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Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America QUOTES

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America QUOTES

1 " She sensed that they expected her to fall apart, but she didn't know how to fall apart. She knew it was strange. She looked the same despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except the occassional muffled crying on the job. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

2 " It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly. Americans are nostalgic for the village setting and hold dear the notion of community, so the idea that the oppressed do not band together in solidarity is counter to our myths. But community spawns communal justice; the village gives rise to the feud. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

3 " He presented justice as a psychological relief... "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

4 " ...ghettoside. ... It was both a place and a predicament.... "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

5 " This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

6 " Fundamentally gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

7 " The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

8 " White people “had the law,” to quote a curious phrase that crops up in historic sources. Black people didn’t. Formal law impinged on them only for purposes of control, not protection. Small crimes were crushed, big ones indulged—so long as the victims were black. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

9 " This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

10 " If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs’s ceaseless vigor and determination—investigated as if one’s own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people—conditions would have been different. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

11 " There was, of course, a whole complex range of people in the ghettoside world. Some men liked hurting people. Some didn't. Some men started out not liking it but became brutalized and sadistic. Maybe the mix would differ in other groups of Americans. Maybe some other racial or ethnic cohort would contain a higher ratio of regular guys, or a lower ratio of men susceptible to becoming violent. Maybe the gnawing fear of getting murdered-- estimated as high as one in thirty-five by a Justice Department report in the 1990s-- would influence another group of men differently.

But this was hairsplitting. Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

12 " He said it simply, as if it were obvious. Axiomatic, even. And it was. A black assailant looking to kill a gang rival is looking, before anything else, for another black male. This was the fundamental fact of Bryant Tennelle’s death. Other elements may have contributed—the neighborhood in which he lived, the company he chose to keep, the hat he was wearing that evening. But for all that—and for all the rhetoric about bad choices, senseless acts, at-risk behavior, and so forth—what killed Bryant was the one fact about himself that he could not change: he was black. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

13 " Before anything else, Bryant was black. To Devin Davis, that meant he was killable. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

14 " In Jim Crow Mississippi, killers of black people were convicted at a rate that was only a little lower than the rate that prevailed half a century later in L.A.—30 percent then versus about 36 percent in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

15 " If you don’t incapacitate violent actors, they keep pushing people around until someone makes them stop. When violent people are permitted to operate with impunity, they get their way. Advantage tilts to them. Others are forced to do their bidding. No amount of “community” feeling or activism can eclipse this dynamic. People often assert that the solution to homicide is for the so-called community to “step up.” It is a pernicious distortion. People like Jessica Midkiff cannot be expected to stand up to killers. They need safety, not stronger moral conviction. They need some powerful outside force to sweep in and take their tormentors away. That’s what the criminal justice system is for. It was what Skaggs was for, and he knew it. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

16 " When you see the suffering and pain that it brings, you’d have to be blind, mad, or a coward to resign yourself to the plague. ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

17 " The hurt was too great for crying—tears belonged to a realm of earthly physics, but the murder of her son had transcended the coordinates of her world. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

18 " Death was bad enough. The death of a child, unbearable. But the murder of a child? There was nothing worse. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

19 " It was an evil thing, as the pastor had said. The Monster arose from what was meanest and most vicious in human nature. But the dark swath of misery it cut across generations of black Americans was a shadow thrown on the wall, a shape magnified many times the size of its source because of a refusal to see the black homicide problem for what it was: a problem of human suffering caused by the absence of a state monopoly on violence.

The Monster's source was not general perversity of mind in the population that suffered. It was a weak legal apparatus that had long failed to place black injuries and the loss of black lives at the heart of its response when mobilizing the law, first in the South and later in segregated cities. The cases didn't get solved, and year after year, assaults piled one upon another, black men got shot up and killed, no one answered for it and no one really cared much. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

20 " There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life's paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. has a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America