[Part I] The New Racism in East MoCo

(Updated July 9 @ 2300 hours, typo and missing word. Stet.)

I have been putting off this post for a long long time.

Since about 2000-2001 or so, I have been involving myself in various activities in Aspen Hill, especially focusing in such things as cleaning up North Gate Park, bringing more and better security to local shopping centers, and improving standards of living and safety at local rental and townhome/condo complexes.

The park is pretty well cleaned up, and to some degree security is improving at the rental/condo complexes. That latter improvement is due to increased cooperation between property managers and law-enforcement; the property-managers don't want any kind of doper action going on and they have all kinds of numbers to call to arrange a really bad day for whatever tenants they decide they don't want on their properties. The people answering those calls will cheerfully provide those very bad days, but there is a consequence which may have been unintended but which should have easily been anticipated. All of the displaced "problem people" -- as they are actually called -- wind up renting here in "the houses", in Aspen Hill west of Georgia Avenue, or during the recent excesses in the mortgage markets, they actually bought houses with "stated income loans" (or "liar loans") and those were generally in South Aspen Hill.

Even the sketchiest of "white Americans" tend to be either staying out of South Aspen Hill, or they go there in force. Gangs have been here longer and more deeply than the police or elected officials wanted to admit, but largely those were "immigrant gangs" such as the 18th Street Gang or MS-13, Vatos Locos, Sur X3 and the occasional wild clique of South Side Locos. But in recent years we've seen something pretty new and it's just depressing as hell, as well as totally understandable. Yet though it's understandable, I cannot approve.

Almost any of the misplaced cultural anthropologists -- who have spearheaded "anti-gang initiatives" for years here -- would tell you without hesitation that "immigrant gangs" are a natural response to a feeling of displacement, of being the stranger in a strange land, outnumbered by unfriendly faces and frequently the outright and undeserving victim of discrimination, harassment, and even violence. Be that as it may as regards the origins of such immigrant gangs, those origins are far in the past, and the aggressive recruitment of such gangs even down into elementary schools shows that it's not the immigrants who are set upon by hostile whites or blacks. What's happening here is that the "immigrants" -- legal or otherwise -- are assimilating to a new culture in their new homeland, a culture of crime, violence, and especially of organized activities of vendetta, revenge, and pre-emptory intimidation.

But the worst part of it all is this: people coming to America are expected to become American, and the most unusual and amazing characteristic of the USA is that we generally oppose racism. We generally oppose separatism. We generally strive to offer equal opportunity. But the gangs don't want that, in most cases.

And in response to the relentless anti-white/anti-Americanism of the "immigrant gangs", now we once again have white gangs, and I'm not talking about people who came out of prison after 20 years and can't wait to get back into a life of crime; I'm talking about teenagers and young adults. Black gangs are growing in the area at a rate never before seen, and they're not just gangs of local kids-gone-bad who just happen to be black; a lot of this is national-scope gangs such as Crips and Bloods. As for the Latino gangs, the local situation used to mostly be spontaneous networks of people moving mostly in the underground due to immigration status (or lack thereof), organizing a workforce not legally entitled to work in the US, and assorted bored teenagers with lame pretentions to being "gangsta". Yet in recent years, even before the current economic doldrums, there has been increasing importation of the so-called "California rivalries". Locally, black "rude boys" and sketchy latino kids used to be able to get along. But as the Crips and Bloods rivalry is imported from the brutal West Coast scenes, so also do we see the importation of the brutal rivalries between the Bloods and the 18th Street, between the Crips and other "hispanic" gangs, and as the crime grows increasingly racist, so does the general society reacting to that racist crime.

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Very sadly indeed, as a primarily American Black community finds itself driven more deeply into poverty by the economic downturn, the already high unemployment rate of non-college black males is driven even higher by the cutthroat and cut-rate competition of "immigrants" (legal or otherwise, mostly Spanish-speaking) for low-skilled and construction work. This sort of endless competition and sense of being discarded in favor of the johnny-come-latelies that can't even "speak American" is not making anyone any happier and indeed the outrage is growing.

I'm seeing increasing segregation at various places. For example, the central Aspen Hill shopping centers seem to be increasingly latino or African immigrants only, and in the Plaza del Mercado stores -- notably CVS -- there is a pervasive attitude I pick up, of "what the fuck you doin' here, white man?" I didn't spend most of the last decade trying to reclaim the parks from crime, or get more and better programs in the schools -- such as free summer lunches and educational programs to keep kids on the right track -- just to have people get all up in my face as if they thought they had a right to resent me.

If the recent elections -- both the Presidential and the County District 4 Special Elections -- are seen mostly as giving a license for racial hatred, all I can say is that I'm offended. Race or perception of it is no license to crime, to exclusionary practices. Indeed, race or the perception of it is especially odious as associated with criminal acts.

And there's nothing more odious, thus, than organized crime -- gangs -- based on race. The only thing that could be worse would be gangs -- racist or racialist gangs -- engaging in continuing patterns of crime and harassment to carve up desegregated neighborhoods into racially exclusive enclaves... that they control.

Yet as far as I can tell, the elected officials are "just fine with that"... and that's where the police get their orders.

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More to come.

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