everything the light touches

from the archives of a recent trip to pembrokeshire. yes, it was paradise. truly.

The framing of everything is “why are you being mean to these poor, sad, destitute, white people!? They have no choice but to move into these poor neighborhoods!” The expectation is for me to feel sorry for white people who are coming to live....in a place I already live.

Once again, the neighborhoods y’all move into when you struggle are the neighborhoods we grow up in. My neighborhood is so black, dominoes won’t deliver after the sun goes down. But you know what? We’re happy and feel lucky to be here. You know why? Because we know what you don’t know and that’s that 2 streets down is the hood. And 4 streets down from that is the projects. So we’re happy to be in our little black neighborhood.

But you? You move in full of despair. You hate being here. You feel at a disadvantage to be here. You hate our culture. You hate our cookouts, our loud music, the bass at 4 am rolling through, the weed smell, the fact that we leave our dogs chained up outside, the fact that we have pitbulls, the fact that we don’t really cut the grass like that, you bemoan everything about us.

And as more of your cracker friends move in you cling together. You don’t know our names but you look at us like we’re the intruders in our own neighborhoods, you start talking shit, you start wanting to “make improvements”, and worst of all you start calling the fucking police.

So we start getting arrested, assaulted, more of you move in, our rent goes up, we move out, you’re building a “home owners association,” you’ve got us all too scared to listen to our music or cook out anymore, the rent goes up some more, we leave, more of you move in, and suddenly our little black neighborhood that wasn’t the nicest but not the worst is full of white faces. White faces that peer at the few black people left. You make them so miserable they’ll leave anyway.

And all of this? Big money hasn’t even touched it yet. You bring gentrification with you as a poor white because you bring racism with you. You bring your privilege and upwards mobility with you. You bring your “improvement” mindset with you.

So no. I don’t feel sorry for poor white people at all.