One correction, the people I spoke to didn't know I was white. I did over-the-phone interviews.<quoted text>
Ahh, you hit the nail on its head... How do we get people who don't care about themselves to care about their community and each other? That is the 100,000 dollar question. And so far, no one has seem to know the answer.
An individual can try to be proactive, but will end up dead without the proper response and protection from the law.
The first step is courage! Courage to go the opposite direction of what they see around them. Peer pressure can drive a teen to insanity. The knowledge of self is the second step. Once that is searched out, the healing can begin to move in a positive direction. It can't be done with the mindset of a ghettoized conditioning.
I refuse to live amongst such insanity. My life and that of my family is more important to me than getting shot tellin some young thug to pull his jeans up over his ass. In my youth, that 'style' did not exist...one would've been labeled ghay.
I like to live where there's peace and a sense of community pride.
Education is a cop-out answer from those successful blacks that you talked to. They know full well that that's the easiest answer to give a curious white like yourself. Only a few will take advantage of an education! Those are the ones those wealthy blacks see hope in. The rest are going to repeat the mistakes of their ignorant and ghettoized parent.
If the system finds and isolates the bad seeds among the groups of urban teens, then maybe the rest can flourish. But some of them even have parent/s that are counterproductive in their own households... smoking weed, listening to gangster rap in the car and home, not disciplining bad behavior, not instilling a sense of pride or religion, etc....
So, basically your answer is that there isn't any hope?