From: barnhart@netcom.com (Aaron Barnhart)
Subject: Anti-Gang Ad Controversy #3: Clarence Page column
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 03:12:52 GMT
Organization: Netcom
Reply-To: barnhart@netcom.com

Taking the glamor out of gang life
By Clarence Page
(1989 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary)
Chicago Tribune
August 12, 1992

WASHINGTON--Imagine you are sitting at home watching television.
Suddenly the image of a young neo-Nazi skinhead fills your screen.
He delivers a Hitler-style salute while an announcer delivers this
startling message:

"If they were giving medals for killing black people, this guy would
win a bronze."

The picture changes to a hooded Ku Klux Klansman:  "This guy, the silver."

The picture changes again.  This time it is a tough-looking black youth,
dressed the way you might presume a street gang member would dress.
Gunfire echoes in the background.

"But this guy would win the gold," the announcer concludes.  "If you're
in a gang, you're not a brother.  You're a traitor."

As the commercial ends, you hear the sound of a prison door slamming
shut.

Chilling.  Is this the sort of ad you would welcome on your television
screen?  Count me as one black father who would.  Gladly.

Yet the question of whether you will see it or not may be determined
by how a controversy swirling up around the ad plays itself out.

The ad originates in Evanston, Ill., a racially-integrated-and-proud-
of-it suburb of Chicago, which has had the serenity of its less-fortunate
neighborhoods interrupted occasionally by gangs shooting each other.

It was with the intent of "de-glamorizing" gang life that a local school
teacher suggested a TV ad to Evanston's Human Relations Commission during
a "Seeking Solutions" community forum.  Chicagoan Tom Reilly, a vice
president at the Leo Burnett advertising agency, read about the idea, 
thought it was right up his alley and volunteered to help.

When Reilly's team's creation was screened before Evanston test audiences,
the response was overwhelmingly favorable.  One teenage African-American
boy who had been toying with gang life burst into tears, according to a
leader of the local chapter of Mothers Against Gangs.

But the response wasn't totally favorable.  The spot's noisiest critic was
Ald. Rochelle Washington, one of four black members of Evanston's 18-
member City Council.  When it was screened by the city's Human Relations
Committee, she stormed out of the meeting room and slammed the door for
extra emphasis.

In a telephone interview later, she told me she was deeply offended by
the ad's simplistic equating of skinheads and Klansmen who killed blacks
because of hate with "our kids" who fall into crime because of family
and the social system's failures.

"I think our kids brood and let things pile up inside themselves, instead
of letting them out," Washington said.  "This ad isn't saying, 'Come in
and let me help you.'  It is pushing them farther away.

"I don't want an ad that says, 'We hate you.'  I want an ad to shake 'em
up, but I don't want this one.  I'll go to my grave fighting this one."

Besides, she said, gangs are not just a black problem, although the ad,
in her view, makes it sound like it is.  "My mother once said, 'Don't
give anybody a stick to whip you with,'" she said.  "I think with this
ad we are, in essence, giving the Klan a stick to whip us with."

Maybe so.  But if they're whipping us, we're killing us.  The ad's
message is not significantly different from the housecleaning message
countless black leaders have delivered in the past.  Jesse Jackson,
for example, has often remarked that, "We've lost more people to dope
than we ever did to the rope."  But we African-Americans often are
reluctant to speak with such candor in front of other Americans, even
when truth is what we need to set us free.

It offends me, too, to think of skinheads and Klansmen as the moral 
equivalent of black street gangs, but it offends me more that it happens
to be the truth.

Society obviously has failed many of our young people, but that doesn't
mean we should fail them again by delivering anything less than a clear,
direct, no-nonsense message: Gangs are the enemy of a community.  If you're
thinking about joining, don't.  If you're in one, quit.

"Our target is teens who are thinking of joining gangs," Owen Thomas,
the commission's executive director and an African-American, explained.
"It is to change their perception that gangs are cool or hip."

Fair enough.  It is certainly true that gangs are not a problem for
blacks alone.  Just about every American ethnic group has been plagued
by them at one time or another.  But I can't remember anyone since the
days of "West Side Story" who has glamorized gang life as much as today's
"gangsta rappers" like Ice-T, Ice Cube, and various other Ices do.

Time to hear the reality behind the raps:  Klansmen have murdered at
least 20 African-Americans since 1960, according to Klanwatch.  Street
gangs murdered at least 1,300 blacks last year alone, according to the
FBI.  We don't need to worry about the Klan or neo-Nazis nearly as much
as we need to worry about "brothers" and "sisters" who do their work for
them.

It is not my intention to absolve society for its failures.  At best, an
ad like this one can be an effective device to grab the attention of
media-addicted youths of all races, but it must be accompanied by other
local efforts to engage young would-be gangsters in constructive
alternatives.

After all, society is all of us.  If our communities fail to pull ourselves
together across racial lines and provide the social support that can compete
with gang life, we have failed again.

Copyright 1992 Tribune Worldwide Amalgamated and the Chicago Cubs. Reprinted
without permission.

More installments coming in the Evanston anti-gang ad controversy,
so keep watching s.c.a.a.


-- 
Aaron (Barnhart@netcom.com) -- posting from Evanston, Illinois