The Broken Windows Theory is in essence a self fulfilling prophecy. I remember reading about that in a psychology class I had taken in the past and decided to look it up again. If you go to this link, there's a great diagram that shows this and how it actually affects the way we live our lives. For better or for worse, if you believe something, your actions will portray your beliefs.
In this particular context, the perception behind black neighborhoods (from people in and out of the community) is that they are broken, crime invested, and poverty stricken neighborhoods. No good could possibly come out of them. Let's be honest, that's what makes us look at people like Kevin Durant (who grew up in DC) and Derrick Rose (who grew up in Englewood) and marvel at how they come from nothing to become multimillionaires in their 20s! The people in those neighborhoods see the crime and violence as normal. All of this is based on the appearance of the community, according to the BWT. If it looks as though the community is broken, then it must be crime infested. It becomes a perpetual cycle crime that leads to crime that leads to more crime and so on.
What really stuck out to me was the fact that immigrant neighborhoods become more and more like black neighborhoods as they become less integrated. From generation to generation there is a loss of hope in the American Dream, which leads to "broken windows" in those neighborhoods.
After reading that, I began to think of myself and all the other Latino students that I have connections with in college. Granted, we did not all grow up in completely "broken windowed" areas but I do know people that did and I myself did for a while as a kid. Yet, here we are, in college, learning to achieve our own "American Dream". So would those people, according to the broken windows theory, be considered anomalies?
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