Try It Yourself

SOMEONE, AN INTELLIGENT person to whom I am quite close, once said to me, something like "the crazy, hard to understand thing about the race riots of the sixties and since is why these people would burn down their own neighborhoods". And, at the time, I quietly acquiesced, choosing to not offer any rejoinder. After all, it seemd like a pretty good point. Pretty good, and sensible, but still, something wrong with it....I just wasn't sure what.. I started thinking about it, thinking about the murder of Martin Luther King by a bigoted white man, the beating or Rodney King by white cops, and the anger and sense of hopelessness and the riots and burning neighborhoods that followed. Then, it came to me, I figured it out: it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, the phenomenon wasn't so crazy and hard to understand at all: the black folks who burned their own neighborhoods did not see these neighborhoods as "theirs"... They didn't think they were burning down their own neighborhoods, even though they lived there, simple as that. To them, the 'hood where they lived, the ghettos, were not theirs, but rather, some rich remote white man's. Some rich remote white manliving in a mansion, and collecting their exorbitant rent every month. They knew they ,were only there for a short time, because they had to be there, because they had no choice, because they could afford nothing better. Soon enough, they would face eviction, adn have to dind another dump, in another ghetto, in another part of the city. Simple as that. Burn this one down, move on to another one. There is always some rich powerful white dude willing to be a slum lord, willing to profit from other people's poverty. How could anybody live anywhere and not consider the place where they lived to be their home? Well, just try it yourself, and you'll see. Try moving in to a bug infested dump with a thousand other people within ear shot of you, all of whom share your plight of low wage job or no job, and bills to pay, children to feed. No job or poor job for one reason, and one reason only: the color of your skin. Give it a try, see what its like, then ask yourself if the neighborrhood where all this is happening is "yours"? Ask yourself if it is possible to think of it as yours, the same way rich white people think of their million dollar houses as being part of "their" neighborhood. Attack this attitude all you want, roll your eyes at the apparent class envy, but definitely give this style of life a try, before you make your final decision as to whteher this attitude makes sense, as to whether you would have the same attitude wer you in that situation, or whether it is in any way shape or form understandable. I really hope and pray that the intelligent person who did not understand the burning of the nighborhoods can understand this, and feel as if the question has been answered, as to why. Because, always, there is a reason why...