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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Mainstream Media

Poverty, Violence and PTSD – But What About Racism?

07 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Tags

616 East Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, Child Abuse, Community Violence, Culture of Poverty, Culture of Violence, Domestic Violence, Gun Violence, July 4th, July 4th Weekend, Mainstream Media, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Poverty, PTSD, Public Health, Shooting Deaths, Soft Bigotry, Structural Racism, Uncle Sam


Chicago Police fatally shot a 16-year-old boy in the city’s Gresham neighborhood Saturday night and distraught family members are questioning the incident, July 6, 2014. (http://nbcchicago.com).

Chicago Police fatally shot a 16-year-old boy in the city’s Gresham neighborhood Saturday night and distraught family members are questioning the incident, July 6, 2014. (http://nbcchicago.com).

Over the past two weeks, thanks to Chris Hayes’ reporting on the state of Chicago for MSNBC, not to mention a horrific July 4th weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s lie of declining violent crime in the metropolis has been thoroughly exposed. In the past eighty-four hours, dozens of shootings in Chicago injured at least sixty people, with between nine and eleven killed. Six of these shootings involved the Chicago PD, as they killed two teenagers over the weekend. But if we leave it to the mainstream media and the moralist Black elite to explain, the Blacks on Chicago’s South Side are just immersed in a “culture of violence.” Black youth simply live careless, nihilistic lives, that “gang, drug, [and] gun violence” is the root of the problem

For those White, bright, and bi-racially White, though, there’s the knee-jerk reaction of media and caring adults that comes with it. For mass shooters apparently with much better aim than folks in Chicago, like Elliot Rodger, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Wade Michael Page, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, mental health and mental illness, along with gun control, is the mainstream media’s topic of the day. Even their explicit racism and misogyny can become the media’s evidence for their mental illness. White and Black moral leaders don’t then speak of cultural deficiencies or of an enjoyment of crime and violence as reasons for their shootings.

It’s terrible that we afford one group of young men every benefit of the doubt because they were/are affluent or White, and the deny humanity of another because they were/are poor and Black or Brown. Yet recent sociological and psychological studies indicate what anyone who has lived in poverty and with violence has at least sensed throughout their lives. That many (if not most) growing up in these conditions experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), leading to more poverty and violence in adulthood.

I know this better than most. Below is a short sample of the violence I witnessed or experienced from birth through adulthood:

September ’70 – my father, drunk and jealous, attempted to attack my mother with a knife. My Mom with me and my brother Darren in tow, picked up a heavy quartz crystal ashtray and threw it at my father as he charged her in the kitchen. He was apparently struck in the head and knocked unconscious. The ashtray had detached the retina in his left eye, which he never had repaired. Nine years later, my father had to have his left eye removed. I don’t remember this attack or my Mom defending herself — I was all of ten months old. I do remember my father’s eye being removed, and the headache and vertigo he had prior to the surgery in the summer of ’79 The research indicates, though, that there would have been a psychological impact on me and my nearly three-year-old brother nevertheless, and not a good one at that.

July ’75 –  from Boy @ The Window

Screen shot 2014-07-07 at 1.08.28 PM

December ’76 – when my father stomped in a brand-new glass coffee table and had to go to the hospital with several serious bloody cuts in his legs.

April ’77 – when my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father after his months of psychological and abuse toward my Mom had landed her in Mount Vernon Hospital with kidney problems.

April ’82, May ’82, July-August ’82 – my then stepfather beating me up in a Karate studio in front of a group of men because I refused to call him “Dad,” beating up my Mom for not “lovin’ him,” and beating me up for the first six weeks of my summer between seventh and eighth grade for me defending my Mom.

January ’86 – the last time my stepfather actually laid a fist on me, damaging or chipping three of my front teeth and busting my lip in the process.

June ’89 – the last fight between my Mom and my stepfather, where the same crystal ashtray my Mom used in ’70 easily could’ve fractured her jaw and left cheekbone. Thankfully, my then stepfather had terrible aim.

If it were just a matter of domestic violence and child abuse for me alone, that would be tragic, but not necessarily relevant. The violence of 616 East Lincoln Avenue, sadly, wasn’t contained to A32. Domestic violence was the way of the A-building at 616, starting with our adjacent next-door neighbors. In the two-bedroom department immediately below us, the husband and wife had a violent, alcoholic relationship, so bad that it was a rare weekend in the years between ’77 and ’87 where a plate or wine glass didn’t break or the police weren’t called. Their son once pointed a gun at me on my walk up the front steps of 616 when I was a senior in high school and claimed he’d secretly pointed a gun at me in the past. Muggings and robberies, including the four that I experienced, were as common as the common cold

At the near-door apartment building, 630 East Lincoln, the drug trade had been alive and well years before the arrival of crack cocaine. Fights involving knives and baseball bats were normal, often involved a crowd of kids as spectators. Sometimes these fights would spill onto the front lawn of 616’s A-building, where I could witness it first-hand.

That violence was a frequent companion in my life wasn’t surprising. I never lived anywhere growing up where the majority of the people around me weren’t welfare-poor, working-poor or working-class Blacks, where the heating oil came in time for winter, and where maintaining mental health was a topic of conversation. To act as if employment practices, education policy, public health access, police neglect or brutality or housing policies had nothing to do with the sheer concentration of poverty and violence around me would be at the least naive. Fundamentally, it was the benign neglect in the chain between individual racial assumptions, the soft bigotry of mainstream media, and the hard concrete of structural racism in play.

What was my constant companion growing up in Mount Vernon, New York has remained the story of poverty, race and violence in Chicago’s South Side for a century. Don’t feel sorry, for me or for all of those shot up in Chicago this past July 4th weekend. Do something, say something, or don’t. But feeling sorrow without saying or doing something about shouldn’t be an option.

The Make-Believe Media

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

"Both Sides Do It", "Dirty Laundry" (1982), Anchors, Columnists, Commentators, Jay Rosen, Journalism, Journalists, Liberal Bias, Mainstream Media, Make-Believe Journalism, Media, News Media, Objectivity, Print Journalism, Pundits, What Are Journalists For? (1999)


What media can get wrong (Election 1948, SCOTUS Obamacare Decision), November 3, 1948 and June 28, 2012 [October 17, 2012].

I get so tired of so many “journalists,” commentators and columnists saying the same thing over and over again. About the 2012 Presidential Election, about education, about race relations, about crime, about virtually anything anyone with a working brain cares to think about.

For more than four decades, our media has become like the color commentators for an old World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) event between “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan. Where the mere appearance of journalism and fairness has become more important than any actual substance. Where pitching fake debates about actual facts about real events and trends is normal business. Overall, the news industry — TV, print, radio and Internet — is about as professional an operation as a hole-in-the-wall bar attempting to become a strip club.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” whether it’s Ruth Chris Steakhouse or the mainstream media, October 17, 2012. (http://sanfrancisco.com).

Jay Rosen’s ’99 book What Are Journalists For? and Don Henley’s ’82 hit “Dirty Laundry” have plenty in common. They both unmask the news business as just that, a business. All of these ideas about objectivity, access and coverage for mainstream journalism in all its forms are just that, ideas. In actuality, news has grown into another form of entertainment, sometimes in the most literal sense (read The Onion and watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as but three examples).

Perhaps the most glaring falsehood of all is that the media is a mere reflection of society, and that journalism’s role is to be the mirror that stands apart, reflecting both the light and the darkness of our world. Both Rosen (in a scholarly tone) and Henley (with sarcasm-dripping lyrics) call bull crap on this idea.

There are too many lies that the media tells itself for me to go through all of them in one blog post, but there are particularly pernicious ones that I need to address here:

1. The built-in “liberal media bias:” This one is about as true as “dolphins fly” and “parrots live at sea” (thank you, Stevie Wonder). Fact is, the news media, with the exceptions of FOX News, represents a centrist view of the US and the world. Period. When’s the last time anyone has heard CNN discuss creating a single-track Pre-K to twelfth grade college and work preparation school system? Since when does the New York Times recommend the legalization of marijuana or the decriminalization of heroin and cocaine? Has the Washington Post ever suggested that America’s imperialist foreign and economic policies were the ultimate reasons for 9/11? These are all liberal positions, and yet, they get next to no play except maybe on non-mainstream TV and rags, liberal talk radio and progressive blogs.

2. The media’s goal is “objectivity:” Are we really that daft? Scholarly objectively went out the window in the humanities and social sciences in the ’80s, because it was obvious that scholars are actually, well, people. Last I checked, journalists, commentators, editors, columnists, anchors and talk show hosts are, too. Their collective main goal – to sell a story to the public (or, in many cases, to others in the media world), and overall, to make money for their newspaper, radio station, news channel or website. For if the business makes money, folks in the media get to keep their jobs and their prestige.

Gold bars and the earth on a set of brass scales (inspired by An Inconvenient Truth [2006]), August 2, 2011. (http://drpinna.com).

3. The “both sides do it” argument: The fact that the media has turned into about five different monopolies has led to this idea that there are two equal and opposite sides to everystory. It’s been true of the mainstream coverage of this election, but it’s applicable to everything they show the public. Climate change, some say “yes” (as in 99.8 percent of all scientists) and some (scientists paid off by Scaife, Olin, and the Heritage Foundation) say “no.” Trayvon Martin, was he a victim or a thug? Look, we all know that life has much more gray than the media is capable of capturing, but most rags and news outlets have long given up trying to provide a full story. All in the name of selling more newspapers, driving up ad sells and pushing up Nielsen ratings.

Megyn Kelly, FOX News, September 27, 2011. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

4. People in the media world are intelligent and sophisticated: This one is a keeper. To be sure, there are plenty of brilliant folk associated with CNN, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, and the New York Times. But most journalists aren’t as smart as we tend to assume. Fact is, journalists are good at two or three things: asking lots of questions, looking professional in front of a camera and writing in middle school sentences. I could’ve done two of these three by the time I finished sixth grade. Since most folks in news spend most of their time talking with each other, their brilliance is self-evident. They certainly don’t need to check in with us for our approval.

I’m sure that the likes of Megyn Kelly, Soledad O’Brien and Tom Friedman won’t be reading my blog to see what I’ve said about their business. After all, they have the pen and the mic, and I’m just an aspiring writer and professor with a blog. But I know something they don’t. You can’t live in the world of make-believe forever.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

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