White Night In the Ghetto

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

White Night In The Ghetto From the Front Seat of A Taxicab.
I've been working almost every night these past two weeks and have become re acclimated to driving and all it entails.

Sunday night for some reason I got five different fares who were young adult whites going to their residences deep in formerly Black neighborhoods (well, Crown Heights is a neighborhood that is mainly Black but has a large number of Lubavitcher Jewish cultists also, and I won't count Williamsburg in Brooklyn an area long shared by the Satmar hasidics and Puerto Ricans because it's been getting filled up with these generic whites from the interior of North America for a long long time now.) I got to talk a bit with two of these passengers. Let me digress here for a moment though. In the old days I had more conversations with passengers than I do now. Back then cell phones were not for everyone as they are today and these days I ignore it when I hear a passenger speak because nine times out of ten they are calling ahead to their destinations or calling their spouses to explain their whereabouts, and so forth.

Anyhow one of these kids (I call them kids, they must be in their twenties or thirties) was a bit concerned that I would not know how to get to where he was going (real "Do The Right Thing" territory - Bed Stuy, do or die as they say) and I told this kid that the corner where he was going to is where my parents had a small apartment on the day they brought me from Brooklyn Jewish Hospital sixty years ago.) Anyhow these two kids are very aware that they are the forward wedge of white power in the ghetto, that their presence alone makes it more difficult for the people already there to stay there. Each said he was "guilty." In my mind these kids are good kids but they should not feel "guilty" that they also need a place to lay their heads at night and they cannot afford to live in Manhattan or in any white enclave anywhere near New York City. It's a gift to have a conscience. I told them what matters is what they do with their understanding of how things are in order to change the world and make it a place where everyone has a place to be in.


Since I am a Jew who lives in General Grant Houses I am also I guess part of this forward wedge. General Grant Houses is on the Western border of Harlem, rubbing right up against Columbia University's neighborhood which clearly begins one block south of my apartment. Columbia University has bought up the land right across Broadway and they plan to destroy the low density buildings over there, gasoline stations (there are very few remaining in Manhattan) warehouses and so forth. St. Mary's Church is one center of resistance to this spread.

I had reason yesterday to look over the legal definition of genocide and the historical 1951 petition to the United Nations that charged the United States with genocide against "The Negro People of the United States" which was at that time the accepted usage.Looking at it onc e could say that Administration for Children´s Services here in New York is a mechanism of genocide. Check it out:
ARTICLE II, CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE:
Adopted December 9, 1948" In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

ARTICLE III:
"The following acts shall be punishable:

A. Genocide;
B. Conspiracy to commit genocide;
C. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
D. Attempt to commit genocide;
E. Complicity in genocide."

-xii-
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9685712


Article II of the Genocide Convention
A- ACS knowingly has a policy now of overloading its caseworkers and making them take parents to court in cases that really don´t merit this level of intervention which wastes caseworkers´s valuable time and energy. They know well that this policy actually results in the neglect of cases, some of which actually are legitimate abuse situations that cry out for intervention. This is why the number of children who die while on ACS caselods increases during removal panics which are dictated by the media barons Sulzberger (New York Times), Zuckerman (New York Daily News), and Murdoch (New York Post) . Almost entirely these children are Black and Latino. ACS illegally turned over approximately 465 Black and Latino foster children for drug experimentation and it was reported that the experiments killed two of these children.

B and C- ACS harasses Black and Latino families needlessly. Black and Latino families are rousted in predawn raids and ACS awakens entire apartment buildings in which members of these two groups reside. ACS harasses and interferes with family functioning even when allegations against them are clearly known to be false. ACS frightens and traumatizes Black children and Latino children on a daily and nightly basis. Black and Latino children often witness their parents being placed in handcuffs and taken away at these hours, for so the called crimes of disciplining their children by customary and religiously sanctioned means. These tactics, often initiated by anonymous accusations, smack of what we once were taught took place in Hitler´s Germany and Stalin´s USSR.