UNITY IN THE COMMUNITY
By Peggy Lee
Kennedy
“Unity In the
Community,” a Venice Town Hall style meeting on December 11, was sponsored
by Venice 2000 – an organization that works with at-risk youth and gang
intervention out of the Vera Davis Center in Venice. This community meeting was
number two in a series of meetings meant to bring “unity in the
community” by joining together the common religious ideas regarding human
rights.
The key speaker at the December 11 Venice
meeting was Minister Tony Muhammad from the Nation of Islam, the west coast
regional representative for Louis Farrakhan. Minister Tony was a powerful and
profound speaker, a man who cares very much for people in the community. He used
the Bible, the Koran, and secular ideas in a historical context in order to help
the audience understand the oppression and the dominance of White Supremacy
– how it affects all
people.
Minister Tony spoke about the
destruction of our youth through criminalization and an enormous and
ever-privatizing prison system, a system imprisoning a large percentage of our
African-American youth. He spoke of the irony that African-American youth on the
streets are proudly wearing high cost clothing decorated with major corporate
branding, such as the Nike Swoosh, when the very same corporations employ prison
workers at extremely low (slave) wages to produce their clothing. These clothing
companies find a market in popular gang-styles, with customers that may be next
in line for a jail cell or for gang-related
violence.
Furthermore, Minister Tony
was sharp with interesting statistics and stayed on the path of
“unity” and human rights throughout his lecture. He encouraged the
audience to support community-based businesses and spoke of developing our
at-risk youth with legal forms of making a living as a basic solution to some
negative gang activities. Not being Muslim or African-American, I felt very much
included and stayed interested through the entire
speech.
Bravo! to Stan Muhammad,
executive director of Venice 2000, for bringing Venice such a dynamic speaker.
Too bad if you live in Venice and missed it, but we will be looking forward to
part three of “Unity in the Community” to see what’s
next.
Posted: Thu - January 1, 2004 at 06:39 PM