I stand corrected on the young man not being shot, although it is clear his death was the result of having been the victim of the unprovoked attack.
And I never came anywhere close to claiming that no whites in Chicago opposed the unprovoked racist mob attacks on the black community in 1919.
It’s just that I reject your implication that the black community share responsibility with the whites for the violence.
Yes, unregulated white supremacist capitalism and massive economic inequality had left the city roiling with tensions.
Yes, white ethnics had been exploited by capitalism and had their own history of poverty and oppression in the city-never on the scale suffered by black and brown and indigenous people, but nonetheless real.
Yes, there no doubt were some black and brown people who were not saints.
But none of that means that working class blacks owed it to working class whites not to move to Chicago, or that those working class whites who launched the unprovoked riots against black Chicago had no other option but to lash out at people of color in order to drive them out of town.
The working class whites COULD have joined forces with black and brown people-as they still could today-to drive the wealthy out of power and create a way of running life in which no one had to struggle to survive, in which all had a decent share and a share in the say about how work and life and run.
Instead, the working class whites of Chicago chose to leave the wealthy unchallenged and focus-as too many of us still do today-on blaming our problems on, while making violently unwelcome, people whose only real offense is not looking like us. As I don’t need to remind you, hardly any working class whites in this country have anything positive to show for treating working-class black and brown and indigenous and Jewish and Muslim people as the enemy rather than making common cause with them against the 1%.
And in terms of the situation in Chicago in 1919, you still have yet to offer any examples at all of any “behavior” black people were engaged in that could possibly your contention that their community comes anywhere close to sharing the blame for the riots.
