Quote:
Originally Posted by Minte
Madison is not the hotbed for racial unrest.. The community has a large minority population that never has issues. The common denominator is education. Every black man and woman that I know has at least a bachelors degree. They have real families, children that have two parents in their lives.
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This is a good point. Education and opportunity go a long ways towards a person's future.
A few years back I watched this pair documentaries about gangs in Little Rock, Arkansas. The first movie was mostly about a guy who had just gotten out of jail after 15 years. He was a gang member when he went in and he was trying to start a program to get kids out of gangs. As he and the filmmakers talked to these kids it was crazy. Many of them were 10-15 years old and they had already given up on life. They just assumed they would be in a gang and either end up in jail or dead. The idea of getting a job at McDonalds or somewhere similar, getting an education and getting out of the cycle was a crazy to them as if you had told them to fly to Mars. Their parents were/are in the system and in gangs so are their brothers and sisters so will they be. It is like many of them don't even care to break the cycle.
At the same time there was one kid the guy helped who got a job, stayed in school then went away to college.
The second movie took place 10 years later. Many of the gang members were still in the gangs, others were dead or in jail and nothing had changed. That one guy had gotten a degree and was now working as an accountant in some large company. He made a good living, got married and had a kid and had a great future ahead of him. When the filmmakers tried to use him as an example to these other kids that you can get out and have a good life they immediately put the other guy down. He was an Uncle Tom or they considered him some kind of race traitor because he got a job and is living a normal life. He is "working for the man."
It was sad, depression, mind boggling and infuriating at the same time.
Meanwhile, I grew up in a small redneck town. We were very poor when I was a kid, but my mom made sure we went to school and told us all the time that we can achieve great things in our lives if we try and we work hard. We grew up feeling like we could go somewhere.