Quick Thread on rioting and looting:

One of the most sophistic talking points consistently trotted out in situations like these, “they’re destroying their own community.”

Ghettos and hoods are not communities except by the loosest and laziest definitions of the word.

I grew up in a couple of these “communities” in 80s-90s NYC and still have family in various NYC housing projects. I have never understood what militantly obtuse people who don’t live anywhere near such place, can possibly mean when they use “community” to describe these places.

None of us owned property in these areas. There were literally thousands of people packed into my building and the buildings next door. People barely left their apartments, let alone knew their neighbors.

There weren’t legitimate grocery stores nearby, only bodegas & Chinese food spots, operated by people who had glass barriers between us and them. No city officials renovated or tended to playgrounds, many of which were in a state of such disrepair that no child could do anything

on those concrete squares except play dangerous games of tag. The schools are an educational death sentence – the success story was always getting into a school far away from our “community.” Police hardly policed the area except to harass and arrest - rarely to protect.

People lacked for basic health services. Children went hungry and were often abused. We threw our garbage - which included big ass mice we caught on glue traps - into giant incinerators, and lord knows the trash wasn’t picked up in the area on any consistent schedule.

Elevators were constantly inoperable, leaving the old and young alike to hike up to 19 floors of steps just to get back to their apartments, from any task. If you didn’t have a laundry center in your building, sometimes you had to carry clothes as many as 10 blocks to wash them.

In a hot, crowded laundromat. You had to watch your clothes as they washed and dried or risk them being stolen. This meant a simple 90 minute task, that allows most to do other things in the meantime, could occupy your entire afternoon and throw your schedule off.

Crackheads were in the stairwells and hallways on any given day. No landlord, super, or security guard was present to keep any semblance of order. A handful of fast food chains were littered around the area with unsanitary conditions and stressed, depressed employees.

These “communities” have no stability in terms of the members of the population or the shops that mark the area. Communities can’t be disbanded and redesigned at the whim of the children of the wealthy who decide to set up shop after college and displace said community.

Families who suffered through criminal conditions for decades, only to find the rents suddenly and exponentially increase because young white professionals have a fantasy about living in the city and want to be near a subway line that gets to midtown quickly.

Legit communities have commonalities that extend beyond poverty, suffering and desperation. The people who riot are not “destroying their communities.” They’re destroying spaces that are practically open-air prisons as well as symbols of their economic lack.

This televised massive rioting is simply the culmination of many smaller riots that occur internally for residents of these areas on a daily basis. If you’ve ever been: dehumanized by a social worker; humiliated by an older neighborhood bully who flashed a gun on you; detained or

beaten by police just because; gone days between meals; never had an allowance; slept on a floor or couch consistently; shared clothes throughout childhood with your brothers, sisters and cousins; gone over a year without a haircut because your parent(s) have nothing outside of

a meager public-assistance check because there aren’t any jobs, and even if there were they aren’t qualified for any except the most menial and lowest paying; regularly had the fucking shower cut off before you even finish getting the soap and shampoo off you; seen roaches & rats

run freely through your apartment no matter how clean you keep it; never been able to stick your head out of a window in your apartment because they’re all barred or gated....

You’ve been rioting inwardly, against yourself, for years - sometimes your entire life.

Because you are hurt and you are angry. And depression is just anger turned inward. So you suffer and riot against the self because you don’t know where else to direct your pain and anger at the injustice of life.

You turn to alcohol, drugs, gangs and all sorts of escapism and vices as a riot against ourselves and the conditions we live in. No one chooses to be born in these conditions, but society is set up so nine tenths will never escape from a cruel fate we had no hand in shaping.

Our existences are riots, slow deaths, self-destructive episodes that make us feel a little more alive or a little less dead. That gives us the feeling society denies us: that we fucking matter.

This riots in the wake of murder and brutality by police are a healthier sort of riot. I don’t condone or condemn it; I simply understand it, b/c it’s inevitable when you treat a group of people the way America has treated Blacks in general, and the poorest blacks specifically.

This country turns its backs on and gives the figurative finger to the bulk of blacks every day, excluding us from the most basic benefits of citizenship, blocking us from the resources and opportunities that would allow us to actually establish a community.

History is marked by ransacking of black communities (Black Wall Street in Oklahoma; Rosewood in Florida, etc), when we do establish them, yet people have the gall to get on a high horse and talk about Blacks destroying supposed “communities”

in which they themselves wouldn't deign to spend a day unless the only other alternative was death.