#ghettoside

[jamespauljones-killedcovers]

Ghettoside - Jill Leovy

Bodley Head - 2015

Killed Cover

[kabukik-blog]

Can I spend NYE like this #chillaxin #morningcoffee #goodbook #ghettoside #newyeareve #nye2018

[coverspy]

Ghettoside, Jill Leovy (F, 20s, plastic-wrapped book, black hair, orange scarf, headphones, black boots, C train)

[davidpotash]

Shining a Light on Ghettoside

Shining a Light on Ghettoside

America’s criminal justice system is most challenged – and most ineffective – in African-American communities in high-crime, high-poverty areas. Once a culture of violence begetting violence takes hold in these neighborhoods, crimes go unpunished and justice become an abstraction. The costs for those who live and die in these areas is horrific. Sadly, broader society often turns a blind eye – and…

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[shahofblah]

Yadira couldn't stop the habit of cherishing Bryant, of thinking about him constantly in the way a mother does, planning for his future, noticing activities he might like, opportunities that might be good for him, jobs that might suit him. DeeDee was the same way. Going to work at LAX, she would notice the various municipal employees around her--the facilities crew caught her eye--and she would think of the possibilities for Bryant. The crews of men worked outdoors all day in active, hands-on jobs with decent pay and benefits--a good possibility for Bryant, she thought. It didn't matter that he was gone. Such were the folds of maternal concern that had swathed him through life; they could not be loosened. Yadira Tennelle had to force her mind to conform to this new, hard reality, to accept that Bryant's life had been lived, that he was "a sentence with a period," as she put it.

Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

[gurusmusic]

Not nearly enough, says Jill Leovy, the author of “Ghettoside.”

“Somehow, the importance of a functioning formal justice system is taken as self-evident when talking of the American frontier or of various failed states around the world. But when it comes to contemporary black inner cities, with their very similar patterns of violence, the notion flies out the window.

So before we talk of addressing legitimacy, we have to be clear about the problem we are trying to fix. The real problem is that formal justice is materially lacking among populations that suffer high rates of violence. It’s missing, and it must be supplied.”

[booksandquotes]

He had molded his life around an urgent problem seldom recognized, and he was unshaken - perhaps even encouraged - by the fact that so many others didn't get it. He had a steady faith that things could improve with the right kind of effort.

Jill Leovy, Ghettoside

[kontextmaschine]

For the flight back from Pennsylvania, I bought & read Jill Leovy’s “Ghettoside”, because I forgot to bring a book and when I was in LA her Homicide Report was one of the only promising bits of journalistic effort in a pretty lackluster town.

It’s decent. Well, more. I have a tendency to scoff at things giving even competent generalist introductions to things I have history with; what I SHOULD say is it’s pitched at the airport-book level, but her details and analysis are fully in line with but more in-depth than mine.

She uses for a through-line the investigation of the murder of the son of a homicide detective; crime writers are traditionally good at balancing facts and social context and overall narrative and colorful anecdote and she’s no different - you realize a lot of her digressions front as pieces of the puzzle while merely being something interesting in proximity to the central story, but only in retrospect.

(That access issues might’ve precommitted her to the angle that the son was in fact a good boy who didn’t do nothing — that you notice in even later retrospect.)

One thing - I was reading her on the idiom of being “caught slippin’” and I was like “wait a second - is this the ghetto way of saying ‘around blacks, never relax’?”