I didn’t say “violence on the part of Black people good and defensible”. What I was talking about was self-defense. It is recognized in the U.S legal system, at all levels, that people have the right to use violence in self-defense. If you defend “stand your ground laws”, you’d have to defend any violence black people in Chicago-a group that never initiated violence against whites, for the record-had the right to stand their ground when their neighborhoods were under unprovoked attack from white vigilantes.

And yes, I dO believe that the majority of the blacks who scabbed would have joined the unions they were scabbing against if only they were allowed to do so. Most black people ARE working-class. Black people have been part of the labor movement wherever they’ve been allowed to be-check out the stories of people like Lucy Parsons of the Industrial Workers of the World and A. Philip Randolph and C.L. Dellums of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the overwhelmingly black Local 1199 Healthcare Workers Union-many of whose members are risking their lives trying to save coronavirus victims.

Also, did you seriously just argue that black people who were leaving the South-as anyone treated in the way they were treated inevitably would have done-were also obligated to leave the country? To leave the country they’d been born in-and were thus citizens of? Why should black people be treated as having any LESS of a place in Chicago or the U.S. as a whole than anyone else? And in what universe did southern blacks owe it to southern whites or working-class white already in Chicago not to be there? Black people, and brown people, and Latino/a/x people, and LGBTQ people, and people who came here from the rest of the world as most of OUR ancestors did-were and are as much part of the working class as southern and “ethnic” whites, and if those groups of working class whites had accepted black and brown and Indigenous people as part of their class, an entirely different, better, and freer way of life would have been created for the many. Working class whites never gained a damn thing from assuming that “working class” ONLY meant white, only meant “cis-male”, only meant “heterosexual” or only meant “U.S. citizen by birth”. All that belief ever did for working class whites was to hold us down and prevent us from creating a life that was better than the one we have now.

And yes, there was illiteracy among blacks who moved to Chicago-but that was only because it was illegal to teach black people to read in many parts of this country. It was never illegal to teach white people to read, so if anyone had no excuse for being illiterate, it would have been the southern whites(some of whom are my ancestors, btw). It’s not as though it was no biggie for southern whites not to know how to read, but it’s proof of inferiority and non-legitimacy in our society for blacks to have been illiterate.

And finally, I WAS going to call you out for using a Spike Lee character as your posting name and avatar-which is something a white supremacist poster should be decent enough not to do-but then I remembered that decency isn’t part of being a white supremacist and that you probably think that most black men are actually just like Mars Blackmon.