Parental Responsibility

I have heard a number of responses to the Ferguson incident identifying missing parental responsibility as fundamentally responsible for adolescent death both in that incident and in the Tampa episode.Aside from an unjustified indictment of black families and visible minority communities such statements lose sight of the fact that adolescence is a time of rebellion and testing of the societal boundaries. From the rowdiness of fraternities to the acting out of athletic teams,to the increase in intrafamilial strife,adolescents are pushing the new boundaries of their identities.such testing is not usually punished(if punished at all) with deadly force.It seems clear that the boundary testing of black adolescents(not exclusively male)brings into play the unacknowledged police function of “keeping certain people in place”elsewhere identified as immersification.

The microcosm concept.

The Octogenarians

The “octogenarians” was constructed with two intersecting ideas. the first is that looking at the decade of the 60s is of particular interest be cause it represented an era of focused concern on problems of inequity and social justice.This remains true despite the usurpation of national concern and interest by then growing  involvement  with Vietnam.This concern took the form of a series of federally fueled initiatives. The second is that focusing on one of these initiatives (Model Cities)allows us to look at what happened through a magnifying retrospectoscope.Because most of us were present in New Haven or around New Haven and Washington at that time.We octogenarians have a more or less uniform view of what transpired.(Relatively unaffected by antological process,a lovely word referring to the deliberate distortion of truth to allow for the production of a set of facts to be used in argument that derives not from occurrences but…

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