With the weather breaking in Chicago, in a scenario found in Black areas, there will be more people out, more people about and predictably more violence and more victims. Activists and advocates will be out in full force night and day working to stem gangbanging.
Their work is necessary and honorable but it must be connected with ending another evil: “economic gangbanging.” If gangbangers are those who band together to protect one another, make money and assert ownership of their turf, economic gangbangers are driving daily into Black neighborhoods, poor Black neighborhoods, and driving out with handfuls of cash. They aren’t driving motorcycles or expensive cars but huge cement mixer trucks, fl atbeds, and heavy equipment. They are destroying sidewalks, dumping gravel on grass while resurfacing streets, dropping in improved sewer lines or working with utility companies to do underground whatever utility companies need done–presumably running electric cables.
But these public works and construction projects aren’t manned by the men who live and die in these neighborhoods. White men come in and out and work in peace. So while young Black men are killing each other over peanuts and bravado in the drug trade, Caucasians are making a killing in the construction trades and in municipal contracts. Our neighborhoods are “too bad,” “too dangerous,” and “too ghetto,” for these hard hat-wearing crews to live in, but the ‘hood is a nice place to come suck up a paycheck and take it back to build where you live.
Something is wrong with that picture and something is wrong with pictures of outsiders readily employed in our neighborhoods while we victimize one another and beg, borrow and steal our way through the day, the month, the year. Then we send young men and women to job training programs with no jobs at the end of the tunnel. For years there has been talk about lack of opportunity and contracts and little change, but photo-ops with the mayor, the city councilor, the alderman, the state representative and even the president abound. We have leaders who boast of the mayor personally taking their calls, but someone else is called when the contracts are handed out and the checks are cashed.
We want young men to stop the violence but we don’t give them anything and allow legally sanctioned stick-ups right outside our doors. Something is wrong with that picture.
In Chicago, a major construction fi rm is paying $12 million to settle a whistleblower complaint, which charges James McHugh Construction Company “used women-owned businesses to fraudulently secure multi-million dollar public transportation projects in the Chicago area funded by state and federal governments,” reported www.courthousenews.com.
The company is accused of using front companies that posed as women-owned businesses to qualify for contracts supposedly let to minority businesses. State Attorney General Madigan said, “The company used womenowned businesses to submit false claims to the state and federal governments for millions of dollars when in fact; those businesses never completed the level of work required by law.”
Wait. So the company plotted to wrongly get the contract and then didn’t complete the work?
Then there is the work being done at Malcom X College that has bypassed Blacks, according to the African American Contractors Association. So a tribute to Malcolm and an institution carrying his name will be completed largely without much construction from his brothers? Mark S. Allen of the National Black Wall Street offi ce in Chicago asked in an April Facebook posting: “There are 15% in contracts worth $32 million dollars awarded to Hispanic contractors and 11% of contracts worth $22 million dollars awarded to ‘Black’ contractors. My question that I think is worth a major discussion … ‘Is $22 million dollars REALLY going to legitimate Black contractors and employs Black community workers?’ ”
When we say enough to the gangbangers for poppin’ off weapons, we should say enough is enough for political leaders and religious leaders who go off at the mouth and bring nothing home to the people. Your tax dollars are at work but you are not allowed to work? If we don’t stop this madness, we want death and destruction that stalks the streets. Next time you think or talk about the problem of gangbanging, think and talk about economic gangbanging and taking back those streets and those jobs. Where is the outraged outcry about that?
(Final Call editor-in-chief Richard B. Muhammad can be reached at editor@finalcall. com. You can also follow him on Facebook and @RMfinalcall on Twitter.)
