A Death in the Parallel Economy

Today’s “research activity” involved the murder of a man at the gym Steph and I used to belong to.  Around 8pm a couple days ago a guy was shot and killed right down the street.  This feels too close to home, literally.  He was playing basketball on the court that I’d played on before and suddenly there were six gunshots. A friend of his later posted, “n-ggas can’t even hoop”. 

The 23-year old victim lived a parallel life to mine that is utterly foreign. He was a gang member relocated from a tiny town in Mississippi, population 1,200. He went to high school nearby and brought his girlfriend up from there and had a child here. 

The pressure of providing for his new family apparently involved taking risks for money.  He also reposted a meme last fall that went: “Not in ICU, Not in Jail, Not in the Grave, Just Take a Single Moment to thank God”. He had 4,500 friends on Facebook and said: “I want my whole gang rich ! Not just me”. 

On 3/2/23 he was arrested here and charged with improper handling of firearms in a motor vehicle and possession of drugs.

There's no telling if it was gang related or not. It could've been simply an argument on the bball court that escalated. Wrong place, wrong time. The police, 48 hours later, don't appear to have many leads other than a very shadowy images of hooded figures on the court. Despite presumably many eyewitnesses involving a game of five on five. 

Regardless, there’s this underground economy that most of us never see, the drug economy and gang town. They operate within our city and under our noses and come from remote places like farm towns in Mississippi. 

It’s sad and perhaps the predictable outgrowth of a black culture that mostly refuses to participate in the higher education racket and then finds no real jobs as a result. A local former school board member had this to say the other day: 

“Over my years on the School Board and as a volunteer in Franklinton, it's become clear to me that the success a kid has in school is directly related to the environment the kid is raised in.

What level of education do the parents have? Do the parents read to their kids? At one Franklinton elementary school where I volunteered the principal told us that less than half the students had parents who had graduated from high school. Those parents were typically poor readers, had few if any books in the home, and never read to their kids when they were little. Those kids go to school in a neighborhood where this lack of early childhood development is a constant across nearly all homes. Consequently the academic performance of those kids is poor, and it's not the fault of the teachers or the amount of funding.

And the consequence is another generation of kids who don't read well, struggle with everything in school, drop out early, and end up in poverty.

I'm sure we could have plenty of arguments about how things got that way. There is a racial component, but note that in Franklinton in particular, there are nearly equal percentages of Black and White kids in poverty, both generally descendants of folks who migrated to Columbus from Appalachia and the Deep South to work in the factories, which they could do with little or no education. Today those factories are gone, but the culture is still there. This is a far from simple problem to fix.”