On Tuesday night at 10pm another boy was killed in Chicago. Sixteen years old. His name hasn't been released yet.
This is two blocks from the school where I teach. This was two hours after I released my players from practice, some to walk down the very same street.
Two days earlier another boy was killed a few more blocks away. This one 13 years old. The trigger finger belonged to another boy, 18. Another one lost in Chicago. No one appeared on his behalf. A few blocks away another boy, this one 20, shot. Wednesday night.
Reconcile that reality with this reality. Today, 68 students from our school in the middle of this received acceptance letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Three others have won Posse Scholarships. Another, Yale.
On the night of one of the murders, my team of 58 high school boys and girls were running their asses off in the locker-lined hallways, training and preparing for an ultimate frisbee season that is more than a month away. They will mostly compete against affluent suburban kids whose background din of neighborhood noise somehow neglects to include shots fired and bodies falling.
What do you make of this? What can you make of this?
These are the same streets. The same kids in so many ways. Different days.
Put yourself in the shoes of a freshman boy at my school. You're 13 years old. Which narrative do you choose to internalize?
Will you be one who makes it to college? Or, one who is covered in a blue tarp in an alley, name still not released almost a week later?
What do people outside your community believe will happen to you?
What do people inside your community believe?
What do you believe?
Same street, different day?
I've taught at this school for five years now. Some things in the neighborhood have changed. Some haven't.
The GiGi's peep show and porn corner store has closed, making way for a cheap furniture spot to serve as backdrop for the bus stop. Progress.
On the front stoops and porches that line the one-way streets around the school a few new flags have started to hang. In between the colors of Puerto Rico and Mexico hang Bradley University red, Illinois orange and blue. Progress.
Still, this week in an alley a block away, under a blue tarp, a 16 year old kid laid dead. Name still not released. Adding to a cacophonous din of doubt, filling the minds of my students who might not yet believe. They might not yet believe that theirs will be a porch with a university flag and not the drawn shades of another mother who lost a boy to Chicago.
