When white people fled NYC not that long ago, Black, brown, immigrant and queer people had to build communal urban structures to survive mass disinvestment.

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When it was built, its transportation, its institutions, and its cultures suffered and build resilience through exploitation and mutual aid. We lived on top of each other. A wild beautiful mess of humanity.

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As its culture spread to largely white suburbs, the kids of those people came back enamored to simultaneously cosplay NYC while ridding it of its authors one police call at a time, one child into private school at a time, and one vicious nimby community board meeting at time

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Many authors of NYC were displaced into the suburbs where white people did not even build sidewalks or reliable buses because they drove, where cultural institutions were private, where beaches had fees, and where electeds turned them into ATMs and prison labor.

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Today, if there is an NYC exodus, it is the children of those who came back from their own parents panicked flight.

And those children want suburbs back.

Again causing another displacement of Black, brown, immigrant and queer people who began, again, to build them.

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Today again the simple whims of precious white pearl clutchers, driven by propaganda, decide the entire fates of working people, who will be priced out and policed out of the suburbs they were told was home - uprooted to come back to an NYC they gutted of public investment.

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And to them I say, you are nothing more than a giant child in a tea shop, crushing people who have survived and will survive much more than you in every generation they have ever existed.

I don't hate to see you go, but I did hope to see you grow.

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