(13) I didn't know what a ghetto was then.  Later I would learn that we lived in "the slums"; I thought we had just moved to paradise.

 Why and how did this change?  How much of this was an internal and how much an external issue?

(14) The took their time coming and I'm sure were quite amused at this naive family, so serious about catching a petty thief in the South Bronz.  This contact with the police shook my confidence in the world.  Something was terribly wrong here.  It was nothing they did, it was what they didn't do.  They didn't take us seriously.  They came because they had to come.  They asked questions not because they thought the answers might help catch the thief, but because they had to do something when we were so insistent.  I looked at the two white officers and realized that while their mouths were saying one thing, their manner and attitude were saying something else.  We can't believe you made us walk up all these stairs for a lousy robbery of ten dollars.  What's the matter with you people, don't you know where you live?  Don't waste our time with this small-time crap.  We'll come because we have to, but we don't have to do anything.  You're on your own.

 Police are a top down solution!

(16) We had just been robbed and no one seemed to care.

 Even ghettos need community!  How to build it?  What's missing?

(17) On Union Avenue, failure to fight would mean that you would be set upon over and over again.  Sometimes for years.  Later I would see what the older boys did to Butchie.

 Whence power among the powerless?

(17) To those of use who watched [Butchie's beating], the lesson was brutal and unmistakable.  No matter who [sic] you fought, he could never beat you that bad.  So it was better to fight even if you couldn't win than to end up being "stretched" for being a coward.  We all fought, some with more skill and determination than others, but we all fought.

 How do you fight a toxic value system?

(19)  The lowest group was those children who could not leave the sidewalk, children too young to have any status at all.  I belonged to this group and I hated it.  The sidewalk, while it provided plenty of opportunity to play with other children, seemed to me to be the sidelines.  The real action happened in the street.

 Amidst powerlessness and disempowerment, is this the only type of boredom that allows for a toxic value system?

(21)  Then Paul Henry chimed in, "Don't be scared, little Geoff.  Go git him."  I was surprised.  I didn't expect anyone to support me, especially not Paul henry.  But as I would learn later, most of these fights were viewed as sport by the bystanders.  You rooted for the favorite or the underdog.  Almost everyone had someone to root for them when they fought.

 Where did the sport metaphor break down?

(21)  The older boys pronounce the fight a tie and made us shake hands and "be friends."  They rubbed our heads and said, "You're all right," and then gave us some pointers on how to really fight.  We both basked in the glory of their attention.  The other sidewalk boys looked at us with envy.  We had passed the first test.  We were on our way to becoming respected members of Union Avenue.

 Whence the insecurity that empowers a value system like this?

(30) It strikes me that while metal detectors may prevent a few guns from coming into the school, they have no real impact on the children's sense of safety.  Children simply get the message, "If you're going to shoot someone, it will not be in school.  You must shoot them coming to school, or going home from school, but not in the school building."  And this is one of the main problems with too many of our schools.  Children understand that adults who control the school are powerless to protect them.  School is too often the child's learning ground about the impotence of adult authority when it comes to violence.

 Again with the powerlessness of adults.  The misconception of school as a "safe haven" does more harm than good, particularly when they are organized around the breakdown of communities through things like forced bussing.  We need to make the ponds smaller, not bigger.

(32) In many ways those of us on Union Avenue were a certain type of warrior class in the Bronx.  We disdained bullies and were not known to bully others, but we were known as boys who had heart.  The block had an identity and that identity was strengthened or weakened each time one of us had to square off after school.

 Community identity: how does it get formed?

(109) If  all they see is young men with guns setting the normative standards in their communities they will naturally accept those standards as their own.

 Is this irreconcilable with nonviolence?

(112-3)  What made the situation even more dangerous was the fact that Ramon was well-loved by the gangsters in the neighborhood.  They loved Ramon because he was an exceptional athlete, and because he was fair and non-judgmental.  He knew that many of the boys he grew up with sold drugs for a living.  He chose not to.  He carried himself with a pride and a swagger that made little kids on the block look up to him, not the dealers.  The dealers understood this, and they also knew that Ramon was not afraid of even the most dangerous of them.  They carried guns but Ramon would not be intimidated by them and they had to treat him with respect.  He was a local boy gone good, and even the drug dealers saw him as a role model, if not for themselves then for their little brothers.  This meant that there would be others who would see it as their duty to kill the person who had tried to shoot Ramon's bother.  They knew that Ramon was not a criminal, had no criminal record.  They would kill the boy as a favor, so that Ramon would not risk ruining his life.  I knew the hunt was on and time was running out for the kid who had shot Joe [, Ramon's brother].

 There's a fundamental divergence and tension here in recognizing that the grass is greener somewhere, but feeling trapped, nonetheless. 

(116)  They told me how the other boys, fourteen and fifteen years old, had shouted, "Pop him!' and how the crowd had seemed disappointed when he didn't pull the trigger.  I couldn't fathom how casully the crowd wanted to see someone shot and probably killed.

 What is the crowd looking for, really?

(124) Here I was dealing with children dying every day and trying to solve the problem on the streets, and other Americans were sitting in offices designing new and more effective ways to entice children to use handguns.  I looked at Marian Wright Edelman and the look of disgust on her face told it all.

 Legislating it away won't work!  How do we make guns a constructive influence?

(124) They discussed these guns with the same intimate knowledge that boys I grew up with discussed cars and car engines.  They also bought gun magazines.  They were fascinated by guns, and , in the same way we looked forward to the new-model cars each year, they looked forward to the new models of handguns, with their new gadgets and high-tech sophistication.

 False nostalgia (re: guns' absence).

(128) The problem is not just that some officers are corrupt and others cover it up while arresting poor young men on a regular basis.  It's that the police in poor communities are society's only representatives of justice and fairness, but most police officers who work in the inner cities are not from these neighborhoods.  They have no appreciation of the culture or the makeup of the community.  They find themselves in a strange environment where the people are often hostile.  They don't recognize any sense of community--they see chaos instead--and so often they can't discriminate between one element of the community and another.  They end up treating everyone as if they were guilty until proven otherwise.

 So, we pull police from those neighborhoods?  Less top-down, think carefully.

 (128) Lack of respect for the police causes young people in poor communities to be extremely cynical regarding illegal activities.

 !

(138) (Outsides are not always wanted in school, especially in schools that are failing, where there is often a "circle the wagons" mentality.) 

 !

(140) One of the unanticipated results of having so many parents involved in our Beaconprogram is that it has reduced the level of violence in the school itself.  When we began to think about it, this made sense.  Young people are less likely to act violently in a setting where their mother, or their friend's mother, might be.  As the Countee Cullen Community Center involved more and more of teh community, adults and children, the school and the center took on more of the values of the larger community and fewer of the values of the adolescents in that community.

 A glimmer of hope from within, finally!

(146)  They really wanted Janet Reno to hit a basket.  They were patient and supportive while she missed shots from right underneath.  Any one of them could have made those shots easily, yet they didn't laugh or ridicule her, they knew in time she would get it done.  And when she finally made the basket they cheered her.

 Dissect!

(147) We were discussing his dream of going to the United Nations as an ambassador for children, and how our children need to learn the same skills that are taught to UN peacekeepers.

 REAL skills!

(148) Safety plans are a crucial element to making peace.  These plans are necessary because adults often pay little or no attention to where violence is likely to occur in schools or afterschool programs.  But children know.  Children know where fights happen, and why those places are chosen.  While this information is common knowledge among children, adults never ask them how to reduce or prevent violence.  We go about hiring security guards or bringing in metal detectors, with no thought that children can tell us much of what we need to know about violence reduction.

 Free school on Union Avenue!  Governance is the real issue, here.

(160) For those who think the death penalty is the answer I ask you consider the thousands of American children who are killed each year.  The Children's Defense Fund reports that "In 1991 alone (most recent data available), 5,536 children and youths died from gunshot injuries" (CDF, The State of America's Children Yearbook 1994).  So you see there already is a death penalty on the streets of our cities and towns.  The threat of the government catching you and killing you will never carry the deterrent power in our cities' war zones that some people ascribe to it.

 Strong rhetoric.

(162) And don't be fooled by those who say that these teenagers will never work for five dollars an hour when they can make thousands of dollars in a week.  I have found little evidence of this in my years of working with young people.  Most of them, given the opportunity to make even the minimum wage, will do so gladly.

 Solution to powerlessness!

(163) There is no difference between the message that Mighty Mouse delivered and the one that Charles Bronson delivered in his "Death Wish" movie.

 Bullshit.

(164) The television, movie, and record industries must all reduce the amount of violence they sell to Americans.

 Does the nonuniform demographic distribution of violence undermine this conclusion (given the [comparatively] uniform demographic distribution of media violence?)

To Geoffery Canada:
Fantastic book.  But: you aren't afraid of your goverment because it abandoned you.  Don't rush to give it power; listen to the grievances of those it didn't [abandon].  There are other hells.