A new pair of shoes

You hear stories upon stories of a youths life being cut short by violence in inner city neighborhoods. The news attributes this violence to gangs, poverty, and flaws in the overall social services system in the community. Now all of these may be contributing factors but what I've gathered from my friends who live in communities such as this is shoes. You may laugh at that statement or assume that I am cutting down an overarching problem but what I have learned is that systemic injustice can begin to be fought with something like shoes.Lemon Anderson's Please Don't Take my Air Jordans is a beautiful representation of how a teens desire to be cool and have the latest shoes would drive them to kill. Macklemore's Wings is another representation of this. I wish that there wasn't a mentality of needing to be cool because of what you wear, needing to have the latest consumer item. I just wish we could live in a society where people, poor or rich, weren't judged by how new their clothes were and were judged for what they're worth on the inside