Lost Count: A Love Story

A couple years ago I watched a spoken word video in my English class called Lost Count: A Love Story and I recently came back to it. The spoken word was written and performed by two Chicago youth, Nate Marshall and Demetrius Amparan in 2007. [Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVD-HsHoUNM ] The poem addresses youth-on-youth violence in Chicago, which has become an epidemic in the city. The spoken word is very powerful and I highly recommend watching it.

 I researched some more about youth violence in Chicago and came across an article [Link: http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-muckrakers/2013/01/chicagos-homicide-epidemic-is-a-youth-homicide-epidemic/] that included a map of all the youth (ages 25 and under) homicides in the city from 2008-2012. If you go to the article and scroll down to the map you'll see red dots scattered across it and when you click a dot it pops up with a sort of profile. Each dots says the name, age, race and gender of each victim. What I found interesting and somewhat disturbing was that when I clicked the dots, 15 out of 20 times the victims were African American males. I did some more research and found that most of the articles I came across about shootings and youth violence in Chicago featured African Americans. Latinos make up 1/3 of the 21 minority communities in Chicago but I didn't come across any articles talking about Latinos. In the year 2008 80% of Latino youth in those minority communities were victims of homicide. The statistics show that African American males account for the largest number of youth homicides in Chicago but they aren't the only victims.

I found another article [Link: http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130728/downtown/let-us-live-youth-plead-march-spotlight-youth-violence] that was talking about the Let Us Live march that took place in Chicago. Youth gathered to protest youth-on-youth violence in their city and while that's great the article was somewhat surprising to me. The movement was focused on African-American victims and Corey Hardimin, a college student said "This is not a race movement. This is a human rights movement." Hardimin may believe this but the media makes this an African American issue by only reporting the black-on-black youth crimes. On the Map from the first article I was surprised to also see a large amount of white youth victims and, again, I couldn't find any articles talking about white-on-white youth crime in Chicago.

I found a lot of this information somewhat overwhelming and I don't know exactly what to gather from all of it. So, my question is: Do you think the youth violence in Chicago is an African American issue? The statistics show that their group has the most number of homicides in Chicago but what about the other minority groups? Isn't this a Latino issue too? Also, what role does socioeconomic status have on the crimes in the city? Most of the crimes were committed on the South side of the city, the most poverty-stricken area.