Young Black Men Yet To Receive “Obama Benefit of the Doubt”
December 26, 2008 by blackgirlgrown
Filed under engage
Bryan Weaver, chairman of the Adams Morgan advisory neighborhood commission and president and founder of Hoops Sagrado, an international youth leadership program based in Washington, writes in The Washington Post:
Remember on election night, when pundits on cable news shows shouted to the mountaintops about this moment in history? Remember that strangers were hugging each other in the streets? This was the moment, we declared, when we as a nation and as a people had at last overcome. Yes, this election proved that if any person works hard enough, she or he can become anything, even leader of the most powerful country on Earth. Welcome to post-racial America!
But don’t celebrate just yet. We have a long way to go to achieve real change. You see, this month, only two miles from where Barack Obama will live and serve as the 44th president of the United States, a young black man was gunned down in Adams Morgan. Yes, this sort of crime is all too common in the District, but the tragedy of Derrell Goins’s murder Dec. 10 was compounded by the self-centeredness of the people who came and went that night at the crime scene.
Before the ambulance left with its precious cargo — the dwindling light of a young man who spent his 21 years walking gently on this Earth — a group of people was pushing to get inside the police line to make sure no stray bullet had scratched their green Pontiac. A couple complained that they wanted to drive through the crime scene to unload their “party boxes” at their luxury condo. Another man remarked that this incident was a “drag, but shootings happen all the time in D.C.” He chuckled.
