Stop Hitting Yourself

The Reality Behind Poor Black Neighborhoods

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.