Food for Thought in the Wake of the Death of Hadiya Pendleton
February 24, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The shooting death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old Black high school student, at the hands of another Black youth has been on the minds of people in Chicago over the last several weeks. The media lauded her as “so promising,” in contrast to the “bad” youth who are constantly demonized, and the fact that this happened only blocks from Obama’s house in Chicago right after Hadiya Pendleton was in DC as part of the parade for Obama’s second inauguration made this killing international news. In this light, the following, from “The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have. A Message, And a Call, From the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA” is food for thought:
For millions in the inner cities, if they are not killed at an early age, their likely future is prison (nearly 1 in 8 young Black men is incarcerated, the prisons are overflowing with Blacks and Latinos, and this country has the highest rate of incarceration of women in the world). This system has robbed so many youth of the chance for a decent life and has got far too many living, dying and killing for nothing—nothing good—nothing more than messing up people and murdering each other on the streets of the cities here…or joining the military, being trained to be murderers on a mass scale, massacring people in countries across the globe. A system which offers millions and millions of youth no greater purpose, no better fate, than crime and punishment, or to become a mindless killing machine for the system itself—that alone is reason enough to sweep this system from the face of the earth! (See the entire Message and Call.)
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