The Corner : A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood - David Simon and Edward Burns.

I have often felt that it is impossible for anyone to write about and to explain the Black American experience, nor is it possible to truly understand the Black American experience unless the writer or reader is actually black. I’ve tried reading widely, from Alex Haley to Toni Morrison to Ta-Nehisi Coates but I was always left feeling that as a brown person in country of brown people in another continent, I couldn’t truly comprehend the horror of what it was and is like to grow up Black and poor in America. Not even the deep rooted racism in India (and when it comes to colour I truly believe we are among the most racist countries in the world) gave me a sense of it, unless I viewed it through the prism of parallels like Dalit oppression. 

Strangely, the book that affected me the most, that left me truly shaken and saddened, that gave me the rawest comprehension of that experience was written by two white men. 

The Corner, written by a former policeman and a journalist who went on to create The Wire, chronicles the lives of people living in a corner in a small neighbourhood in Baltimore. A neighbourhood that is poor, a neighbourhood of ordinary people, predominantly Black and African American, that serves as an open air drug market for heroin and crack cocaine. As you follow these lives, these families, you are forced to question everything you assume or think you know about violence, drugs, education, policing, policy and the lives of the urban poor. We realise that when we say there are no easy answers, we are wrong, because there are no answers at all, at least not yet. 

Every answer, every solution, every proposal, every idea fails to comprehend the complete absence of hope, of possibility, of options that exist for a child in such a neighbourhood from the moment they are born. That to survive, to get a steady job, to not be a teenage parent, to get an education, to not be a criminal, to not be an addict, to be none of these isn’t the result of will or strength of character. To realise that these outcomes follow the inevitable arc of destiny, just as certainly as a private school child goes to an Ivy League college and gets a trust fund. The circumstances that exist in these communities, where survival and dignity are a miracle to be hoped for and dreamt of, rather than a goal to be achieved, shocked me, a person who drove past Dharavi and Tulsi Pipe Road and lived in Garhi village. 

The fact that citizens can live like this put to lie the myth of America being a land of wealth and opportunity, of equality, of milk and honey.