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The stories told by those who have emerged from this world have the ring of tales by escaped adventurers from a savage land. Danny Sanders of Brooklyn has spent 13 of his 35 years behind bars. Now he works for the Fortune Society, a group that helps ex-convicts. "When we were robbing people, the trick was to get the money without hurting anybody. Now the kids brag about hurting their victims." Danny claims that he has never backed down from a fight in his life, but he is skittish about this new generation. A group of teenagers recently demanded money from him while he waited for the subway. He forked it over. "I ain't scared," he says. "But I ain't crazy either."
Marvin Brinston, 19, was once a mean walker of Oakland's mean streets. One day, he experienced a sidewalk epiphany. "Two men were arguing," he recalls. "One just straight up and shot the other. It dawned on me how they got killed by just talking. And that scared me. I just had to get away from that." Now Brinston is doing landscaping and maintenance work for A.C. Transit, the East Bay bus system.
Gil Johnson, 24, of the Bronx, N.Y., is uneasy about the younger generation. "They don't take no talking. They just come out shooting." He had a friend who was killed after stepping on someone else's foot. "If he had said, 'I'm sorry' or 'Scuse me' or something like that, he'd be alive today."
What is the explanation for this murderousness? Why are blacks disproportionately represented as victims and victimizers, as predators and prey? One partial explanation, some experts contend, is the hopelessness that pervades the urban ghetto, which fosters a kind of street-corner nihilism, a feeling that nothing is worth anything. Says James M. Evans Jr., a social worker who organized a workshop last year in Washington on the subject of black-on-black violence: "They believe they have nothing to lose. Even if they should lose their own lives, they feel they will not have lost very much. Besides, why should they be good, they ask. There is no reward for good behavior." Paul Hubbard, vice president of an independent urban planning agency called New Detroit Inc., is struck by the sense of detachment and despair among violent young blacks. "They have a value system much different from ours, and they don't have a reason for adopting our value system because we haven't been able to show them why they should."
Dr. Mark L. Rosenberg of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and Sociologist Evan Stark of Rutgers University have written that three broad themes emerge from the literature about violence: "The importance of unacceptable levels of poverty, racial discrimination and gender inequality; the cultural acceptance of violence as a way to manage dilemmas these and other situations pose; and the ready availability of lethal agents that can be used in violence against others or self." Social scientists see additional reasons: high unemployment, drugs, gangs, and the rise in female-headed households and births out of wedlock. The rate of black teenage unemployment in the nation's cities is more than 50% in some areas. The future is not cheering either. In those same cities, more than half the black children are born out of wedlock.