One of the most sophistic talking points consistently trotted out in situations like this is "they're destroying their own community." Hoods and ghettos are not communities except by the loosest and laziest definitions of the word. I grew up in two of the worst neighborhoods in 1980s and 90s New York City, and had family in other terrible NYC projects, and I have never understood what these ignorant jackasses can possibly mean when they use the term "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 and Chinese spots operated by people who often had glass barriers between us and them; no city officials ever renovated or tended to our playgrounds, many of which were in such a state of disrepair that no child could do anything on those concrete squares except play a potentially dangerous game 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 if ever to protect; people lacked for basic health services and children went hungry and were often abused; we threw our garbage - which included big ass mice we caught on glue traps - into a giant incinerator, and lord knows the trash wasn't picked up in the area on any discernible 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 away to wash them in a packed laundry spot, where you had to watch your clothes as they washed and dried or risk them being stolen - which meant a simple hour long 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 were present to keep any semblance of order; a handful of shytty fast food chains were littered around the area, with unsanitary conditions and stressed, depressed, shytty employees.
On top of that, these "communities" have no stability in terms of the members of the population or the shops that mark the area. "Communities" can't be disbursed and redesigned at the whim of the children of the wealthy who decide to set up shop after college and displace an entire group of people who suffered through shytty conditions for a decade or more only to find the rents suddenly 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. "Communities" have commonalities that extend beyond poverty, suffering, and desperation.
These people are not "destroying their communities." They're destroying spaces that are practically open air prisons. This isn't the only riot, it's simply the culmination of many smaller riots that occur internally for residents of these area 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 for no reason; 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 and 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; had the fukking shower cut off before you even finish getting the soap and shampoo off you; seen roaches and rats run freely through your apartment no matter how clean you keep it; never been able to stick your head out of a window because they're all barred... If so, you've been rioting inwardly, against yourself, for years and years and years. Because you are hurt and you are angry. And depression is just anger turned inward. So we suffer and we riot against the self because we don't know where else to direct our pain and anger at the injustice of life. We turn to alcohol, drugs, gangs, and all sorts of escapist activities 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 9/10 will never escape from a cruel fate we had no hand in shaping. Our fukking existences are riots, slow deaths, self-destructive episodes that make us feel a little more alive or a little less dead - that give us the feeling society denies us: that we fukking matter.
This riot against the city is actually a healthier kind of riot. I don't condone or condemn it; I simply understand it, because it's fukking inevitable when you treat a group of people the way America has treated blacks in general, and the poorest blacks specifically. fukk this country for turning their backs on and giving the figurative finger to us every day, excluding us from the most basic benefits of citizenship, blocking us from the resources that would allow us to actually establish a community, historically ransacking our communities when we do establish them, and then having the Goddamned gall to get on a high horse and talk about blacks destroying these supposed "communities" they themselves wouldn't deign to spend a week in unless the only alternative was prison or Afghanistan.
Eat a dikk if you're talking this "community" bullshyt.
