Who is Legacy?

I found the movie Legacy to be extremely heart breaking. Every day we hear on the news different stories about how another teen has been killed in Chicago due to gun violence, but we hear it so much that in a sense we are immune to it, and we don’t think twice about it. The movie started off talking about the young 14 year old boy that was shot and killed. The talked about how out of all the people in that neighborhood he always tried to make a difference and they never seen his death coming. The messed up thing about it was that his little brother was there when he got killed. Then they started talking about the family and the generational cycles that has continued over the years with dependency on government assistance. I got emotional watching that movie because it’s crazy how the system is set up to fail people in urban communities’ particular blacks in my opinion. People so easily say that blacks are lazy, and love to be supported by the government but the system was designed to privilege whites, and minorities suffer in the meantime. In that movie it was clear to see how bad they wanted to get out the project, but there was discouragement after discouragement. I also got a chance to see how the people that are hired to administer government assistance how they treat the people that need it. It didn’t seem as if they were interested in helping the people at all. It’s sad the way society is set up where people in urban communities are made to need the government, and the help doesn’t seem to really help in the way to advance them; they always seem stuck forever. I think everyone felt a personal connection to the girl because she was a student at NIU, and I loved the fact that she didn’t let all the many oppositions stop her; they may have slowed her down, but it never stopped her. I think a lot of times it’s hard for other races to understand blacks, but to actually see and live through what they do on a daily basis is something that can’t really be explained. It’s interesting to think that most of the time the class you are born in is the class you will stay in. It’s rare for someone to advance; not as hard to fall into a lower class. The grandmother was supported by the government; then her daughter was even more dependent on the government because it was hard for her to get a job without the proper education. The daughter was determined not to fall into that cycle and was also determined to get her family out as well. This brought up one of the different ideas that Wilson talked about; the single-female headed households. This is something that is reoccurring in urban neighborhoods. The young boys are killing each other or are in jail; sometimes it seems as if there is no way out for them because the cycle continues to repeat itself from generation to generation. The project are supposed to be affordable living for people in these urban areas, but they are crime- filled and are part of the reason it’s hard for these people to move forward. Eventually they were able to get out and the projects were knocked down, but that’s a very rare occurrence. Some people try their hardest and are never able to get out of those neighborhoods. As we saw there were multiple attempts by their family to get out of the projects, and it took years before the mother even found a job that she could have to support her family. Also the other daughter of the grandmother was hooked on drunk from the time she was 14 until her thirties where she was finally able to get control of her life and not have her kids living with her grandmother. There are so man y people in urban neighborhoods that are hooked on drugs, because they are a product of their environment. I was happy to see there was hope for them at the end. It was really interesting to see the different theories that we have talked about in class shown on camera to better help people understand the struggle of trying and being held back where you can’t even move forward.