 people. As we close out 2020, there have been close to 900 reported shooting incidents with bullets hitting their targets more than 300 times. What makes this statistic so tragic is that while the “solutions” by city leaders are tied up in bureaucratic red tape, police yellow tape drapes too many neighborhoods in the Bull City (or Bull-et) City on a daily basis.
This is not the first go round with Durham trying to tackle its, ever elusive ,violence problem. One may recall ,back in 1994, when two year old Shaquana Atwater was killed by a stray bullet ,sparking outrage from city folk. Or the release of Welcome to Durham in 2007, which brought national attention to Durham’s gang problem. So the issue of violent crime in Durham, periodically, becomes a cause celebre, mirroring suburbanite fascination with gangsta rap. While many people took the ominous warning from Treach of the 90’s Hip Hop group, Naughty by Nature, “ if you ain’t never been to the ghetto , don’t ever come to the ghetto,” as a no trespassing sign, some folk who wanted to live, vicariously, through rap lyrics took it as a party invitation. Which is all fun and games until a bullet pierces your minivan while your toddler rests ,peacefully, in her car seat.
What makes the 2020 sequel different is the fact that “stopping the violence” is now shrouded in social and political ideology that makes people lose sight of the matter at hand; mothers and fathers crying over the caskets of 15 year children.
There is also a financial piece to the debate. While many people are familiar with the idea of the prison industrial complex , courtesy of writers such as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, people are less aware of the social industrial complex where , for every dead body in the morgue there is a line of grant grabbers looking to fund their children’s college tuition with blood money. On the other side of the fence you have police departments whose PR operations paint a much rosier picture of their efforts than reality dectates in order to justify a paycheck. Hence , reminding one of the old adage about “putting lipstick on a pig” (no pun intended.)
Sure, the politicians can continue to blame it on the guns and how a “small group of people “ with ,apparently, unlimited fire power, since it was recently reported that over 700 weapons were retrieved by law enforcement in 2020, are terrorizing the city . But can we really have that conversation without discussing how heavy assault weapons always seem to wind up in the same neighborhoods? Not to mention putting it in the context of America’s great fear of what Robert Williams ,of the Deacons of Defense, put it in his book title, Negroes with Guns.
And, yes, we can blame it on street gangs. But can we have that discussion without dealing with the history of how gangs became tools of black genocide without exploring how they were originally created to protect the black community from racist white gangs ?(Read Mike Davis’s book , City of Quartz.) And also, how did groups of black youth become “street gangs” while violent white teens were known as “athletic clubs?” (Read Urban Racial Violence in the Twentieth Century by Joseph Boskin.)
Sadly, in 2020 , we continue with both sides of the pro-police/ anti-police debate giving us what martyred Black Panther Fred Hampton termed “answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain and conclusions that don’t conclude.”
So, to whom does one run to stop teens from being murdered on these streets? What about asking the small group of community activists who have no horse in the race to fund nor defund the cops but, merely , want their elderly grandmothers to be able to ride to the grocery store in peace. Or how about the mothers and fathers who have lost children who they can’t bring back but are only looking for closure by making sure that no other parents experience their grief.
Maybe they have the weapons that will finally win the war against violence in Durham.
But as long as we look to the usual suspects to fight for our community we will be faced with the dark pronouncement that Gil Scott Heron gave us in, “ Winter to America.”
“Nobody’s fighting cause nobody knows what to say. “
Minister Paul Scott is founder of the Durham NC based Black Messiah Movement . He can be reached at (919) 972–8305. His website is BlackMessiahMovement.com
