“Is there a common link to these neighborhoods?”
A question that has no need to be asked.
However, I look at it differently - what they have in common is that the people who live there, and their forefathers (uh...so to speak), have been extensively “helped” by Liberal thinking for the last 50 years.
This article is from 1996, a long time ago, but very interesting. It’s long and I haven’t finished it yet, but I think it’s worth the read.
My Black Crime Problem, and Ours
John J. DiIulio, Jr.
Violent crime is down in New York and many other cities, but there are two big reasons to keep the champagne corked. One is that murder, rape, robbery, and assault remain at historic highs: the streets of Manhattan, like those of Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles, remain much less safe today than in the 1950s and 1960s. Worse, though policing and prison policies matter, nothing affects crime rates more than the number of young males in the population—and by the year 2010, there will be about 4.5 million more males age 17 or under than there were in 1990: 8 percent more whites and 26 percent more blacks. Since around 6 percent of young males turn out to be career criminals, according to the historical data, this increase will put an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades. Numerous studies show that each succeeding generation of young male criminals commits about three times as much serious crime as the one before it: the occasional fatal knife fight of 1950s street gangs has given way to the frequent drive-by shootings of 1990s gangs.
The second reason to keep the champagne corked is that not only is the number of young black criminals likely to surge, but also the black crime rate, both black-on-black and black-on-white, is increasing, so that as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males. But just when we need to think most earnestly about black crime, the space for honest discourse about race and crime is shrinking. The evidence of that shrinkage is everywhere: in the lickety-split O.J. verdict and its racially polarized aftermath, in the utter certitude of many blacks that the justice system is rigged against them, in the belief of many whites that violent crime is synonymous with black crime and the fear they feel of every young black male passerby not wearing a tie or handcuffs.
What has made our views on race and crime so polarized—and often so out of touch with reality? What are the facts about race and crime? And what are Americans, blacks and whites together, to do about it?
http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_2_my_black.html
The above is an excerpt. On the one hand, it seems a complicated issue. On the other, it seems so simple.
Stay in school and while there, actually learn. Join some clubs, volunteer, hang out with the smart kids and emulate them. Go to college or trade school. Get a job and prove yourself and work your way up. Get married to someone with a good education and good job prospects. Buy a home and have a child or two and teach your children well.
Or would that be too “acting white”?