{"id":179,"date":"2006-08-25T09:14:42","date_gmt":"2006-08-25T13:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=179"},"modified":"2006-08-25T09:14:42","modified_gmt":"2006-08-25T13:14:42","slug":"growing-up-in-black-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=179","title":{"rendered":"Growing up in Black America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A chillingly matter-of-fact <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/mwt\/feature\/2006\/08\/25\/crime_essay\/print.html\">piece in Salon<\/a> today about what could get you killed in the inner cities of America twenty years ago &#8212; wearing anything that made you look rich or successful. Today, however, you will get killed and they won&#8217;t even bother to rob your corpse. Being a known killer conveys worthwhile status, whereas the kind of possessions which can give status are now completely out of reach &#8212; Bentleys, for example. You can&#8217;t steal one of those from a corpse in the streets.<\/p>\n\n<p>That this story should be the latest example of nostalgic writing about how things were better when the author was a boy &#8212; because then he knew what might get him shot &#8212; is not something I might ever have imagined. Absolutely everything I believed about progress when I was a child was wrong, except, perhaps, that it can always go backwards.<\/p>\n\n<p>The interesting question is how we might stop such a development in Europe. Clearly, American model capitalism won&#8217;t do it. Prosperity on its own won&#8217;t do it, either, even if it is on offer, which may not be the case.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A chillingly matter-of-fact piece in Salon today about what could get you killed in the inner cities of America twenty years ago &#8212; wearing anything that made you look rich or successful. Today, however, you will get killed and they &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=179\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=179\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}