White privilege...being able to ravage, loot, and pilfer Black communities for 80 years with complete impunity...and then, when Black people turn the tables in 1943 and start fighting back in earnest, we dub it an “urban phenomena,” label people Black people as the problem, and continuing to pilfer and loot their communities in higher level and different ways…and still labeling and blaming and making it stick even another 80 years later in 2020:
“Sunday, June 20, 1943, a fight broke out between several hundred white and colored men on Belle Isle, a park extending into the Detroit River on the east side of town. ...one of the worst riots ever seen in the United States, an outbreak that would mark a turning point in American race relations. Until the 1943 uprising in Detroit, most riots in the United States, from the 1863 Draft Riots in New York to the riots in Tulsa in 1921, to Atlanta in 1906 to Washington, D.C., to Chicago, Springfield, and East St. Louis, Illinois, and Wilmington, North Carolina, among others, had been white attacks on colored people, often resulting in the burning of entire colored sections or towns. This was the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites and in which black residents, having become established in the city but still relegated to run-down ghettos, began attacking and looting perceived symbols of exploitation, the stores and laundries run by whites and other outsiders that blacks felt were cheating them. It was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urban phenomena, ultimately centered on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them.”
~The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson (p. 155)
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