The hundreds of people, mostly youth, who attended the candlelight vigil where JoJo was killed, and the memorial programs to honor and celebrate his life, are living testimony to the loving and generous person he became.

Who, then, besides the gunman is responsible for this outrageous crime?

JoJo was killed by the same social system he was trying to change. It's a system that takes food, music and recreation programs from disadvantaged school children so that wealthy corporate executives and stockholders can pay fewer taxes. 

It's a system that closes factories in South Central L.A. so that stockholders can earn greater profits from the labor of Indonesian youth. It's a system that cuts assistance to the blind, the poor, the mentally disturbed, the ill, the young and the elderly to feed the hogs at the Pentagon feeding trough. It's a system that, in the name of peace, wages endless war at home and abroad, militarizing our civil society and criminalizing poverty, youth, and dissent, while rewarding greed and glorifying violence. It’s a system that is responsible for far more deaths than that of our son. It is responsible for the deaths of millions of children who die needlessly each year for no other reason than the greed of others.

The real criminals are the antisocial monsters who are responsible for a system that is making war on the poor and in the process creating confused and enraged people like the man who killed our son. That man is as much a product of this system as the handgun he used. He obviously had no village that might have given him the love and respect that would have made his horrendous crime impossible. Some people will argue that he had a choice between right and wrong. But if this society denies good choices to children how do they learn to make good choices as adults? If we don't give a child a decent life, how can that child grow up to respect life?

If we were a loving and generous society, one that respected children in all their great diversity, one that offered real equal opportunity, liberty and justice for all, our son JoJo would be here living a hopeful, loving and generous life. And so would the young man who killed him.

Naomi White and Derrel Myers
San Francisco
2000

 

[Special Note: Joshua "Jo-Jo" White was especially concerned with the effects that violence and inequality in our society have on children.  These values were expressed in the poem (below) written by JoJo at age 11.]