The people in a place make the place.
New York BLM co-founder slams Mayor Adams for failing Black residents: ‘City is a warzone’
Quotes:
Hawk Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, slammed New York City Mayor Eric Adams during an interview on Fox News, arguing he’s been ineffective at protecting Black New Yorkers.
“Don’t listen to what Eric Adams says, he gives great press statement. He’s the master of the press conference. Some kid dies, he hugs their mother. He’s holding up sneakers, he’s crying. But what we elected him for, the city of New York, was to keep the city safe. This city is a warzone and he can’t stop it,” Newsome said on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom on Thursday [04/21/22].
“So with all [Adams’] power, he turns to BLM and says, ‘What are you going to do?’ Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to organize people in our communities to go out and preach a message of love and unification in the streets. We’re going to take control of our cities, because the government has failed us for decades. Even when crime is low, we’re still dying. And we have to fix this problem ourselves because we believe that poverty is the mother of crime,” he continued.
Well, yes and no. First, I can’t begin to say how refreshing it is to hear someone, speaking on behalf of Black Lives Matter, say, in effect, that ALL black lives matter — not just those killed by police. And that black folk have some responsibility to order their own lives.
Second, I frankly don’t much care what New Yorkers “elected” Adams “for.” The admission here is that the Mayor can’t “keep the city safe.” I would never have supposed he could, as I will explain here further below.
Third, as to “poverty is the mother of crime:” On the one hand, I note that Newsome offers no solutions. On the other hand, I disagree with the proposition. I would say, instead, that crime is the mother of poverty.
Put differently, I would say that contempt causes poverty — contempt for oneself, one’s neighbors and their possessions; contempt for the world.
The same dynamics apply to poor whites, as to poor blacks. Only one third of America’s poor are black. The rest are white.
The system — white supremacy — is immaterial.
When I was in jail in 2010, I was housed at different times in four different units. The quality of life varied drastically from one to another, depending on the amount of contempt the residents displayed toward one another. Now, one is segregated into different housing, and the size of the housing units varies, based on that same consideration. The first unit I was in, for about a week, housed fifty men. The last unit I was in, for about three weeks, housed two hundred. But the fifty men in the first unit collectively displayed more contempt every day, than the two hundred in the last unit displayed in two days.
We were all living under the same system, yet there were those differences.
In April and May of 2020, I was housed for about six weeks at the Greenspring Men’s Homeless Shelter. About two hundred men were held in a portion of an abandoned school. The population was overwhelmingly black. But it fell into two distinct groups — groups of black men — who generally did not mix.
The majority group of black men, perhaps 60% of the population, notwithstanding our homelessness, were getting along in life pretty well. They lived peaceably with one another and with the circumstances of the shelter. I would sometimes see some of them near the courthouse downtown — The Dunkin’ Donuts across from the courthouse was where I typically spent my days. — or hear them talk of having gone to the Inner Harbor.
A minority group of the black men, perhaps 40%, were not getting along in life at all well. All of the drama at this shelter was confined to this group. All complaints about theft were confined to this group; the ramification being, that only they stole, and they only stole from each other. Their speech was full of obscenities. Their music was full of obscenities. They lived squalid: they threw trash and garbage everywhere, ignoring the trash cans. Drug use was rampant; about half of this population “stayed” intoxicated.
They displayed the same kinesthetics as the people who surround Lexington Market[*], which is the reason I won’t go there. Actually, Lexington Market, or Penn-North, or other centers of urban decay, were where they typically spent their days.
This was the subject of my post, “Podcast – I don’t want to live among these people.”
We were all equally homeless. We had all grown up in, and were living under, the same system. Yet these black men and those black men had those differences.
Some people live in a low-rated world,
for reason that they low-rate everything in their world. I first learned this from listening to some of our customers at the dollar store. They choose to feel contempt toward every thing and every one they see.
No systemic change occasioned the sudden spike in murders in Baltimore City that began in January 2015 and continues to this day. No systemic change occasioned New York City’s becoming “a war zone,” whenever that happened. It’s all about people’s choices.
Hawk Newsome as much as said, and I agree, it’s up to blacks to change the black condition. And the necessary change is that folk choose to honor rather than feel contempt for, themselves, their neighbors, and their possessions.
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[*] Related:
The Homeless Blogger 