I’ve been seeing this meme lately, variations on a pretty basic theme:

0 white guilt.

And the folks sharing it are usually so aggressive and adamant and defensive about it that all I can say is, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

I’m Tao Joannes, coming to you from the Dog Shack deep in the heart of Texas.

And look, I get it. I’m white by all measures and categorization, regardless of who my ancestors were or what they might have done.

But I don’t feel guilty.

I feel compelled to do the best I can in the present day with the information and opportunity that I have.

We just need to be clear about three things.

1. If Encountering Historical Facts Raises Unpleasant Feelings, Congratulations

You’re learning real history, not propaganda.

Piercing the national myth of white superiority can feel threatening to our sense of identity. And the easiest response is to deny, deflect, and attempt to injure the source of the information in response.

Try this:

Absorb the information.

Take testimony about experiences you haven’t had seriously.

And take scholarship seriously where you lack expertise.

Don’t just pull a thought-terminating cliché out of the bag and move on. Take a second or two and learn.

Seek out work you disagree with. Howard Zinn, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Raul Perez, just to name a few.

Reckon with the history.

Don’t avoid it.

It might not make you feel better, but it can definitely help you to not do worse.

2. Guilt Is Not the Point

We don’t share historical information to make you feel bad about yourself.

The point is to learn about our nation’s history to make sure we wind up on the right side of the history being written today.

None of us wants to be the people in the background of the picture harassing Ruby Bridges on her way to school, or dumping acid in the pool, or dumping food on people at the lunch counter.

The legacy and brutality of racism did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation or the Civil Rights Act.

The same racist tropes and stereotypes advanced to undermine Black progress during Reconstruction and justify the injustice of Jim Crow apartheid are still making the rounds.

And too many white folks keep falling into the same rhetorical trap and spreading them.

Look, I’m Southern. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love fried chicken and watermelon.

Why are we still using these symbols to denigrate Black folks?

The negative association with watermelon was just a way to undermine the success of freed slaves making an honest living with an accessible cash crop.

There’s a white guy that sells them out of the back of his pickup truck at my local gas station even today.

Okay, the fried chicken trope can be seen as early as 1915 in the propaganda film Birth of a Nation, which showed white actors in blackface playing congressmen.

And they’re chomping on a chicken leg while addressing Congress to demonstrate their lack of sophistication and unfitness to govern.

That same film did a lot of heavy lifting to portray Black men as lustful and violent predators who needed to be locked up and, of course, forced to work for free for our protection.

On that trope hangs the rationale for the unrest that caused the Tulsa Race Massacre, that led to the destruction of Black Wall Street, the brutalization of Emmett Till, and the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys.

It’s a pattern that continues to this day, shutting down conversations about situations like the Nolan Wells tragedy with claims like, “He was last seen talking to a white girl,” which just activates that prejudice and suspicion and makes it easier to dismiss the possibility that he was intentionally harmed.

Doubling down on the comfort of ignorance and animosity is the trap.

Education and awareness are the escape routes.

3. Be Accountable

Recognize how your current actions and attitudes affect the discourse and the people around you.

Understand the damage that racist jokes and tropes cause.

Understand the cumulative effect of millions of white people in denial about what privilege means and the legacy of systemic racism.

What you’ll find, the more you learn, is that in addition to harming an entire group of people, racism offers a psychological compensation that encourages you to accept less than you’re worth because at least you’re not one of them.

That status can make people defend arrangements that are not actually serving them.

Learning the history helps expose that bargain.

And accountability means refusing it.

Discovering that hierarchy in your own life and the world around you can feel threatening.

It can make you feel guilty.

You got to work past that reflex.

Don’t be guilty. Be better.

Why do racists always bring up African slavery?

This is something you hear constantly from white supremacists.

I’m Tao Joannes, coming to you straight from the Dog Shack deep in the heart of Texas.

First, let’s acknowledge that criminals engage in human trafficking all over the world.

Forced labor and sex slavery are common pretty much everywhere.

Human trafficking in Europe is rampant, and it includes both domestic trafficking victims and victims from many regions outside of Europe.

Yes, even in the Caucasus, that region where bad science told us that the white Caucasian person came from.

It’s so common here in Texas that certain businesses and facilities considered high-risk are required to put up signs reminding people that it is illegal.

So why do racists keep bringing up Africa?

Africa is a continent of 54 internationally recognized UN member states.

They imagine, for some reason, that it’s one homogenous mass filled with mud huts and starving children, with a bone in their nose and a plate in their lip.

And for some reason, they think that Black Americans have to answer for everything they think is wrong with it.

This is insanity.

What is legal in some African countries is compulsory civil and military service.

Citizens are required to spend time serving that country, just like they do in Israel, and just like many American politicians, particularly those on the right, are fond of advocating right here.

This does not count as slavery or forced labor.

Legal forced labor in some African countries is that which is forced on prisoners.

If you are convicted of a crime, you can expect to do labor while incarcerated, just like in the United States.

If you haven’t watched the documentary 13th, then after this video, go find it and watch it.

It’s on Netflix and available free on YouTube with no ads.

The documentary breaks down exactly how the 13th Amendment enshrined slavery and forced labor into law as punishment for convicted criminals and covers some of the many very profitable ways that prisoners are still exploited.

It opens with President Obama sharing the statistic that the United States has 5% of the world population and 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Chew on that for a second.

At the time, one in four prisoners in the world was American.

The land of the free.

Eight states have added language to their state constitutions to prohibit forced labor by prisoners: Colorado, Utah, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, and Alabama.

So good for them.

But let’s talk about Alabama.

Alabama dresses forced labor in a fast-food uniform and tells us that prisoners have a choice.

To quote JusticeCatalyst.org, which represents plaintiffs suing Alabama:

“The way Alabama’s forced labor scheme operates is ruthlessly simple. Incarcerated people must work or suffer violent consequences. A discriminatory parole system keeps them incarcerated not for public safety but so the state can exploit their labor for the financial benefit of public agencies and private businesses.”

One video is not enough space to get into all the ways that Black Americans are targeted to keep the prisons full.

But just imagine.

You get caught in the system on unjust charges, like the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women and collectively spent 130 years in Alabama jails and prisons for crimes they did not commit.

In fact, over half of all exonerations in the United States are Black men.

They are 10 times more likely per capita to be falsely convicted and exonerated.

Stay woke.

Imagine your choice is: go to work or get beaten or isolated.

And so they bus you to a McDonald’s, where you make minimum wage, and the state takes 40% of your gross wages plus additional fees, generating millions in revenue.

And then they just send you home on the weekends with your pockets practically empty.

This is America:

The land where nothing’s free and the home of the slave.

I’m never gonna tell a Black person how to feel about slavery or racism.

At least not on purpose, all right? Sometimes I get excited and swerve outside my lane. Let’s be real.

It’s not my job to police Black folks on anything, much less the legacy of American chattel slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow.

But I am also not one to tell you that bullshit doesn’t stink, and I’ve been seeing more and more people, including Black Americans, looking to Thomas Sowell as some sort of intellectual icon and even repeating his rhetorically slippery garbage like it’s something other than propaganda.

And that’s why I feel empowered to correct the record before the problem gets worse.

I’m Tao Joannes, coming to you from the Dog Shack deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re gonna look at one of Thomas Sowell’s quotes that’s been making the rounds lately:

“More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed.”

Now, I could do a video on nearly every line in the essay this comes from, but to quote another great Black American, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

The quote and surrounding essay often come up in discussions minimizing the impact of American chattel slavery, claiming to share the truth about slavery that was hidden from Black Americans: that they didn’t have it so bad, that they should stop complaining and start achieving, and, most importantly, voting Republican.

They will blame Africans for starting slavery to shift blame away from the Europeans who financed and incentivized slave-catching operations.

They don’t want to acknowledge that European demand industrialized the process, intercepted ships at sea and took the crew and passengers, and raided coastal towns to enslave people of many different ethnicities: British, Irish, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Scandinavian, and later even American sailors.

That’s worth making a note of.

The most generous estimate, an extrapolation based on one academic’s understanding of their labor needs, placed the total number of humans captured and forced into bondage at around 1.25 million souls between 1500 and 1780.

Put a pin in that 1.25 million.

We’ll come back to it.

Sowell’s statement is therefore accurate if you accept that number and limit your count to the Africans brought explicitly to the 13 colonies and the United States of America between 1619 and 1808, the official end of the legal transatlantic slave trade, which best estimates place at around 400,000 people.

About 460,000 if you count the ones that were illegally smuggled after that.

Now, what is dishonest about this framing is that the 13 colonies were just one small part of the Atlantic plantation slavery system.

12.5 million Africans were sold and packed onto ships like cordwood, bound for North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean.

Of those 12.5 million, only around 10.7 million survived the passage.

So let’s consider that figure for a second.

An estimated 1.8 million people died during the Middle Passage alone, more than even the highest widely cited estimate—that 1.25 million I told you to remember—for European Christians enslaved in North Africa.

But wait, there’s more.

10.3 million enslaved Africans were shipped to the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean and South America.

Conditions there were so dangerous and the work was so brutal that they often died from overwork, malnutrition, accident, violence, and disease faster than they could be replaced through births.

A constant influx of fresh lives to sacrifice at the altar of profit was required to maintain an effective workforce.

In North America, from the 400,000 imported Africans, approximately 9.5 million Black children were born into bondage.

Four million of their descendants were declared free by the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

So even if we accept Sowell’s framing, the importation of 400,000 Africans in no way captures the vast scope and extent of the American chattel slavery system, which simply dwarfs the number of Europeans taken to North Africa.

The last point I’ll make is about the racial framing Sowell chooses.

If you’ve been around internet racism discourse for longer than five seconds, you’ve surely seen the division of the continent into North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, usually as a way to remove the accomplishments of Egyptian and Arabic from those of the darker-skinned Africans below the desert, which made up the population of purchased slaves.

They often even discuss North Africans as white for that same purpose.

When discussing the slavery practices of the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates, however, they often pull a bit of racial sleight of hand by declaring them all Africans and bemoaning their enslavement of whites.

So the second part of the criticism there is that the concept of whiteness didn’t even exist until the mid-1600s, and even then it was primarily a legal status designed to prevent servant-class solidarity and make slavery easier to administer legally.

Ireland, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Iceland, and Scandinavia would have felt nothing approaching racial solidarity between them.

It was a legal fiction and scientific curiosity, not anything that sailors and common folk would have considered had much at all to do with them.

It wasn’t even until the late 1800s and early 1900s that Irish and Italians were granted full social access to the privileges of the caste in America.

In fact, one of the largest lynching events in the United States was an 1891 murder by hanging of 11 Italian men in New Orleans.

The grouping of these disparate ethnic identities into a singular block of white people is a modern retrofit of period attitudes designed to serve the narrative of white racial grievance, whataboutism, and the minimization of the brutality of American chattel slavery.

They will grant or revoke whiteness according to what best serves the narrative of the moment: claiming credit, diminishing contributions, or assigning blame or victimhood.

Now, none of this is to say that the enslavement of Europeans in North Africa was good or nothing to worry about.

We aren’t comparing suffering to win some sort of prize.

I’m just placing that carefully selected and separated fact back into the context of the much larger system surrounding it, instead of pretending our cherry-picked example tells the whole story.

What do you think?

The dumbest take I’ve heard out of these racists in a hot minute is, “White people fought a war to free the slaves because y’all couldn’t free yourselves.”

Like, seriously.

I’m Tao Joannes, coming to you from the Dog Shack deep in the heart of Texas, and I am pissed.

Before I get into everything wrong with this misinformation campaign—the racism, the paternalism, the outright inaccuracy—I want to address why this kind of dishonesty triggers my alarm bells.

In the book 1984, the protagonist works at the Ministry of Truth.

The Ministry of Truth controls historical records to continuously update history and the news to align with the Party’s current agenda. They edit the record to make sure whatever information a person is able to discover always proves Big Brother and the Party is right about anything.

They say, “Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.”

Knowing history helps us recognize patterns, which prevents us from repeating mistakes.

So when I see such a widespread effort to change the understanding of historical events and reframe their meaning, it just pisses me off.

These might be new dogs, but they’re using the same old tricks, and they are dangerous.

I hunger for truth, and I cannot abide a liar.

So the claim itself—”White people fought a war to free the slaves because y’all couldn’t free yourselves”—is offensive on many levels.

The first being the historical revision.

So let’s correct the record.

White people did not fight a war to free the slaves.

Even if they had, trying to get some kind of emotional credit for it is like a drunk telling his abused wife she should thank him for no longer beating her.

The entitlement is breathtaking.

Slavery, but their official platform was not abolition, just opposition to expansion. Any new states added to the Union had to be free states.

The South saw this as leading inevitably towards the death of slavery. So they seceded from the Union and formed a government that made slavery its defining institution, explicitly enshrined in their constitution.

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas all added additional language protecting it within their own constitutions.

The famous Cornerstone Speech by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens states directly that the Confederacy’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordinate to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

Now, in the North, Lincoln rejected the idea that states could secede for any reason.

He considered the Union permanent and non-negotiable, and the idea of secession was simply illegal.

Lincoln said in multiple speeches and letters, before he was nominated, while campaigning to be elected, and after he was inaugurated, that he had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed.

He famously wrote that if he could preserve the Union without freeing any slaves, he would have done so.

So right away, we can determine that the South started the war to preserve slavery, and the North fought back to preserve the Union.

Now, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, it didn’t even free all the slaves.

It only applied to states that were in active rebellion, which meant that Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri still had legal slaves until the 13th Amendment.

Nothing changed for them.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure intended to disrupt the Confederacy.

So let’s consider the second point: the assertion that enslaved people did not and could not free themselves.

This presents enslaved Americans as some sort of passive and feckless creatures that required the paternalistic intervention of the great and noble white man to save them from themselves.

First off, enslaved people did free themselves.

If we’re talking globally, we can look to Haiti, where enslaved people rose up and completely eliminated slavery.

And then parts of Jamaica and Suriname did the same, although it remained legal in the countries at large.

Within the United States, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans escaped their bondage with zero or minimal assistance from whites.

Harriet Tubman might be the most famous abolitionist of the Underground Railroad, but she was by no means the only one.

She escaped on her own, turned around and then helped others escape, and then fought with the Union Army to defeat the Confederates.

Of that self-emancipated population, 200,000 free Black Americans enlisted and fought with the Union against the Confederates.

.........

They made up about 10% of the Union Army, and then there was about 20,000 that joined the Navy.

Now, back on the plantations, many military-aged males left to ......... fight the Union.

Enslaved people fled. They withheld labor. They slowed production. And when the Union forces got close enough, they helped.

Some even managed to pull off complete uprising and revolt and were in total control of local areas when the Union arrived.

So my verdict is that the initial claim that whites fought to end slavery because Black Americans were too passive to do it themselves and needed the noble white man is categorically false.

Any attempt to advance that narrative is revisionist history intended to shame Black Americans and deflect from historical and modern criticism of systemic racism.

Now, my point here is not just historical education.

It is to encourage us all to question these narratives.

Whenever something seems too neat, too one-sided, too self-serving, it’s a good indication that the Ministry of Truth is out there spreading misinformation to make us forget our past, condemning us to repeat our mistakes in the future.

When you hear and see somebody pushing these lies, you can use this information to push back instead of just accepting it because it serves your ego and comfort.

The truth is very often disturbing.

Have you noticed any other revision and doublethink in modern discourse?

Recently, I flew to Florida, and when it came time to get on the plane, I got in line behind a really pretty Black woman who was wearing a Rosa Parks T-shirt.

I figured, hey, I might as well strike up a conversation, and I complimented her shirt. I said, “I like your shirt.”

She’s like, “Oh, thank you. Rosa Parks, right?”

And then I figured I’d flex my Black history knowledge a little bit and be like, “But nobody ever has a Claudette Colvin T-shirt now, do they?”

And she gave me the ick face like, “No, not really.”

And it didn’t really work.

So avoid that tactic if you have an opportunity, fellas.

But the reason I bring this up is because recently there’s this Black influencer named Officer Brandon Tatum, and he has been making his fame and fortune off of following in Charlie Kirk’s footsteps and misrepresenting facts about the struggle for civil rights and the legacy and impact of the civil rights movement.

So let’s unpack this.

What he had said is that Rosa Parks staged her arrest, and therefore it was not a valid example of resistance or rebellion.

And there’s some truth to that, okay?

Claudette Colvin, on March 2nd of 1955, was the first woman in Montgomery, Alabama, to be arrested for not giving up her seat.

She was a 15-year-old girl. She wore glasses, and she was dark-skinned.

When she was sitting on the bus with some of her friends from school, a white woman came up and demanded her seat, and she refused.

The police came and arrested her and dragged her, kicking and screaming, off of the bus.

So, in addition to the charge for not giving up her seat, she was also charged with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer.

So she was not a very sympathetic symbol for the movement.

Now, she wrote a letter to the NAACP telling them about this situation, and the secretary of the NAACP at the time was one Rosa Parks.

She was a mature, grown woman, attractive, well-composed, light-skinned, which is important when it comes to PR, sadly, thanks to the racist nature of our society.

Colorism is baked right into it, where lighter-skinned people are perceived more favorably than darker-skinned people.

So she knew all this, and she owned a car.

Her husband could have driven her home from work, but she chose on this day, after work, to ride the bus.

She sat in the very front row of the Blacks-only section.

Now, as the whites section filled up, the bus driver came back and moved the little divider to behind Rosa Parks and said, “You need to get up and go.”

And she said, of course, we all know, “I’m not moving.”

When she was arrested, she submitted peacefully and gracefully, and she said as she was leaving that she was just tired and didn’t want to get up.

It made for a very sympathetic image.

Now, what happened after that was that the Women’s Council organized the Montgomery bus boycott to start on the day of her trial, December 5th, 1955, and it became very successful.

It brought a lot of attention to the injustices and the movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. was promoted to a visible position within this, and that’s where he became as famous as he did.

So, was it staged?

It was provoked, definitely.

She knew what would happen, but she didn’t make them arrest her.

She didn’t make them make an unjust law.

She just allowed herself to be caught up in it in a way that presented a sympathetic image for white America.

Does that mean it wasn’t valid resistance?

I don’t know.

You tell me.

How’s it going, folks? It’s Tao Joannes coming to you from the dog shack deep in the heart of Texas.

There’s been so much crap online by different racists that I felt I had to make a video to set a couple of things straight, to keep from having to repeat myself over and over and over again in the comments.

Let’s talk about poor Black neighborhoods.

You see this all the time. White supremacists love to play “stop hitting yourself.” It’s their favorite game.

What I mean by that is they will look at conditions that white people created to keep Black people disadvantaged, and then look at the results of that situation they created as proof that Black people deserve to be treated as second-class citizens.

“Look at what they’ve done to their neighborhoods. Look at how violent they are. Look at this. Look at that. They burn things down every time they get mad.”

What we have to realize is that we’re looking at the end of a literally centuries-long process of dehumanization and degradation of an entire race of people.

Now, I’m not saying every Black person is a victim or embraces a victim mentality. I’m saying that these systems were consciously and deliberately constructed to place impediments to progress in front of Black people—Black Americans.

So let’s talk about it.

Redlining

The very first thing we need to look at is redlining.

Now, what you need to understand about redlining, first off, is that it is still a part of our nation’s operating structure. There are still successful redlining lawsuits being pressed against banks, insurance companies, and cities.

What redlining is, is they took a map of a city, per se, and they said, “We’re gonna draw a red line right here around this area. Within that area, we are not going to approve home loans. Within that area, we are not going to approve insurance policies. And Black citizens may not live anywhere except within this redlined area.”

So what that means is that bank financing to improve property, and for Black Americans to purchase property, was denied to them.

That means businesses that wanted to operate in that area were not insured.

Now, if you know anything about running a business, you need insurance to run your business, because without insurance you can get sued and lose everything.

So what this means is that these areas became deserts—food deserts—where there were no real grocery stores to speak of.

They became opportunity deserts, where there were no jobs. You had perhaps a bus line to get out of that area to go find someplace to work, if you could get hired. But there was no opportunity for advancement within these redlined areas.

Now, this even extended to veterans of World War II. Black veterans, when they came back from World War II, were not allowed to use their GI Bills. They were not allowed to get home loans in these areas. They were not allowed to live in other areas because they were segregated. Therefore, they had to make do like everybody else and rent from a slumlord who put the bare minimum into keeping the place livable.

That’s why we wind up with things like lead checks, and that’s why we wind up with a huge poverty problem, because there is no money. There’s no energy. There is no value being brought into these areas.

Building Something Anyway

Now, what’s worse about this is that Black people have learned, by necessity, to be an extremely resilient and resourceful people.

They’ve taken these scraps—just like they took the offal, the pig’s feet, and the intestines, and turned it into soul food.

They took these blighted neighborhoods and turned them into vibrant communities of arts and togetherness, and they advanced themselves.

Now, what happened was that when white people saw these neighborhoods being transformed, that there was value being created in these neighborhoods, it could not be allowed to prosper.

We see probably the most glaring example of this in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Black Wall Street—a thriving business district connected to a network of business districts across the country—was burned to the ground overnight.

Now, people say it’s because they just didn’t like Black people.

Well, there’s something to that. They weren’t really fans of Black people.

But even more than that, my theory is that they were able to construct a thriving economic base without relying upon the largesse of the white man’s tender mercies.

They made it all on their own.

They turned it into a thriving business district without having to depend on white financing, white suppliers, white contractors, or anything else.

They did it for themselves, by themselves.

That is simply unacceptable.

In modern terms, we can look at something like Venezuela or Iran, who, when they decided they did not want ExxonMobil, Chevron, et cetera—our oil companies—to make decisions about how their oil should be handled, and nationalized their industry so they could keep more of the value of their oil rather than have it extracted and delivered to American capitalists, they dared to trade that oil in something other than the United States dollar—the petrodollar.

We declared them enemies of the state.

We started backing coups.

We started supporting brutal authoritarian dictators and their regimes.

We just cannot handle anything but white-dominated capitalism being in control of economics.

So rolling it back to Black neighborhoods: because Black Wall Street was not under the thumb of white capitalists, it had to be wiped out.

Now, it may not have been a conscious decision. It may not have been an outwardly aware decision.

But that is ultimately the reason behind the destruction of Black Wall Street, the destruction of Rosewood, and the destruction of Seneca Village.

Urban Renewal and Eminent Domain

Now, that didn’t always happen with mobs, pitchforks, and flames.

That happened through eminent domain.

We’ve already got the redlined area, so it’s marked as inferior. It’s marked as blighted. It’s marked as cheap and bad.

So when people do manage to build something up in these areas, all the government has to do is say:

“Well, this is a blighted area that we are going to revitalize through urban renewal.”

They’re going to sell it for pennies on the dollar, far below the actual value of the properties, to outside investors who come in and gentrify.

Or they are simply going to take it outright through eminent domain and destroy it.

Put up a stadium.

Put an interstate right through the middle of it.

We can see that in places like Rondo, and again, Seneca Village, which became Central Park.

In Rondo, in St. Paul, the interstate ran directly through the neighborhood, destroying a large portion of it and separating the remaining neighborhood into two pieces, where you had to walk a mile and a half one direction, then another mile and a half back, just to get across the street.

We see this happen over and over and over again, across generations.

Every time they built something, we came in and destroyed it, took it away, or made it so they could no longer afford to live in the area they had built and invested in on their own with no outside help.

“A Riot Is the Language of the Unheard”

Then something happens, and it triggers the anger of the citizens.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said:

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

When people feel there is no other way to have their voice heard, it can lead to violence.

It can lead to riots.

It can lead to destruction of property.

Now, even with all that being considered, we have situations like the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis that were spoiled by accelerationist Boogaloo Boys who were trying to bring about a race war—a new civil war.

We had people openly claiming this on the internet, who wound up being prosecuted for it, thankfully.

These outside agitators committed crimes and started this more violent expression of the frustration of the people who lived there.

And the racists turned around and blamed the citizens themselves for orchestrating the entire thing.

Stop hitting yourself.

Stop hitting yourself.

Poverty, Crime, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Within all this, we’re already talking about a redlined area with no significant local ownership of the homes themselves.

The homes are either owned by government agencies—the projects—or landlords who put as little as possible into maintenance while extracting maximum rent from the government or individuals who can’t get government assistance.

With this lack of opportunity, this lack of access to affordable, nutritious food because it’s a food desert, things happen.

People eat shitty food.

They gain weight because they’re eating nothing but empty calories.

They’re poor.

They have no opportunity to improve themselves—or very limited opportunity.

I mean, it’s always possible to do better, but sometimes it is really hard.

Sometimes you don’t want to wake up at 3:00 AM and go down to the day labor place to maybe get on a crew for the day.

Sometimes it’s easier to sleep in, go hit a lick, go sell some drugs, and come home with a fat wad of cash.

You can get lucky for a long time and make money that way.

But eventually, because you’re over-policed, you’re going to get caught.

Then you’re going to get over-sentenced—which is a whole other thing.

The school-to-prison pipeline.

You’ve heard of that.

Black kids in school who get into a fight are often brought up on criminal charges and incarcerated.

Their first contact with the justice system begins when they’re barely old enough to understand what’s going on.

Meanwhile, a white kid across town gets into a fight, gets detention, gets a couple of days of suspension.

The Black kid is now in the system.

Once the system has its hooks in you, it does not let go.

That’s something people don’t understand unless they’ve been there.

Ownership and Alienation

So you have areas deprived of resources, deprived of investment, deprived of even the opportunity to develop meaningful community structures.

Those structures, once developed, are destroyed by outside forces.

People are alienated from any sense of ownership of the area or anything inside it.

Then people wonder why, when the shit hits the fan, things get broken.

“Black People Can’t Swim”

This reminds me of my favorite example of “stop hitting yourself.”

The “Black people can’t swim” joke.

We forget that throughout the Jim Crow era—and even beyond—Black people weren’t allowed to swim in public pools.

Even famous actresses and performers were not allowed in the pools at the hotels where they were performing.

They were more than happy to make money off Black talent and Black excellence.

But they weren’t going to let Black people enjoy what came from that.

When your granddaddy saw a Black person getting near a pool, they called the police.

They grabbed bottles of acid and poured it into the water.

They sicced dogs on them.

Now you turn around a couple decades later:

“Oh, Black people can’t swim.”

“Nolan Wells drowned because he couldn’t swim.”

That kind of bullshit.

Nolan Wells was known to be a strong swimmer—an athlete.

And they’re still trying to push this narrative that the boy just couldn’t swim, and that’s why he drowned.

You good with that?

Stop hitting yourself.

Final Thoughts

I’m just sick of it.

I’m sick and tired of repeating myself in the comments, and I feel like I can’t just not address these things, because this is the reality of white supremacy in this country.

This is the brutality and the savagery of white people toward people of color in this country.

And it doesn’t just end there.

We aren’t even talking about Matthew Shepard or what they’ve done to LGBT people.

We’re not even talking about the outright violence of lynching in the South or what they did to people like Emmett Till.

There’s no end to the content that can be made on this subject.

This is just one piece of the puzzle of white supremacy.

And it’s disgusting.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Wake up and stretch my legs
Take a deep breath of freedom
And smile at another beautiful day in America

16 hours since our last mass shooting

Coffee brewing, check the headlines
Shopkeeper acquitted
Of shooting a black kid in the back

That’s a nice light roast
Shade grown
Fair trade
Damn good coffee
Cat meme, nice.

Black kid guilty of first degree murder
Given 35 years
Seemed like self defense to me
But I wasn’t there
I didn’t see the video
I guess we gotta trust the system
Cat meme

There’s a fight and a concert
Pay-per-view
On the White House lawn
And a man faced no charges
For getting drunk
And shooting his daughter in the face
For insulting the President
It was an accident
He just meant to scare her
Cat meme

Beautiful day in America
Police shot at a family
In a car they thought
Had stolen diapers
And murdered a one year old boy.
America.

We just made a trillionaire
And a couple thousand millionaires
And all it cost was cancer research
And all your personal data
And 14 million starving children
Cat meme

It’s been zero hours since our last mass shooting

Another black man committed suicide
In the park
With a rope
On a tree.

What’s for supper?
Do I smell pizza?
America
Cat meme

Early on a crisp autumn morning
In a clean and well-starched uniform
He crosses a close cut lawn in the suburbs
And approaches the door

It’s not the first porch he stood on today
And it’s not gonna be the last
But he can power through till forgettin’ time
tonight at the hotel bar.

When they answer he says Ma’am I’m sorry
but they are never coming home
They died defending our freedom from a critical threat
In a way that made some people tons of cash

In appreciation for this service,
This sacred duty
This sacrifice,

Of all they ever had in life to give
And just a little bit more

Here’s a folded up flag
You can hang it on the wall
Next to their picture
By the door.

I’m sure you understand
It was a necessary sacrifice

you see
Freedom isn’t free

and we
pay in blood and iron

Decorate the landscape
with soldiers torn and dyin’
Strong bodies
ripped in half
With spray and pray precision
Pure potential shattered
With industrial ammunition

Without war we’ll let the commies win
you understand

On a chilly Friday in December
Quiet office, cup of coffee blowing steam
Cell phone shatters the silence
Her husband’s voice on the other end was rushed

Something’s happening, he said
baby please turn on the news
the school won’t answer
I don’t know what to do

Twenty minutes later on the TV
The man in the suit said the nightmare was done
A Twenty year old broken boy with a gun
wanted to go out with a high-scoring run

And she was just another
of Twenty grieving mothers
That lost a baby to pay the unfortunate cost
Of our worthy privilege

I’m sure you understand
It was a necessary sacrifice

You see
Freedom isn’t free and we
pay in blood and iron
Don’t count the cost in kids
We see torn and dyin’
Tiny bodies
ripped in half
With blind, corrupted vision
A generation shattered
With Wal-mart ammunition

Without our guns we’ll let the socialists win
you understand

On an overcast Saturday afternoon,
Something good stewing on the stove.
Feeling every bit yourself with a fresh outfit
Streaming some trashy reality show
When you hear twelve pops from where your grandson plays
The kind that drops you to your knees to pray
The sound of bullets taxes pay for
Ricochets against every apartment door
And you’re already dead when you don’t see the toy gun
You told the boy to leave behind

And the man in the crisp uniform says
We have to inform you
The young man

was waving that toy gun
Pointed it at someone
And I couldn’t take the chance it wasn’t real
I was completely afraid for my life
And I deserve to get home to my wife
So i put one bullet through his chest
For each year that he lived.

But don’t worry,
I’ll be fine with counseling
And back on the street in a week.

I’m sure you understand
It was a necessary sacrifice you see
Freedom isn’t free and we
pay in blood and iron
Who cares if one of them
Is bleedin’ and dyin’
Dark bodies ripped in half
With paperwork, on mission
A neighborhood shattered
with government ammunition

Without the cops the criminals win
You understand.