“The image of ‘gangs,’ perhaps the ultimate devil figure in late twentieth-century urban America, is one of the most powerfully distorting filters through which law-abiding middle-class citizens distance themselves from residents of the inner city,” Dwight Conquergood told a recent Northwestern University conference on race and media. “Labeling someone a gang member licenses the most rabid racism and class bias….A Chicago Police manual describes gang graffiti as ‘dog and fire hydrant’ marking of turf or ‘like a wild animal marking his boundaries.’…The consequence of this media demonology of gang youth is that they are…silenced in the most profound way, removed from the human community, through the linguistic violence of labeling them germs, animals, degenerates, and terrorists.”
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“If firearms increased violence and crime, the crime rate should have increased throughout the 1980s, while the national stock of privately owned handguns increased by more than a million units in every year of the decade,” writes Northwestern University law professor Daniel Polsby in the Atlantic Monthly (March). “It did not. Nor should the rates of violence and crime in Switzerland, New Zealand, and Israel be as low as they are, since the number of firearms per civilian household is comparable to that in the United States. Conversely, gun-controlled Mexico and South Africa should be islands of peace instead of having murder rates more than twice as high as those here….But gun-control enthusiasts, who have made capital out of the low murder rate in England, which is largely disarmed, simply ignore the counterexamples that don’t fit their theory.”
Cultural exchange? We’ll know the interest is real when they start stocking Salman Rushdie. U. of I. professor of library and information science Betsy Hearne was one of 32 international experts invited to Tehran last fall to discuss children’s literature, an invitation she says signals “a real and heartening interest in cultural interchange between Iran and the United States.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Illustration/Carl Kock.
