Speak Out!
Beloved Gangsters?
Fri, 11/02/2007 - 12:57 | Crime
A Washington Post review of the new feature release, American Gangster—expected to be a hit—raised an interesting issue:
…as a society, as a culture, as a civilization we're complicit in the promotion of deviance to heroism. That figure -- the dope dealer, the seller of the Sportin' Life with his powders and his escapes -- has moved from pariah to rock star over the years.This isn’t just a “Black thing;” take The Sopranos, the blockbuster Godfather film series, Scarface, to name a few. Why does society over-glamorize yet claim to disapprove of criminal kingpins?
THE COVENANT In Action
Comments
before american gangster the
before american gangster the so called X generation that we finally get to here from, that were written off in their youth starting in the schools as hopeless and just don't wanna learn because the love the struggle, fear the torment of injustice from the oppressor, the just don't wanna be happy, they want die. the mere fact of trying to convince someone this is fate, the will of God has betrayed God. There has always been the mafias, the mobs that we rarely heard of and often convinced it was all a thing of the past. how about big time embezzlers that steal millions from others only to receive most of the time a four year max sentence, or 6 month community service of choice, controlling the justice system as well as courts while they debate about a death sentence as a solution to black justice.
This country as a whole is
This country as a whole is fascinated by gangsters. Money and power is the name of the game. I also think that parents should educate their kids in the process of watching gangster movies. I took my children to see it; they were floored to how much damage this one man caused. It opened up dialogue.
Please don't be so naiive as
Please don't be so naiive as to mix the reality up....These men were allowed to set up shop, and to kill our brothers and sisters en-mass....People, we cannot even purchase homes! Why is it that regentrification almost always means whites moving back in to neighborhoods that have deteriorated due to controlled blight. Where do whites get this money from...we work hard just like them; they have been receiving loans and winks and nods forever...we do not get the loans and when we do, as we have seen, they are in fact a controlled scheme that is designed to allow us to fail, lose our footing and in fact to be tremendous leagues beneath our white counterparts......
I suppose the glorification is a form of vicarious living...like the little boy in chaps, a cowboy hat, and garnishing pistols and verbally shooting "bang, bang"...
Where else can a Black man really get to be King of the Cats ?
In Leimert this Sunday...a Brother was selling a t-shirt with a man's face and the name "bumpy" across the top...Just 'cause you can sell it, don't mean you should!
Peace
What's often lost in such a
What's often lost in such a discussion is the fact that the ink had barely dried on the latest civil rights bill when Lucas decided to set up shop. A black man with his smarts and ambition could not even dream of working on Wall Street, or applying for a loan at a bank to open a business. So, he took the easy way out with his get rich quick scheme. Unfortunately, he ended up harming untold numbers of people with his drug trade. www.blackpillar.com
To me, we do tend to
To me, we do tend to celebrate the uber-gangster, that rare criminal, who through their own tenacity and luck has been able to parlay their anti-social behaviors into multi-billion dollar enterprises.
Society will always have criminals, but the highly successful urban gangsters like, Lucas, Barnes and Rayful Edmonds are only able to accomplish and keep their enterprises through a complicit society i.e., dirty cops, drug addicts and corrupt governments. I think that is the larger story.
These criminals aren’t the first group to exploit the human weakness for drugs and money, they’re just the renegades who do it on their own terms, and are highly successful at it.
But they generally, get their comeuppance. So the public gets the lesson, that although crime may pay, it’s only temporary.
To find the truth, follow the
To find the truth, follow the money and follow the bodies:
The Bilderbergers represent the big banks that launder 500 billion dollars a year in political bribes. They also launder over a trillion dollars in drug money and almost 400 billion dollars a year in illegal weapons sales. And the Bilderbergers have the power to steal more than four billion dollars a week from unaudited federal government contracts. If you still think America is a functioning democracy, ask yourself why the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars each year is of no concern to senate and congressional Democrats and Republicans who have refused to implement auditing in the 25 years after it was first proposed by the Grace Commission?
Question: Will Hollywood ever glamorize this? I didn't think so.
I dare say that it has little
I dare say that it has little to nothing to do with black, white, hero, or villain. American's have been courted to be infatuated with the image of power. Roughnecks who will do anything to achieve a goal are seen as powerful. Hence, the attraction.