Crime and Violence...

Crime and Violence....

A topic which makes us all wonder what we should do? The answer over the past two decades for most Americans and most Evangelical Christians for that matter has been to isolate ourselves further and further away from where we believe crime and violence will strike, yet we are seeing violence more and more in "our" neighborhoods and in "our" lives and it simply can not be ignored any longer. The LA Times will immediately label any and all violence as "gang related", as they again did this morning, when the LAPD shot and killed a "suspect" (key word), then the paper this morning labeled him as a "gang member". I am in no way justifying the fact that the suspect shot at officers, but the prevailing opinion is, "Kill the gang members and we will live in a safe city." The Christian community is silent about this phenomena of demonizing someone who was just killed, in order to justify the actions of the people who shot him. I know that the police have a difficult job as it was difficult when I did the job, but this labeling of people has to stop, because it makes the person into an object, not a subject who had a family, feelings, interests, and was created in God's image.
Through my studying of sociology, the labeling of people by dominant society has always happened, but we can not ignore the cities any longer.

William Julius Wilson, as sociologist at Harvard and previously The University of Chicago, has written a book entitled; When Work Disappears and has traced the lineage, post World War II, by detailing, a historical study into the economic collapse of inner city neighborhoods in the U.S., between 1950 and 1990, but focusing mainly on 1970-1990, in hopes of looking at ways to bring economic revitalization back to the inner city.

Wilson has detailed how, “outmigration” of higher income families, predominantly middle class and working class black families from ghetto neighborhoods into mainstream society, has caused a definitive disjunction of social cohesion in neighborhood, where people used to form social networks at church, community organizations, schools...after the working poor left, the unemployed poor where left to "fend for themselves." He also points to the fact that unemployed poor are slightly different from the working poor in these same neighborhoods, in that the working poor have greater opportunity to attain economic stability, whereas the unemployed remain trapped within a greater cycle of poverty. Once this “social buffer” between the unemployed poor and the working class poor was removed after the middle and working class families “out-migrate”, and social organizations which once gave structure to inner city life also disappeared, unemployment would continue to increase, through the enlargement of ghetto areas in cities, by people simply leaving those areas.

Statistically, this premise of “outmigration” had been developing through the years, post World War II, but culminated between 1970 and 1990. In the years after WWII the federal government had “redlined” mortgages for homeowners in certain inner city neighborhoods, but favored mortgages for suburban neighborhoods, attracting families to leave the inner cities in favor of the suburbs. “It trapped mainly blacks and certain European immigrants in the inner cities.” The suburbs had greater use of land at this time, therefore many suburban planners made use of lenient zoning restrictions, through “tract housing”, making it difficult for “inner city racial minorities to penetrate.”

How then do we as Christians created jobs, or how do we reconcile the marginalized with the opportunities afforded to the rest of us? This is a difficult question, which I am wanting study and know in a deeper way. The above mentioned statements from Wilson's book was a paper which I wrote at Fuller Seminary about the economic revitalization of cities and how jobs need to be created in cities allowing people opportunities to work. God Bless.