readin & fightin

Had to flee or 'I might be dead,' victim says of racial attack Cops: 3 white teens put noose around black teen's neck

Joshua Merritt said he had no reason to be suspicious when one of his friends texted him, asking him to hang out with two other teenagers they both knew.

But after Merritt, 17, arrived at the home of one of the boys in Chicago’s East Beverly neighborhood Dec. 23, he realized his friends weren’t simply looking to have a good time.

The three teens, who are white, allegedly put a noose around the neck of Merritt, who is black, and hurled racial epithets at him before one of the boys held a knife to his throat and threatened to kill him, police and Merritt said Thursday.

The teens were apparently upset about Merritt’s relationship with one of the boys’ female cousins, police said.

People wonder why I’m so grumpy all the time: this happened two blocks away from my parents’ house, the house I grew up in. In fact, I just wrote about 2 weeks ago about the threats of violence that come from growing up black in such a segregated and racially tense (racially fucked up?) environment. And now here we are, and I am not surprised but wish I were.

This is exactly the sort of stuff my mom warned me about when I was a kid, about not going past the cemeteries alone because that was how the white kids jumped out to beat the shit out of you when they were drunk, and why no one stayed around my grade school once classes got out.

Meanwhile, my parents’ block just became the border of their ward, because Chicago had a ward redistricting fight going on and the two blackest, lowest-income streets were a worthy thing to compromise and kick out the ward.

Why I don’t often go back home, and why I’m mad about it even when I’m not there. In my zine class we’ve been talking and writing about our neighborhoods and conflicts and violence, so they’ve been asking me what my neighborhood growing up was like. This is all I’ve got for them.