500… The number itself seems pretty normal. 500 dollars is a nice little bonus in the average person’s pocket. The black and hispanic folk of Chicago’s inner cities have a little different perspective on the number 500. This past summer, the death toll from gun violence and gang related warfare on Chicago streets reached  500 lives…

500 young lives in ONE summer…

If there was any way to quantify the effect that drugs, crime, and poverty have had on minority communities over the course of 50 years, this past summer pretty much summed it up in blood and lost lives on Chi-town’s streets…As horrific as this past summer was for Chicago, the black community has seen this type of tragedy before. We STILL see it, on a large scale, in cities like Baltimore, Washington, DC, Oakland, Atlanta, NYC, Charlotte, etc. Anywhere there’s poverty, economic stagnation, and a deficit in quality education, you’ll see bodies and yellow tape. The summer of 2013 is shaping up to be no different, as evidenced by a recent Huffington Post article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/07/fourth-of-july-violence-c_n_3558463.html#slide=2666116

As a native Washingtonian, I remember when it was MY city that was in the running for murder capital of the U.S. every year. The late 80’s/early 90’s brought the worst of the city to the american public.  You couldn’t sit on your stoop in broad daylight without the fear of some clown rolling down your street and blazing up the block with gunfire. WE were Chicago not that long ago.  For all of the outcry and debate over the gun violence we see on Chicago streets, we NEED to start asking ourselves the RIGHT questions:

How do we empower OUR communities to reverse this trend?

WHO do we hold accountable (both inside of our communities and out)?

WHAT are we prepared to do as a community to reverse this destructive trend?

In DC and Baltimore, gentrification was the ultimate ‘end result’ of our brush with the ‘social experimentation’ happening in our neighborhoods. Now, it’s the surrounding counties that have inherited what remains of OUR communities.

I see MANY of the same things happening on the streets of Chicago, except in THIS instance, there may not be a ‘black community’ left at all.

Calling national media attention to the tragedy unfolding daily on Chicago’s streets is a start…Unfortunately, it’s going to take ALOT more than ‘talk’ to reverse the decades of socioeconomic damage that being exhibited in daily news reports.

ALL of us are going to have to get dirty in order to save BLACK Chicago (and other urban populations like it). Otherwise it’s going to get ALOT worse.

I don’t think we’re prepared to see ‘how bad’ it will truly get…