So there's this movie coming out, and Hollywood assumes that because I watch movies which happen to have black people in them, of course, this is of interest to me, so I've been seeing the preview often enough to wish I was white cop pulling the preview over on a traffic stop so I could shoot it with legal impunity, according to the people who make this sort of thing.
Anyway, the movie is about a family who lives in the crappy part of town and are identified as poor, even though the teenaged main character is shown possessing more pairs of sneakers than I own shoes. Her parents are apparently still together and own a store with their name on it, which is a neighborhood institution along with the barber shop & barbeque joint. And because their neighborhood high school is typical of their sort of neighborhood, she goes to a good school where she is much less likely to end up "jumped, high or pregnant". It's interesting that she chooses those three things to describe the horrible fate of its students, since one of those is strictly voluntary and the other mostly. If there is an actual neighborhood whose children rape, force drugs on and assault EVERY SINGLE ONE of their classmates, the police should not be coming in with riot gear and tear gas, but with flamethrowers and Zyklon B gas. So even in a movie intended to idealize this community as victims, they are unwittingly acknowledging that their miserable lives are something they impose on themselves. If a significant proportion of neighborhood children are violent, promiscuous or addicts to the point that peer pressure is irresistable to the rest, there is nothing ideal about it, and any responsible father is getting them as far away as possible. They are still in the nieghborhood because, as her father says "our people are here." Along with thugs, drugs, skanks and/or rapists. And there is very likely some overlap between those categories.
Because of this bullshit parenting, indoctrinating children to place ethnicity over morality or prudence, the main character clearly feels uncomfortable at her behavior in her "white" school, where she tries to fit in. Presumably she feels bad about betraying her thug homeland by not acting like a native when she is among other people. And she's friends with a kid from her neighborhood who teases her about leaving them for the white world. Why is no one else ashamed that in order to not be an assault victim or have drugs or a teen pregnancy peer-pressured down her throat, this girl has to go to a "white" school? "Our neighborhood is wonderful. It's not safe for our children, but aside from that, it's the best!" is not a thing anyone says ever.
So the big conflict in the movie comes when these two kids are out driving late one night and are stopped by the police, and the boy decides to be a smart ass, and ignoring the cops' orders to stand still, pulls out a hairbrush and mock-furtively raises it to his head. He gets shot and the rest of the trailer is about the civil unrest and our excessively-shod heroine speaking up about oppression and whatnot.
Now, of course, the obvious issue is that no one deserves to die for fooling around...but this utter fucktard deliberately did it to upset and engender a fearful reaction in armed men in a dangerous situation! The next argument BLM and company always use is that the cops would only have been afraid because it was black people...but these are black people, driving a car they have presumably NOT stolen, and thus known by the cops to be from a neighborhood where even the children are dangerous. By her own words, their high school is a place where you are GOING to get assaulted or raped! Two kids from that school district are, and should be, considered dangerous until proven otherwise! The cops are acting on the exact same knowledge and information that led the heroine's parents to send her to a private school and but because SHE'S good and special and is childhood friends with a guy who is deliberately provoking cops for shits and giggles, they are just supposed to relax and let the young male driver of a car from a neighborhood infamous for the violent & criminal behavior of its young male population, get the first shot.
Maybe I'm wrong about this movie and maybe it's going to be about the need for this idealized community to own its shit. But somehow, I doubt it.
The situation you present as the reality of the black community, seems similar to how I see the Arab community in Israel (Arab citizens of Israel, not Palestinians).
Crime is high, schools are bad, sometimes open sewage water runs down the street between houses built illegally because the Town authorities are bankrupt as hardly anyone pays taxes.
Some people say this is because these guys are primitive and that's just the way they are.
But then I think about some of those who are rich enough and would rather live in Jewish neighborhoods even though you have to buy a legal house and pay taxes and all that burden. If you extrapolate to those less fortunate, you can assume a sizable percentage would rather not live the way this community lives but can't get away.
If this is true, the question stands, why do things stay the same ?
This is where I think the state is supposed to step in. The state must enforce its sovereignty. If it does not, then the most brutal elements of society dictate the terms to everyone.
Of course part of the trouble is that those people who claim to most represent the Arab community, also vocally oppose any enforcement of state sovereignty on this community. In the end, no one wants to touch that bag of snakes.
I bet in some sense this is a parallel of the black situation in the US. But would you say police enforce sovereignty inside black areas, or do they mostly contain those areas by, say, sparsely patrolling them and mostly buffering between them and 'nicer' neighborhoods ?
EDIT: You might gather from what I wrote that I think black areas need more law enforcement, not less.
