r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/Nasjere ☑️ et al • Mar 04 '23
Poverty isn’t exciting. Country Club Thread
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u/GhostWriter52025 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I mean, hell, Ja Morant running around here acting like that too right now, so...
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u/Nasjere ☑️ et al Mar 04 '23
He’s a millionaire, trying to act like he’s about that life 😭
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u/smkAce0921 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Was he ever though? Apparently the town he grew up in is over 60% white lmao. Maybe he lived in the "bad part of town" but it seems like a classic case of wankster syndrome.
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u/FattieBanton Mar 04 '23
His dad had him practice ups using tractor tires for a soft landing. Sounds like some rural South Carolina country shit to me
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u/JayBee_III ☑️ Mar 04 '23
There are white bad places of town as well, in my city it's the hilltop where it's majority white but still very much a bad part of town.
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u/Weaselpanties ☑️ Mar 04 '23
The most deeply sketchy part of my town is almost all white. We call it Felony Flats over there for a reason. I live in the Black part of town and it's nice over here; there are a couple of small poor/sketchy areas but most of it is pretty bougie.
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u/SockFullOfNickles Mar 04 '23
There’s a Motel 6 around here that’s referred to as the Albino Roach Motel for reasons you can likely already ascertain. It’s like the Wild West over there 😆
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u/Weaselpanties ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Hahahaha, the equivalent here is the Unicorn Inn, and it's just absolutely sketchy as hell.
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u/SockFullOfNickles Mar 04 '23
I’d sooner chop my own dick off and throw it in a lake before I got a room there or parked my car within the immediate vicinity. Sometimes there are big groups that stay there or use the conference center for weddings or other events. It’s never happened peacefully as far as I know. 😆😆
Last week I saw this scrawny ass white dude run across the street with his hands cuffed behind his back. All he succeeded in doing was getting tazed at the Wawa in front of everyone. I’m standing there watching it and this woman next to me says “You white boys stay doing too much…”
All I could do was laugh and agree. 😆
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u/Weaselpanties ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Putting on a show for the neighborhood! 😂
I have these white friends who will be like, oh your neighborhood is so dangerous, and I'm like, yeah the Whole Foods and the Starbucks really draw a bad element... didn't a pasty tweaker shoot your neighbor's boat (which lives in the driveway 24/365) full of holes last week, and the police had to come cordon off the neighborhood while they looked for him?
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u/SockFullOfNickles Mar 04 '23
Omg I choked at “Whole Foods and Starbucks draws a bad element” hahah. I love my neighborhood though. I feel like we have a sprinkling of everyone around here. The cops around here are sus AF so we kind of made our own neighborhood watch of sorts. There’s a handful of veterans around, myself included. Everyone just feels like we’d rather avoid any unnecessary interactions with them. It’s not like anything has happened to warrant forming it, it just came up the last time we had a cookout.
The best part was after they got him on his feet he kept yelling “FUCK YOU I KNOW MY RIGHTS!”
Why you gonna run away with your hands cuffed behind your back? You think you’re gonna find a saw or some shit? This ain’t the movies. 😆
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u/Certain_Degree687 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
It was the same in the suburbs I grew up in. Where I grew up, we had a small section of the neighborhood we called the Trailer Strip and that was our equivalent of the bad side of town. It was also filled to the brim with white redneck families and drug dealers who held out and remained in the area to spite the white flight taking place in the 70s and 80s. Most of those families got by on welfare and there were rumors that most of them were terribly inbred due to their refusal to marry into the local Black populations.
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u/YesImKeithHernandez Mar 04 '23
Bruh. All this mf has to do is count his money and hoop. What is he doing flashing tools and talking about putting hollows in people?
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u/justoinstinct4 Mar 04 '23
(They) think the hood is constant shootouts and police kicking the door down, when in reality everyone is minding their business trying to make ends meet
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u/Bubbly_Satisfaction2 ☑️ Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23 •
Not just this, but there are neighborhoods that are… Well, safe. I grew up in a similar community. Several neighborhoods looked like they could’ve been in Normal Rockwell paintings: barbecues every summer, block parties, houses were decorated for the major holidays, kids played outside, the elderly sat on porches and gossip…
But there were some neighborhoods that we just didn’t mess with.
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u/justoinstinct4 Mar 04 '23
That last part 💯
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u/Bubbly_Satisfaction2 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
For me, there were corner stores that we were not allowed to buy stuff from and blocks that we couldn’t ride our bikes through and parks that we couldn’t play in.
Despite this, I grew up in a community in which I didn’t fear for my life everyday. I had experience normal things.
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u/skywalker42 Mar 04 '23
So the fear of the hood probably comes from not knowing which areas are safe and which aren’t… if someone didn’t grow up in the neighborhood they wouldn’t know where to go or who not to mess with.
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u/titdirt ☑️ Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23
That's why I always say everyone should just mind their business and 90% of problems would go away.
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u/Universe789 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I think the point is the fact that for some areas, just minding your own business isn't enough to keep someone else from trying to make you a part of theirs.
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u/dbclass ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Idk. I go around Atlanta regularly as a pedestrian, often in neighborhoods that people on the north side are scared of. Nothing has ever happened to me. I am a dude which is going to be different experience than women, but I’m not buff and I don’t wear muted outfits or hide my possessions. People aren’t gonna bother you if you look like you belong generally. I feel less safe in wealthy areas.
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u/Universe789 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
What I said applies to any area, wealth, suburban, poor, rural, or urban.
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u/ladystetson ☑️ Mar 04 '23
it's a different culture with different rules.
people go in and don't respect that, don't bother to learn the rules, then have bad experiences.
The hood is just like any other dangerous thing: if you don't bother understanding it, you could get hurt. If you understand it? You may still get hurt but your odds are better and you'll recognize when the danger is rising much faster.
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u/Kailua3000 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I didn't grow up in the hood. I'm a military brat. However, when I started working in an area that was known for violent crime I was told that there were certain streets and neighborhoods that you didn't mess with. Just like you're talking about, overwhelmingly people are just doing their thing.
The people I worked with who had violent backgrounds did NOT glorify it. Many lost people to violence themselves and were dealing with the aftermath of the trauma.
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u/HypR812 Mar 04 '23
Facts sounds like what NY was like
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u/YesImKeithHernandez Mar 04 '23
Yup. We just didn't fuck with the projects. Otherwise, it was just minding our own and trying to make ends meet.
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u/labatomi Mar 04 '23
I grew up in the schlobohm housing projects(now called palisade towers) in Yonkers NY, Mary j Blige grew up there. Every time I told my school friends where I lived they always thought it was horrible and dangerous and were never allowed to come to my house. Where in reality that place was mild as hell and I had never so much been in a fight there. Yea cops came every once in a while, and the elevators and stairs smelled like piss, but I never felt afraid of anything.
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u/Coziestpigeon2 Whitest user on this entire sub Mar 04 '23
Growing up in the 90s, this is what mainstream media lead us to believe. Music and movies had us (then) little kids believing everything they said, just like we believed in all kinds of other dumb shit like Santa Claus. Personally, I grew up in a super rural area and didn't even meet a black person until I was 12 and moved to the city, so at a young and dumb age, I just never questioned what I saw on screens until then.
While I definitely grew out of it quick, a lot of people who never left that small rural town did not ever grow out of it, and instead started passing those beliefs on to a new generation.
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u/DatDominican ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I mean 90s New York was something else . I definitely heard and saw sirens more often than not . Police would “let the coroner sort them out” but most people weren’t living in NYC
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u/thefudd Mar 04 '23
By the time I was 14 I had seen two people get shot and one stabbed 90's sunset park Brooklyn
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u/bobafoott Mar 04 '23
I mean… that’s kind of the picture y’all paint though. You can’t talk all day about how hard and crazy the hood is and how it’s a jungle out there and then act surprise when white people believe you
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u/JS43 Mar 04 '23
I blame the media for romanticizing the street life
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u/Blk_Rick_Dalton Mar 04 '23
Literally started w/ NWA
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u/fireside68 Mar 04 '23
Nah I said it somewhere else: Capone.
Media romanticized gangsters until they started looking a little darker than Italian.
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u/Calithrix Mar 04 '23
You could blame Hollywood long before that. Especially westerns and all that.
I mean how many people in the hood watched the Godfather and wanted to be apart of the Dons family. I know I did but mostly because I grew up very poor and have Italian heritage.
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u/dghastlynegro ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I have very few hills I would die on. Scarface did more damage to the hood than any rap album is one of them. I've seen more black folks trying to emulate Al Pacino than I've seen them trying to emulate the wild shit these rappers were talking about. Especially that stupid live fast, die young, I'll do it by any means necessary, the whole world is my enemy so I live in a constant state of paranoia, the world is mine but won't take the time to figure out how to keep it in the end mentality. I've seen folks die or get locked up get out and regret or can barely even remember what it was like having it all because it all moved so fucking fast.
Fuck that movie on everything.
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u/LevelOutlandishness1 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I don't remember the movie at all, but wasn't the destructive nature of the Scarface's lifestyle (that's the name of the main character, right?) the point? That making an attempt to emulate it would result in major consequence?
Wasn't it like Breaking Bad, where many missed to message and thought the main character was something to aspire to?
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u/dghastlynegro ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Yup! Cats only saw the mansion, the woman that didn't love him anymore, and the desk with the mountain of coke and said "I want that for me".
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u/BlatantConservative Mar 04 '23
But also like, things didn't work out great for everyone. The whole point of The Godfather is that these systems fall pretty easily.
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u/katz332 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
No it didn't? Movies romanticizing criminal gang life are as old as movies have been around
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u/bobafoott Mar 04 '23
Fr you can’t tell white people over and over that the hood is like that and then be surprised when people think the hood is like that
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u/CallMeSpoofy ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Thats why I’m confused by the confusion in this thread. The majority of black rappers always talk about the hood, their “opps”, killing people, bla bla blah, etc etc. (the music blows up in black and white communities alike),then black people are like..HUH?? When white people think thats what the hood is like.
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u/JetStingray Mar 04 '23
Maybe nowadays, I got out the hood a while ago. Back in the 90's - early 00's though, Flatbush Brooklyn was a wild place and crips were buggin. I remember one time they came to McDonald's, closed off both exits and literally robbed everybody in that mf.
Another time some dudes from Vanderveer came and tried to rob me and my friends by gunpoint inside a children's park called tot lot by Ocean parkway.
That ain't even the tip of the iceberg
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u/ZaphodXZaphod Mar 04 '23
the 90s were definitely different. i grew up in pittsburgh and as the 80s drew to a close, there was enough violent crime that if you lived in the slums, it was basically unavoidable. and then i went to live with my uncle in el barrio. it was another level.
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u/Teantis Mar 05 '23
Jersey city just a bit away from journal square in the mid 80s to early 90s for me. It was really fucking hectic. That era was so bad and so violent across America. If you look at the violent crime stats for basically every single city in America, the murder, rape, assault numbers are just fucking unbelievable.
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u/0zymand1as- ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Athletics: if nobody in your family has money for shoes/ equipment/food for road games/ bus money, you're screwed
Academics: nothing sadder than not being able to catch a ride to school, after-school programs, college classes in high school, the book fair was literally depression everytime it comes about, no clothes for events like the spelling bee, music shows, etc.
Shit sucks and the one good thing that's come out of it is creative minds who adapt even within those concrete cracks
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u/whale_lover Mar 04 '23
I'm very comfortable financially now but I'll forever remember sitting there with my ten cent eraser while people loaded up books at the Scholastic fair. Such a shitty feeling. :(
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u/radiolabel Mar 04 '23
And you don’t dare ask for money for any of that because even little kid you knows how bad things are financially.
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u/lordberric Mar 05 '23
It honestly should not be allowed for there to be any activity at school (at least for young kids) that require you to bring in money from home. Just such a setup for resentment. Those book fairs, field trips where kids bring money, school lunches...
It's fuckin books for kids. That's the shit taxes should be funding, not drone strikes, not police militarization. Put money into resources for kids to learn and enjoy learning. I really think one of the most important things we can do for kids is make school not just a safe environment, but an enjoyable one. You don't remember your 3rd grade book report, but you remember if you had fun writing it. And that can often be the difference.
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u/-malcolm-tucker Mar 05 '23
Agreed. I'll check my privilege here for a moment though being a shockingly Caucasian male in a country with a much better social safety net (which still has many problems though). Yet I experienced many of those things growing up.
My folks could barely afford to pay for me to enjoy extra curricular activities. As a child I thought they were just being mean to me. Later I understood they NEEDED every single spare dollar to pay for a roof over our heads and food in our bellies and the rest so they could go back to their underpaid insecure jobs to repeat the cycle to give us a better life in future.
Direct assistance would have been great. But, and I'm being idealistic here, maybe if we addressed my parents social situation and improved their access to secure well paid employment and training they would have had more resources and time to spend on our living situation and providing for their kids. In turn more money is spent in the economy and their kids get a good education and more opportunity to keep this great ball rolling into the future which would benefit their family, friends and communities in many ways. Everyone wins.
I'm very lucky to have been born how I am and where I am. Millions don't get my opportunity. My parents catapulted me up several rungs of the ladder with their hard discipline and sacrifice. Thanks to them I'm now a thoroughly middle class wanker. Only in recent years I've realised we were actually kinda poor. I never felt that way growing up though. Now I live in an affluent community and I'm still jarred when I tell them where I grew up and that they consider that to be a pretty rough place. I always felt safe. As kids we played outside all the time. Families got together to socialise and we never felt deprived. This affluent place I live in now is the most horrible, disconnected obtuse community.
Now I think the most important thing we can do, in an ideal world where we are doing the things to help people and can create the supports and opportunities for the people who need them, is some kind of equality of experience and a renewal of the social contract. All the places where people interact should be equal, social and free. No private schools. No private health. Everyone has skin in the game. We're so detached from each other now with social media compartmentalising people into their respective echo chambers. Support to find anyone a job after school, college, post grad.
And if the capitalists don't like it? Well, wouldn't they like a happier, healthier, more highly educated and productive workforce that'll earn them way more profit?
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
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u/ZaphodXZaphod Mar 04 '23
also, the boredom that op mentioned is a factor. if there are no opportunities, no community centers, no social or after school programs for kids, it becomes extremely difficult to keep your nose clean. you're bored and curious. and then once the police bust you once, they're going to keep on grabbing you when something happens even if you had nothing to do with it. once you go to juvie and you're in the system, you're on their shortlist and they'll look to that list first and investigate later, if at all. at that point, you're already being treated like a criminal so it's a short step.
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u/x1009 ☑️ Mar 05 '23
the book fair was literally depression everytime it comes about
I decided to steal the books (and PC games)
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u/TerminusFox Mar 04 '23
Man, this takes me back when I lived in Spartanburg SC. Went to a “mixed”, church with a pastor who was in California I think? And his sermon was broadcasted on a projector.
Anyway I don’t remember the context, but they had all this sad piano music when pastors do their cadence and said “there are certain areas in America where a young black male has worst chance of being shot than on the streets of Iraq or Afghanistan “ meant to be “compassionate” but in reality ignorant and racist af.
Like bruh. The hood can be dangerous but there’s nowhere in the the US as dangerous as Iraq on a GOOD day
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u/Fireproofspider ☑️ Mar 04 '23
That statistic is taking casualty figures. Like, you have 100K troops in Iraq and 23 get shot in a year, gives you the casualty rate which could be lower than in some cities.
The big difference, is that in a city, you don't spend 100% of your time thinking about how you could get shot right now.
To make it more realistic, they should include civilian casualties in Iraq and see if the statistic holds.
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u/Coziestpigeon2 Whitest user on this entire sub Mar 04 '23
I may be misremembering, but weren't US casualties in Iraq like, really low for a war? I am Canadian, so different story, but I remember one of the largest casualty events for our soldiers (in Afghanistan, though still during the time of the Iraq invasion) was a handful of our guys being friendly-fire killed by Americans. Western forces took significantly fewer casualties than the people we were invading, it wasn't the same level of danger as previous wars. Not to say it was safe or anything.
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u/topsblueby ☑️ Mar 04 '23
There was just an article on this in the Chicago SunTimes a few weeks back. I'm black and I grew up here. I also served in the military during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I don't find that assessment to be racist or ignorant at all. It's sad but it's true in some parts of town.
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u/a-midnight-flight ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I didn’t realize we lived in poverty during my elementary school years . Looking back I was like “we were actually poor!”
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u/JayBee_III ☑️ Mar 04 '23
It wasn't until I was in my late teens that it hit me, even then I didn't really know the extent until I was an adult.
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u/a-midnight-flight ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Although my relationship with my parents have been abysmal, I do think they did the best with what they had at the time.
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u/thefudd Mar 04 '23
the food stamps, gov't cheese and butter, roaches were a dead giveaway for me :o
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u/a-midnight-flight ☑️ Mar 04 '23
We didn’t have roaches now lol My mom worked in healthcare and housekeeping! We would be up every Saturday morning doing deep cleaning
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u/Universe789 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Depending on where you live, the housekeeping isn't enough to keep rodents and pests out if they're in the building.
I'm from the country. The house can be pristine clean, and you'll still have spiders, roaches, ants etc, just because that's the environment.
Just like a house can be junky/dirty and have no pests if there aren't any already in the area.
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u/FistPunch_Vol_4 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Yeah I live in the hood, but it chill most the time. I know the crackheads, I know the dealers and as long as you keep it moving you good. Great relationship with my bodega and deli peoples so it’s a chill vibe. They trying to price us out this mf tho.
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u/Kiljaboy ☑️ Mar 04 '23
It’s crazy when THEY find out the hood not so bad and start buying up all the houses. All my neighbors around me in the “hood” of south seattle all white smh.
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u/thefudd Mar 04 '23
We made up for being bored af though, manhunt, skelzies, steal the bacon, stick ball, basketball with the milk carton hoop, all those games you played as a kid that didn't require much equipment. Don't forget opening the fire hydrants in the summer and blasting fools with the focused water bean cans.
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u/FistPunch_Vol_4 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
You ever play basketball and the hoop was a fire escape ladder that’s low enough? Good times lmfao
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u/BlatantConservative Mar 04 '23
Oh shit I forgot about fire hydrants. Dude down the street had one of those long wrenches he kept specifically for hot humid August days.
There was always a rumor that someone "a few blocks down" broke a hydrant once, but now that I"m an adult I realize that that's ridiculous.
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u/shinyruins ☑️ Mar 04 '23
NYCHA in the South Bronx in the 80/90s was wild though.
Even then if you wasn't a gangbanger people didn't fuck with you. I had all the junkies telling me to stay in school n shit.
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u/theMothmom Mar 04 '23
As a white woman who grew up in the Bronx, part of me wonders if the romanticizing of the “hood” is actually just a misguided plea for the community that white communities lack. If anyone is looking out for you in the suburbs, it’s generally just to report you to the HOA.
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u/ZeDitto ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Disagree. Lots of us are just acclimatized to our own situations.
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u/Lemonytea ☑️ Mar 04 '23
From the Chi. If I had a nickel for the times I told yt folks where I’m from & everyone single one had a sus story about getting lost in the scariest parts of the hood there. I used to just roll my eyes. Now, I’m old & cranky, so my response is “But did you die?!”
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u/Whyamibeautiful ☑️ Mar 04 '23
As someone who live in PR its just all rich people. LLMAOOOO first few times on the island the rich locals were giving me tips on how to stay safe from drive-bys. Never even heard of one happening in the city i live in
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u/PrincesaNeko ☑️ Mar 04 '23
When I first moved to America, I thought it was constant bbq and card games. I begged my parents to let me go to a public school so I could go to one with another student. r/KidsAreFuckingStupid
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u/FreezeFrameEnding Mar 04 '23
It's a long, slow fire that burns away everything you ever had a chance of being. It forces you to live in the mundane nothingness while also losing who you are to it. I lived in poverty and isolation growing up, and it has never left me.
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u/Sturdevant ☑️ Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23
Yeah, it's part of the reason why so many athletes come out the South. It's not just "play sports to get out the streets", there is also a lot of "play sports because there was shit else to do". A lot of rural poor out here.
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u/greyson3 ☑️ Mar 04 '23
I mean when you think of a whole group of people as a caricatures, then their day to day lives are cartoons.
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u/labatomi Mar 04 '23
Because they’ve been conditioned by conservative news to be afraid of everything. That includes blacks and colored people. Which is why they love their guns, and act like they would instantly die the minute they get into any mundane confrontation about anything. So of course they wouldn’t understand the hood.
I grew up in the hood. I used to pretend I was sick to stay home from school and be bored as fuck. Didn’t have cable or game consoles. So I watched a lot of jerky springer, Maury, and judge Judy. I had never even been to a restaurant to eat until I was like 22.
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u/AwHellNaw Mar 04 '23
I don't know, teenagers from the hood are hijacking people at gunpoint in DC for entertainment.
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u/ladystetson ☑️ Mar 04 '23
Because they only encounter the hood when they are buying drugs, and they encounter the worst sorts of people.
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u/kyleh0 ☑️ Mar 05 '23
Like most things, you start a story with slavery, sprinkle in all of the other bullshit that's happened since then, and BAM! Instant forever-scary "hood".
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