10:53am August 23, 2013

“But worse yet, what is daily life for young people of color who are poor, is quite literally out of sight and out of mind, and thereby unimaginable, not only for middle class and wealthy residents of cities, but for the Mayors of those cities. Because they never talk to young people who are on the receiving end of these spatial controls, and ever see them in action, they can pretend they don’t exist. Their conscience has atrophied when it comes to the fundamental realities of life for the young and the poor.

Two recent events dramatize this for me- the police murder of Kimani Gray in East Flatbush Brooklyn, and the school closing order given by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago. Never has New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg reached out to the grieving mother of a 16 year old boy who was killed for doing nothing more than walking home from a neighborhood party. Instead, he hides behind a “narrative of criminality” used to hide the ugly facts of Kimani Gray’s death, which is that this was an outgrowth of a “stop and frisk” procedure initiated by plainclothes police that will NEVER happen to young people in the Mayor’s family or social circle. Kimani Gray was one of New York City’s legion of “disposable youth” that must be policed and contained in every aspect of their lives to make the city’s engines of economic growth secure. He could be snuffed out without anyone in power losing a moment of sleep.

Similarly, the lives of tens of thousands of young people of color to be disrupted by the school closings ordered by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago could be conveniently erased from his thoughts by a ski trip because his own children, safely enrolled in Chicago Lab School, would never experience the disruptions, nor would their friends. The impact of these policies would be felt by “Other People’s Children”- the same people who live in fear of gun violence, gang violence, and police containment, who feel alternately penned into poor neighborhoods or pushed out of the city altogether.”

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