Thread by @michaelharriot

He's right.

If you believe a lone racist gunman killed 3 people in Jacksonville, it's probably because you only learned a whitewashed version of history. But there is a reason why a white supremacist chose this specific location:

A thread

https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1695852456066916566

The shooting happened in the New Town section of Jacksonville, Fla.

Wait... Why is the black section called "New Town?"

You've probably heard about the Great Chicago Fire & the San Francisco Fire. Well, the 3rd largest urban fire in American history was in Jacksonville, Fla

On May 3, 1901, a fire at a factory burned 146 blocks, destroying 2,368 buildings. It left 10,000 people homeless.

The fire department decided to save the white homes and let the Black neighborhoods burn to the ground, including two historically Black colleges.

The man who wrote that 1st quote was a choir director at a school started by a woman who moved to Jville bc white people kept shooting at her for teaching Black ppl to read. They did a decent job good job, producing students like Zora Neal Hurston

But Jacksonville was racist AF

Oh, the choir director was a lawyer, too.

A year before the fire, he had a concert to celebrate Lincoln's bday. But instead of singing about Lincoln, the choir director took a poem he wrote about the surviving the racial terror of Reconstruction & set it to his brother's music

The song slapped, too.

But when he lost his home in the fire, the choir director said: "F**k this racist town," moved to NY, helped start a little arts movement called the Harlem Renaissance & became field director for the NAACP traveling to investigate lynchings.

During the lynching epidemic of 1919, the old choir director would go places and hear ppl singing his song throughout the South. That summer, the NAACP made it the Black National Anthem.

And that's how James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing" survived a racist fire.

The other Black school that burned was Edward Waters College, started by the AME church to educate Freedmen after the Civil War, it was Florida's first HBCU.

After the racist fire, EWC bought land in the burned Black neighborhood, reopened and helped build the "New Town."

But that's not why the gunman went there.

See, after the Great Depression, the New Deal gave white people government handouts to start businesses and guaranteed low-interest mortgages to build new homes. There was 1 catch:

You couldn't build in Black communities.

Now, remember, the South was segregated, so Black people COULDN'T live in the white part of town. So even Black WW2 veterans who had the GI bill couldn't use the mortgages to build homes. They couldn't even use the money to start businesses in Black areas

And to make sure...

The US government created maps of towns for banks to show where they couldn't guarantee loans. Even dumb racist understood the maps because they were color-coded, shading the Black sections of town in red.
They called it redlining.
Let's look at Jacksonville's redlining map.

Now, you might be saying: Maybe that section of town is marked "hazardous for another reason."

You might be right. Who knows? Maybe they weren't racist. Luckily, the gov't EXPLAINED why the neighborhoods were marked in red.

the BEST Black neighborhoods are better than the poorest white neighborhoods even in the poor sections. What's even crazier, is that they explicitly say Why it is that way.

You're probably thinking: "This is racist AF but what does it have to do with a shooting?"

Well, the shooter went to Florida schools so he probably doesn't know a lot of Black history. But there is a reason he went to the Dollar Tree after he was turned away from Edward Waters

See, this thread isn't really about Black history or racist shooters.

Like many Black neighborhoods, New Town is in a "food desert." Ppl in these neighborhoods who don't have transportation or time to go to white neigborhoods, must shop at dollar stores

jacksonville.com/story/news/loc…

In Black neighborhoods, Dollar Genral, Dollar Tree & Family Dollar are more ubiquitous than churches, check cashing places and liquor stores

And here's the thing:

Dollar stores aren't cheaper.

They're actually MORE expensive.

perfectunion.us/dollar-general…

Basically they stock smaller sizes and lower quality merchandise for premium prices.

So why don't grocery stores open in Black communities?

Well, that's the thing. Unless it's a high-end store like Whole Foods or Publix, new grocery stores don't really come to ANY community

But these neighborhoods are not poor and hungry JUST because because of 150 years of INTENTIONAL economic inequality. Its not even because of fires or redlining or hate.

The racist shooter unknowingly chose his target based on the measurable economic effects of white privilege

That is the "systemic" part of systemic racism

Instead of about what they did TO BLACK PEOPLE, we should be talking about what they do FOR WHITE PEOPLE

THIS is white privilege.

WHITE people got their fires put out which gave them real estate and land boosted by government handouts which gave them MORE equity in their homes schools which gave them MORE resources which gave them economic security.

But here's the important part:

BLACK PEOPLE PAID FOR WHITE PEOPLE'S STUFF. They paid taxes for fire departments and GI bills and federal subsidies and a good public education system and WHITE PEOPLE GOT IT.

No one cares about how white people FEEL about Black people. We want our STUFF

If we just had our stuff, there would be no Black neighborhoods, so there'd be no redlining, which means there would be no food deserts, which means it wouldn't cost MORE to be Black

Oh, there would still be racist white supremacist domestic terrorists

Trust me, we know.

But I bet we'd do something about it if it kept happening at Publix

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