By Laurie Higgins -
Recently, ABC 7 Eyewitness News anchor Terrell Brown interviewed Shari Runner, the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League on the problems of black-on-black violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her predictable responses sound like she just returned from a White Privilege Conference and illuminate why “progressives” exacerbate rather than ameliorate inner city violence.
Brown: “Gun violence is still a big problem in the city, and it’s often gang-on-gang and it’s black- on-black crime….What do you do to stop it?”
Runner: “Well, I think the root cause is…jobs for kids who are disengaged. We have 46,000 disengaged youth in our city. That means that they are out of school and out of work, and they need jobs. And they really want to be in legal jobs. And they want to be able to be trained to do those jobs rather than be involved in gangs. So, that’s really a big focus of ours for the next ten years, to make sure that happens.
“We need to have better schools. We need to train our kids for the things they’re gonna face when they graduate, and make sure that they graduate, make sure that they stay in school.
“College is an option for many, not for all. Certificates are good. There are a lot of opportunities in the city that just are not being taken advantage of because people cannot get access to them.”
Brown: “Let’s talk about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. There’s a lot of debate right now about the genesis of the movement, what it represents, where it’s going. Often when someone says, ‘Black lives matter,’ the response is, ‘Well, you know what? All lives matter.’ What’s your take on that?”
Runner: “I think the thing is that ‘black lives matter’ is a cry about the fact that institutional, systemic racism still exists in our society. And when you look at the evolution of [BLM] coming from the police violence and the shooting of young black men, unarmed men and boys, 12-year-olds who are confused as 30-year-old men, and the kind of narrative and stereotyping that goes into those kinds of decisions, it is a real cry about the racism that still is very endemic in our society.”
What was most stunning in her troubling comments was her assertion that the absence of jobs for teens is the “root cause” of gang-on-gang and black-on-black violence. The dearth of jobs for teens cannot possibly be the “root cause” of gang-on-gang or black-on-black violence. By the time young males in urban areas who join gangs or engage in violence reach the age at which they are able to work, the root causes have been operative in their lives for a decade.
Read the rest of Higgins' commentary at Illinois Family Institute HERE
