I grew up on a sociological fault line
My life started in the 50’s as a “Leave it to Beaver” kind of life growing up in inner city Los Angeles: a stable family, a working dad and a stay at home mom, a 4 br, 3 ba, two story home, a white neighborhood with a white public grammar school. We were classic middle class through and through.
But then the 60’s happened and our neighborhood blew up. Redlining was banned. Discrimination in housing was made illegal. These were good things, but within three years our neighborhood changed from almost 100% white to almost 100% black. I say almost, because my family was one of only two on our street who stayed behind. In the process, I lost friends and neighbors I loved, and I became a minority in my own middle school.
There was an upper class neighborhood two blocks to our north in Windsor Hills that transitioned to a neighborhood of black professionals. It became known at The Black Beverly Hills. There was also a lower-middle class and lower class neighborhood a block to the south of us that transitioned to black poor people. It became known as The Hood.
I still have nightmares about The Hood because the children who lived there became my classmates in middle school. Let’s just say it wasn’t fun and I’ll leave it at that. In 1991, John Singleton, a young black man who grew up in the Hood, wrote and directed a classic movie about gangs in Los Angeles entitled, “Boyz in the Hood.” It was filmed just a few blocks from my home.
Sometimes I wonder what I would say now as an adult to those “Boyz in the Hood” and it boils down to just three things. But before I tell you what they are, I want to mention that, as disadvantaged as the Hood is, there are “winners” there. Here they are.
The winners in the hood
- The drug dealer
- The pimp
- The liquor store owner
- The porn industry
- The online gaming industry
- The bookie
- The thief
- The gang leader
- The cigarette/vape company
- The nightclub owner
- The slumlord
- The loan shark
- The fence
- The scammer
- The crooked cop
- The crooked politician
All of these people and institutions have one thing in common: they profit off of the misery of poor and powerless people. Indeed, they increase their misery and do everything in their power to keep poor people down.
The losers in the hood
Everyone else who lives there, especially young boys.
Three things I’d tell Boyz in the hood:
1. Go to church. Stay in Church.
No, I don’t mean just go to church. Put your faith in Jesus Christ as the one who died for your sins that have separated you from God and enslaved you in the hood in the first place. But I also don’t mean you should just say a prayer of confession and faith either. Start attending church weekly, and do it for the rest of your life. Then do good works that are worthy of your repentance and get involved on a deep level with men who are older and have followed Jesus all their lives. These men are pure gold. They will be your role models for successful living and they will help you get back up when you stumble in life. And stumble you will.
2. Go to school. Stay in school.*
Take school seriously. Your life depends on it. Buckle down and study every day. Get as much education as you can as early as you can. And no, it doesn’t have to be an academic education. If you are not the “bookish” type, attend trade school after you graduate from high school. Either way, getting an academic degree or learning a trade makes you valuable to employers. And that means you can support yourself and a family without having to resort to illicit means.
These first two things, getting a moral foundation through faith in Jesus Christ and putting it into practice by attending church, and gaining a means of support through education, mean you can now successfully do the third thing.
3. Get married. Stay married.
Have a high view of yourself, of women, and of marriage. Save sex for marriage and then stay faithful to the woman you marry. And know that a healthy marriage takes work, especially at the beginning. Hang in there with your wife and commit to working things out. Communicate with her. Cooperate with her. Respect her. Honor her. When you love your wife, the Bible says, you love yourself.
If you do these three things, I guarantee you will escape the hood. Why? Because the hood will no longer have power over you. You will be able to look at all the godless, anti-social, chaos-inducing things around you and say to yourself, “That’s not me.”
But remember…
The hood hates everything about the institutions of church, education, and marriage and will do everything possible to keep you from getting involved with them.
Being a consistent Christian in the hood means you are going to stick out like a sore thumb. You will be hated, ostracized, ridiculed, threatened, beaten up, and maybe even murdered as you perform good works, like serving a widow on your gang-infested block. Why? Because all of those “winners” I listed above have lost an income source in you. And all of their minions, their “customers” who have become their slaves because they have bought into their lies and know they will never be able to leave the hood, hate you because they know you can.
And will.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
*The phrases, “Go to school. Stay in School.” and “Get Married. Stay Married.” are quotes from James Carville. “Go to Church. Stay in Church” is my own.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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