Reading Response 11/7

“Researchers say 1 in 3 of all black babies born today will spend time in prison.”

I’ll let it speak for itself, but this sentence leaves me on the verge of tears. Melissa Valentine’s article, Who are the Super Predators? juxtaposes her personal connection with “black-on-black crime” along with historical evidence and political policies as well as eloquent quotes of different political figures and writers. One outrageous policy Valentine discusses in her piece is HOLC- the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation introduced during the New Deal encouraging home ownership in the 1930’s. However, what it really did was color code neighborhoods that were safe to live in and others that were riskier territories. What this really did was divide up neighborhoods black and white. The process of redlining is ridiculous though because depending on who you are talking to determines whether or not a person feels “safe” in a certain neighborhood.

Today redlining seems to have been swapped out for homicides. As a nation we have grown far too numb to the violence that has panned out across America. Valentine brings up a very good point about needing to see a face and hearing a story for those who loose their lives far to soon, rather than just adding them to a statistic. People that get killed in this country are just as much human as anyone else and deserve to be noted.

In Hillary Clinton’s Urban Agenda it created some slight skepticism about whether or not Clinton’s policies would be obtainable in the future. The use of public-private partnership to stimulate urban economies sounds promising. However, expanding tools from previous administrations is slightly problematic because most likely the plans didn’t work well. I do agree that neighborhoods should consider rewriting zoning laws to diversify neighborhoods.