Is it better to stay in the hood or get out and try to make it?

Short Answer:

The only viable option is to build community in the rubble of the Hood.

Way Too Long Answer:

There is no escape from the Hood, you can only lose your damn mind, because if you can find comfort in a hostile community of you oppressors then you are fucking crazy anyway.  Just interact with Blacks who voluntarily live among the White majority communities and you’ll see, they crazy as shit.  Their children are crazy as hell too.  Just find them and talk to them.   So, you can get out of your damn mind or you can remain among your own damn people.

Also, the Hood follows Blacks, so if you run from the Hood, you will spend a period of time as an isolated, abused, objectified, tolerated, anomaly among the majority White community; until more crazy New Negros seeking to escape Blackness and bury themselves in Whiteness follow you to the White community that you contaminated…, I mean integrated, and when the New Negro infiltrators reach about 8-10% of the total the Whites will flee before the property values drop any further.  They will sell their homes to other New Negros seeking a White existence, until it’s about 25-30% New Negros, then the Whites who didn’t get out early enough will not be able to sell their homes to the Good or Uppity New Negros, they will sell to working-class Blacks, the Black masses; then the final few who get out at the last minute will sell to slumlords who will rent to the very elements that the New Negros who were running from Blackness were running from in the first damn place and the cycle will repeat for another generation.

New Negros been chasing White folks all over this nation since the late 1950s, when Integration really started getting off the ground.  It’s sick really.  We can’t build viable communities anymore because our Elites and Educated Negros think they can buy into a good neighborhood instead of using their talent and resources to build one, cuz they have been educated out of their minds.  You have to literally go out of your damn mind before you can “get out” of the Hood.

Now there are some misconceptions about the Hood, that us Hood dwellers know but others don’t seem to understand.  I grew up in all stages of the Hood, I’ve lived in the Hood all my life, in the Midwest, the East Coast, and for a shorter period of time on the West Coast.  When I say stages, I mean I lived in the projects, in rentals, and I’ve owned homes and condos in the Hood. 

The Hood is not a monoculture of poor, uneducated, violent, drug addicted criminals, like Racist and Uncle Toms like to pretend.  I was a poor, under-resourced, kid with a absent father and a mother who struggled with addiction, I ain’t even gon lie, but in my Hood there were Black Engineers, Lawyers, Dentist, Business owners, Ministers, Carpenters, Cops, Activist, etc.  These Black professionals would tutor the kids from the projects, set up opportunities for the poor kids to come together in safe spaces.  There were grandmothers who’d prepare food for children in homes that didn’t have the means to feed everyone and needed help spanning the gap between on one packet of foodstamps ran out and the other packet ain’t came yet (foodstamps used to come in booklet back then).  There was a community that White America didn’t see and couldn’t replicate.  (We are losing more and more of that every generation however, cuz of crazy New Negros abandoning the Hood to live with their Oppressors.)

Every Hood I ever lived in had many educated, affluent, and upwardly mobile homes and families mixed with the poor and struggling; but the media didn’t show them.  They didn’t show the ones who didn’t want to live in some White ass crack, who didn’t want to dwell among people who were hostile to their very existence.  Every Hood had a Striver’s Row in my day, and many still do.  Chicago does.  There were also poor and working class Blacks who had the option of leaving, but wanted to fighting it out and build among their people.  The runners, the crazy New Negros and the sick Black predators get all the attention; while the majority of the Black community is ignored, or portrayed as victims trapped in the Ghetto.  That’s bullshit.

My wife and I are educated (with a PhD and Masters, along with other degrees and certifications between us), we own our home (finally), we are your standard boring middle aged couple raising our children and tending to our old dog as we build our small businesses and wage Revolutionary resistance against White Domination; and we live in the Hood, on the South Side of Chicago, in Bronzeville; it ain’t the best, but it’s far from the worst.  We’ve had some shootings but we’ve also grown hundreds of pounds of organic produce in this Hood, there is culture, resistance, and organizing going on here; but none of the good shit gets as much attention as the shootings, and that’s for a reason: Racism.

Also, in my project, of hundreds of families, when I was a kid; there was just over a dozen youths fucking around with drugs and gangs, while the rest of us were still collecting G.I. Joes and Transformers; yet the fucking cops treated us all like gangbangers.  I was a Block Brother in my housing project and when I do an event or work with the shorties no one showed up. Just once a reporter from the news paper came with a note pad to do a write up on the Block Brothers efforts; but if there was a fight or shooting the media would show up with vans from every  local station, there’d be fucking news helicopters in the sky damn near crashing into each other to report on the horrors of the Hood.  If the media reported on White crimes like that New Negros would be running to Asian or Hispanic Hoods. 

Cuz all communities have crimes, but not all communities are criminalized. 

Just a few months ago, here in Chicago, a car was lit up with automatic gunfire just a half a block from my home, and all the Chicago media was there; but when we had a “Black Love is Protection” event, attended by hundreds of community members, no fucking media, the Black media didn’t even represent.  We never get media for the good shit, unless it’s sponsored by Whites or their agents in the Hood.  That shooting involved only 3 people, including shooter and victims; but it paints the whole area; whereas hundreds of positive people doing good shit is treated as a nonevent or anomaly.

I ain’t downplaying the homicides and suffering; cuz oppressed people have shortened lifespans and they suffer, my oldest brother is paralyzed from the neck down from being shot, and way too many of my childhood friends are in prison, been there for decades, so don’t think I’m trying to glamorize shit. It’s the nature of oppression to  produce severe dysfunction among the Oppressed, but you can’t run away from oppression, you have to face, fight, and destroy it.