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1990s: Police, pundits, politicians, and News@11 gushed with the terrors of the crack epidemic, “adolescent superpredators,” teenage “sociopaths,” murderous gangs marauding from inner city to suburb to Mayberry, and an ever worsening “crime storm” of dark-skinned zombies slavering to “murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high…so long as their youthful energies hold out.”

Indeed, the statistics of California in 1990 were alarming:

221 black youths were arrested for murder,
4,235 for drug offenses
6,884 for violent felonies,
22,441 for all felonies, and
45,703 for all offenses.

1990 O.G. CIA Neo Isis - Wig and Banana Sword - Neo Belly Crack-on-Credit

In 2012, in a California black-youth population of similar size (around 250,000 age 10-17) and a similarly complete statewide crime report:

20 black youths were arrested for murder,
1,019 for drug offenses
2,886 for violent felonies,
8,288 for all felonies, and
24,889 for all offenses.

How can this mammoth decline not be front-page news—especially to inform the ongoing Trayvon Martin and Fruitvale [..and Ferguson, MO] murder discussions?

The sad reality is that authorities, academic experts, politicians, and geriatric-media reporters (the average age of news consumers is well over 50) of 2013 simply do not know how to deal with a young black population that is not committing shootings, robberies, drug mayhem, and gangsterisms in mass numbers—let alone one that is dramatically less criminal than the older generations deploring them.

Listen to today’s media panels, politician speeches, even academic forums: the last 20 years never happened. Only young people commit crime and use and sell drugs, the commentariat herd recites. From CNN’s Anderson Cooper to First Lady Michelle Obama, young black men are always misrepresented as getting more violent.

America’s warped crime and social policy establishment badly needs black youth to be killers and thugs, to retreat into the comforts of 1990, nostalgia for a past that never existed, and smug, politically and fiscally profitable prophecies of demographic doom. In America of 2013, just as in 1913, feared scapegoats on which to blame social problems remain a hotter commodity than scientific analysis and effective policy!


Ezili Danto

According to the Government of Haiti National housing policy, greater than 80% of all housing repairs, constructions, and additions completed or in progress in Haiti since the earthquake have been built (or rebuilt) by community residents – an estimated 90,000 houses.

Therefore, ignoring local people’s capacity to build for themselves – and build quickly, is misguided.

- learn from example: understand first how and what works (and what doesn’t) about a bona-fide, in-progress informal exurban settlement in Haiti

- avoid trying to ‘fix’ by decree or masterplan what is perceived to be wrong or substandard

- resist the desire to build, especially using outside contractors

- support capacity-building organizations such as UN-Habitat to help guide local homebuilders which technical assistance in safe construction

- support community organizations and committees already on the ground.

"Dieufel Lamisere - Dancing To Save Lives"

Daniel Brevil

"The sad reality is that authorities, academic experts, politicians, and geriatric-media reporters (the average age of news consumers is well over 50) of 2013 simply do not know how to deal with a young black population that is not committing shootings, robberies, drug mayhem, and gangsterisms in mass numbers—let alone one that is dramatically less criminal than the older generations deploring them."

"Greater than 80% of all housing repairs, constructions, and additions completed or in progress in Haiti since the earthquake have been built (or rebuilt) by community residents – an estimated 90,000 houses.

Therefore, ignoring local people’s capacity to build for themselves – and build quickly, is misguided."