Not So Black and White: Race and Class Issues.

Yesterday, I read two contrasting articles about criminal bail reform, one by a well respected scholar and one by a woman who lives on Chicago's South Side, who experiences the effects of black male violence and guns daily in her neighborhood.

That doesn't mean shootings occur daily. It means, every day, you think about where you will be and when, and you listen for gunshots with ears cocked, as well as to the chatter of what is going on in the neighborhood around you.

The scholar was writing in a national newspaper on Martin Luther King Day, about the results of her work, and experience. The neighborhood woman had only her stories. She didn't like when men were arrested for shootings, bail set, and the gangs automatically bailed them out -- they were back on the streets before you could say, "Boo!'.

Their victims were more likely still lying on their backs in the county hospital, those who survived their shootings, some the intended targets fully in the game, some innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time -- like a residential front porch resting. Or inside the living room playing games alongside other children.

No-bail-no-jail is not a welcome policy in the neighborhoods where the scholar doesn't live. She shares the skin tone of those affected by black men who kill, but because of proximity: little else.

White people don't run from black neighbors much nowadays. They can't afford to lose their devalued homes, again. They run from bad schools. Poor schools, not because the facilities are not the finest or the faculty budget is limited, but because the local culture refuses to value education.

MIddle-classs people take their children and flee for better schools, in places where voters approve school referenda to maintain the programs their children participate in. Where there is little support in the home for formalized education, the public school as a local institution is devalued, a sports palace, perhaps.

Hence the creep from racial to social-class issues... Residents who don't rely on local schools can stay, a racial mix. And nobody wants to fear their front-windows being shot out, as a mistaken address or sign of initiation.

Until the scholar recognizes and plans to address the very real issue of male gang violence in her racial work, she should not advise policies that will affect the lives of people who must live with the conclusions of her work. Anybody can put it down on paper, afterall.

Realism means putting it down where it can be tested, and sticking around to see the experiment through.