Thursday, March 28, 2024

Hadiya Pendleton; Honor Student Performs for Obama’s Inauguration and is Shot a Few Blocks from His Home.

January 30, 2013 by  
Filed under News, Opinion, Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) A 15-year old girl was excited to perform before President Obama at his inauguration last week in Washington DC.  But just a few days later, excitement turned to tragedy when she was gunned down in close proximity to the president’s house.  Hadiya Pendleton lived on the south side of Chicago, a place that has become nothing short of a war zone where bright futures are turned bloody on a second’s notice and nobody seems to care.   Somehow, the world decided that these kids deserve to die and it appears that Hadiya Pendleton’s greatest sin is that she wasn’t born with blonde hair and blue eyes like some of those precious little babies at Sandy Hook.

On the day she died, Hadiya Pendleton had been let out of school early and was under a canopy in a park.  A witness says that while 10 students were standing out of the rain, a gunman came into the park and opened fire.  Hadiya Pendleton and another teen fell to the ground about a block away from the shooting.  The other teen was shot in the leg and Hadiya Pendleton died from her injuries.

It’s very painful to see your big sister get slaughtered,” said Hadiya’s 10-year old brother, Nathaniel.

From all indicators, Hadiya Pendleton was not in a gang.  She wasn’t “thugged HadiyaPendletonout.”  She was just an honor student who happened to live in an area where it’s easier for black teens to get access to a gun than a good education.   Teens can’t find jobs and we abort them with no hope.  All the while, no one seems to know how kids show up in rap music videos with stock piles of weapons.

The fact that this young girl died so close to the home of President Obama is a telling reminder that chickens are coming home to roost.   Our nation allows guns to flow freely, and even simple solutions to gun control, like titling guns as we do cars (as Father Michael Pfleger has recommended) are pushed off the table.  The truth is that gun manufacturers WANT thousands of guns to “disappear” every year because they make a huge profit on black genocide.  The recipe is simple:  Inject drugs and weapons, extract education and jobs, and you’ve got yourself a healthy death march for millions of young black teenagers.  You also have plenty of bodies to feed into the prison industrial complex.

Another reason that this incident brings matters front and center for the Obama Administration (which prides itself on a deep Chicago connection) is that it serves as a reminder of what happens when you overlook and neglect the constituency that has supported you more than any other president in American history.   As the president cries for the little white kids at Sandy Hook, I hope he can also cry for the little girl with skin as brown and beautiful as Sasha and Malia.  Rather than making the life and death of our children part of some bland, meaningless political calculation, I am hopeful that SOMEONE in the White House will consider the old fashioned notion of simply doing the right thing.

Even before this incident took place, Hadiya’s mother was planning to move out of the city of Chicago to find safety for her children.

Believe it or not, her mom was just looking to move to Naperville,” Hadiya’s cousin, Shatira Wilks, said. “Her mom wanted her to take her kids to an even better community and make sure her education is number one. Her daughter has never ever given her mother a problem, this girl was literally a walking angel.”

Parents should not have to leave their communities to find safety and a quality education for their children.    One of the lasting reflections of racial inequality is the fact that when black children are killed (as it happened when my best friend was shot in the head in front of his daughter), people somehow think that we are conditioned or immune to the violence.  In fact, I’ve even heard black people say that it’s our fault that our kids are dying from guns that are made and delivered by white people.   This kind of self-hate is nothing short of disgusting and embarrassing.

The “blame the negroes” line of thinking is also what has caused us to waste the Obama presidency and turn it into some kind of Modern Day Juneteenth Celebration instead of using it as an opportunity for us to come together as a community to effect change.  No president, black or white, should be allowed to fall asleep at the wheel when it comes to pressing issues in black communities across America.  If Obama has time for the Latino and gay communities, he certainly has time for us too.

I hope that this little girl didn’t die in vain.  Perhaps her life can be a reminder to all of us that we should contribute to helping to solve the violence problem and not simply blame it on ourselves.  Black people don’t deserve to die any more than whites, and to think otherwise is simply racist.  Our taxpayer dollars should be applied to our communities too.

Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins 

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition.  For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.

 


Comments

13 Responses to “Hadiya Pendleton; Honor Student Performs for Obama’s Inauguration and is Shot a Few Blocks from His Home.”
  1. RiggityRee says:

    My condolences to the family and friends…… Another human being who’s life was taken away by some foolishness….. This world is coming to a swift end…..

  2. rawdawgbuffalo says:

    Funny obama never said any thing about 7 year old heaven Sutton being gunned down in Chicago but he all over Hadiya Pendleton – poli tricks

  3. Marcus Vessey says:

    I said this on another site. Obama would have been all over this if it was Sandy Hook.

  4. I’d like to first offer my condolences to this young ladies family, having said that, we as a people have to take some of the blame for incidents like this. Yes we pay our taxes like everyone else and the city, state, and federal government should do something, but what are we doing? If we had our own schools, businesses to hire these young people, and counseling services, we may not have as many incidents like this. Yes there are people who will always have a criminal mentality and they will eventually be dealt with. But I do blame us as a community, for the simple fact that we don’t have one. We’ve assigned the responsibility to others that we used to do ourselves.

    There was a time this type of stuff wasn’t tolerated in our community. The gangs knew who they could mess with and who not to. If you were going to school and wasn’t involved in street activities, they didn’t bother you because they knew their would be consequences if they did by the community. But this was a time when we were actually a community where we looked out for each other, had businesses that hired our own people, supported these businesses, and made sure our children went to school. We no longer care about each other like we used to. Our solution is to move away from each other, but as seen in the past and now, people with the same mentality can make any neighborhood go down with a ghetto mentality. I know, I lived in one.

    The solution is to deal with the mentality and offer help in providing opportunities to turn a person’s life around. We need to do this, not the city, state, or federal government because they really don’t care what we do to each other. Haven’t you figured this out already? No one should care more about us than us. No one should do more for us than us. As long as we have this separatist attitude within our own community, these incidents will continue to happen. As long as we keep spending a trillion dollars every year with people who don’t care about us, you will continue to here stories like this one. The solution is Black Unity, not the other way around. Click on my name for the solution.

    Black Unity means financial independence and happiness

  5. Ramses says:

    I rest my case

  6. Deeann D. Mathews says:

    This hurts my heart so bad… because either this child was shot down senselessly or, as sometimes happened, she was shot down because she looked like she might make it “out” — after all, she was on TV, performing for the president. Either way… Oh, this hurts my heart!

  7. mark says:

    Dcarter. I didn’t know her but i care . I have daughter just like her . If this ever happens to her i will randomly find and kill as many gang members as possible in one night. I know of about 40 of them. And i’m sure all 40 will be finished in about 4 hours .

  8. mark says:

    Why is everyone letting these scumbag gangs rule us. 90% of gang members are stupid little midgets That are so stupid they can’t even pull there pant’s up. The last thing i want to see is another dudes under wear. And i think all the dudes that are showing other dudes there underwear are gay. A real man doesn’t do that. First class scum does. You guys in Chicago need to find this piece of scum and kill him in public. Gang members are nothing but a bunch of cowards. Guns are for cowards . Work out be somebody. Little people crack me up. They think if they have a gun there tuff. I know who a lot of you cowards are and when i see you out in public it amazes me what little tiny short scum bags you are . What girl in her right mind would want a man in a women’s body. If i look liked that i would kill myself. Is there even blood in these people’s body. gang members are little tiny worthless scum bags that have very small brains , And never will be in there lives any more then what they are right now. How sad , Real men don’t settle for that . Yea my gun is in my arm. And i see you looking at them when I’m out.

  9. ulo media says:

    O and the fact that very few people responded to this article clearly shows, most of us really don’t give a damn!

  10. ulo media says:

    We are becoming and is in some sense a pitiful people folks. And irrelevant economically, politically and is looked at as a people Not with problems, but as A Problem People. As much as we go to church and all that praying and singing, even God maybe disgusted at our condition.

    http://youtube.com/#/watch?v=KsM1lfssWBQ

  11. Dcarter910 says:

    Where is Obama? Where is the outrage? Where is Al Sharpton? Where is Jessie Jackson? Where are the rappers that promote this crap? Where is the news media? WHY HAVE I NOT HEARD ABOUT THIS ON NATIONAL NEWS? No one really does give a damn about black people….especially black people. No Hope. I no longer feel like this site can promote change because successful responsible black people are being out bread 10 to 1 by the ignorant, self-hating morally deficient blacks that roam the streets like blood thirsty rats.

    One minute she is dancing in front of her “Dear Leader” in D.C. and the next minute she is back in the hood getting gun down. This resembles that foolishness in North Korea where they force the starving people to dance around and entertain the “Dear Leader” and then those poor starving people go back to their village in the woods where they starve and freeze to death. America is no longer any different than any other wicked third world country…America is just evil dressed in gold, gucci, prada and drunken with it’s own intoxicating ignorance and hate.

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