"You just can't do anything right, can you?"

HOLY COW is a phrase that came to mind on this one. Debra Dickerson let it all out when she wrote "Who Shot Johnny". Throughout the peace there were some points that were so intense that I forgot to breathe.
I might be dramaticizing a bit, but she seriously gets her point across.
The shift segment is genius.

SEGMENT 1:
She just tells the story of her nephew being shot. The bitterness is alluded to, and she establishes her intellegence in the beginning, which is strategic. She is proud to be a Harvard Graduate, and she's not ashamed of being admitted through affirmative action.
The picture that she paints of Johnny is interesting also. She talks about him through contrast. She takes stereotypes and rebutes them. And plays on his strenghts, how he was never unconcious after being shot in the back, and how he never complains.
"Being black, male, and shot, he must apparently be involved with gangs or drugs. Probably both."
Law and Order doesn't help with this stereotype. Infact alot of TV shows that deal with crime don't. We draw conclusions based on our realm of knowledge, and alot of the kids that I know have never been shot. I've never even seen a gun outside of a bb gun, and even those scare me. But when I think of someone being shot at random, I automatically assume that there must be something bigger going on. I'm not going to lie, I would assume that something else had to have caused it, because who in their rational mind would shoot an innocent guy for jumping up and down and waving?
And she makes such a strong point, when she continues to rip apart the stereotype because of how much they disrepute her culture.
"We rarely wonder about or discuss the brother who shot him because we already know everything about him....he snatched my widowed mother's purse as she waited in predawn darkness for the bus to work and then broke into our house while she soldered on an assembly line....he kept us from sitting on our own front porch after dark and laid the foundation for our periodic bouts of self hating anger and raial embarrassment. He made our neighborhood a ghetto. He is the poster fool behind the maddening community knowledge that ther are still some black mothers who raise their daughters but merely love their sons."
WHOA.
That, my friends is a crescendo. Its effective because it is genuine, and it has been stifled for years, and her nephew getting shot was the final straw for Dickerson.
The shift to second person in the last few sentences is clutch. It leaves the reader feeling partially responsible for not voicing out against it as well, and it is directed at the shooter, and for everyone else who has made her feel this way over the course of her life and will continue to.