While I was on vacation a terrible tragedy occurred in Chicago. A teenage boy, Derrion Albert, was beaten to death, caught in the middle of a brutal street fight. It happened just before Chicago was anticipating a win as the host city for the 2016 Olympics. Suddenly, between the Obamas, Oprah, and a grainy video of a poor kid’s life ending, Chicago was all the media wanted to talk about. Every time I flipped on the TV there was another reporter directing lame questions like, “Why is Chicago’s youth out of control?”, into news cameras. It seemed the more they asked, the further they got from the truth. And the more I watched, the angrier I became. I saw one interview with a group of guidance counselors who correctly pointed out the lack of funding for schools from which they had been laid off. That’s part of it, but it’s also about affordable housing and taxes and police brutality. Why was it so difficult for everyone to just say what’s at the core of all these things?
This isn’t about youth violence. It’s about poverty and displacement and racism. In a deeply corrupt and segregated city, it’s the very poor who are trapped under the rotting insides of its shiny facade. Children caught in inescapable economic despair will turn to gangs, and the chaos that comes along with them, because they have nothing else to rely on.
Yes, Derrion’s death will bring attention to the dozens of children who are murdered in Chicago each year and hopefully it will change something. But it’s not enough.
In my line of work, we pay close attention to hate crimes in the US. Hate crimes and what is happening on Chicago’s streets are vastly different beasts, but there are some striking similarities. Like inner-city youth violence, hate crimes don’t receive much play in national media and are largely unreported. For the few that receive a little bit of attention there are countless more. We, the public, often distance ourselves, even though they are symptoms of our communities deepest problems. Ironically, the longer they are ignored the worse they become, proving that there is a thin line between mere indifference and complicit tolerance.
If Chicago’s violence is about poverty and economic racism, hate crimes differ in that they are interpersonal and systemic in nature. The perpetrator of a hate crime is acting upon a personal belief that another person is inferior to them, but in many cases they live in communities where law enforcement is permitting or encouraging discriminatory behavior. Take Suffolk County for example, which is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice. The Suffolk County Police Department has not just ignored escalating reports of hate crimes against Latinos, but discouraged Latino community members from receiving help. And then there is the growing number of white nationalist groups in the US that can often be found lurking in communities with an increase in hate crimes. That has been well-documented in Phoenix, where neo-Nazis have found a friend in Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In both Suffolk and Maricopa Counties, it is the displaced and vulnerable who are targeted. There are a lot of inequities in the world we can’t control, but crimes based on bigotry can be stopped. Calling out complicit law enforcement, exposing organized racism in communities, and holding accountable those who commit hate crimes as well as those that incite violence is a good place to start.