Systemic Poverty: A Black Man Story - Zaire Williams

The hood is a place where the majority of the population is African American, living in a poverty-stricken place where families live in peril day by day trying to better their lives. As I stated in my source “(“Differenecebetween.net”),  “Hood” and “ghetto” are places where one does not want to live, and it’s hard for black men to get it out of them. For example, Ice Cube song “Why We Thugs”. This is a great example because throughout Ice Cube’s history he’s been through and experienced “the hood”. In his intro, it states “Yeah, every hood’s the same”, and throughout the song, he starts to explain what he means by that. The U.S government establishes gun shops and liquor stores into these poor neighborhoods, then the world wonders why people living there become thugs and gangsters.

     What caused “the hood” to develop?  Based off the U.S. government.org, during the 20th century, there was a policy to segregate the country making low-interest mortgages available to families through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). African American families at the time were legally entitled to these loans but were sometimes denied these loans because many of the black neighborhoods throughout the country were labeled “in decline”. Meaning black people could not get their loans to pay off good houses. After the end of World War II, the government supported white families with loans to move to suburbs, while black families were evicted from their communities to build highways. Since their homes were labeled “in decline”, the government forced these families into federal homes called “the projects”. To continue building “these projects” many more African Americans households were destroyed. As it was said in “Wikipedia/Racial Segregation” “Because these properties were summarily declared to be “in decline,” families were given pittances for their properties, and were forced into federal housing called “the projects”. To build these projects, still more single-family homes were demolished.” This is where it all began, the whites in power created their own way of living, taking care of “their people by giving them more money than they needed and placing them in great homes and neighborhoods. Meaning “the hood” is a problem because it’s a space that Blacks have been forced into by white policy While they divided African Americans from the whites, placing them in urban areas with nothing but their families with no money or work. As time moved on, it became a generational poverty, the black neighborhoods remained poor and were provided with guns and drugs and no education. It got worse and worse each year, blacks were exposed to new things and used it against each other causing more crime and white Americans deeply implicated in the “ghetto.”

    Therefore, these stereotypical names all come from the wealthy white people who look at the black community as senseless “low-life” human beings. A place that they think don’t care about their education and only wants drugs and crime. But in reality, they’re the ones who really care and have been chasing for education and wealthiness for generations, and most of the time couldn’t make it because the government doesn't want to see the black community succeed. A great example for that is back when Donald Trump was running for President. When he was Toledo Ohio, Trump stated “ The violence. The death. The lack of education. No jobs. We’re going to work with the African-American community and we’re going to solve the problem of the inner city”. We’re going to bring safety back. You can’t walk out the street, you buy a loaf of bread and you end up getting shot. So we’re going to work very strongly with the African American community.” Just like Donald Trump, wealthy Americans want the world to see them as people who want better for this community, when in fact they create the inequality and problems, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.

When asked, slavery, segregation, systemic poverty is what caused the black community to be forced to live the lives they were given with unemployment, drug abuse, and high murder rates, having it harder for them to succeed the way they want.

Works CIted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_neighborhood

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/27/politics/donald-trump-ghettos-african-americans/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States

http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/culture-miscellaneous/difference-between-ghetto-and-hood/