Why “Black People Burn Their Neighborhood”

A Netflix Move LA 92 shows private and news recordings, day by day, hour by hour of the LA Riots in 1992. They start with the riots in LA in the 1960ies that resulted from police brutality and continue through to the end of the curfew in May in 1992. It shows looting and rioting. More importantly, it shows who is looting and rioting and offers the ability to reflect on why there might be looting and rioting in black areas. It also shows that most people forget that looting and rioting and burning was not only in South Central or Compton, but throughout entire Los Angeles with damage being of more than 1 Billion Dollars.

I have often heard the question from white people of “why do Black people burn their own neighborhoods”. Here are some reasons I came up with after watching the documentary.

1. When you see no justice where you live, when you are attacked with impunity and have no recourse, you know it is not your neighborhood.
2. When you can’t get a loan, when you are repressed and you see people who are immigrants but are able to rise and become the merchant where you spend your money, then you see the injustice.
3. When you are poor and have nothing, you will go and take it because you finally can get something.
4. Notice that police don’t stop looting in their area, nor are the fire departments. Because they are happy to see them do this.
5. It was not black people, it was all people in the area. To say why “they” are burning things is to imply it is only black people, but it is all poor people.
6. When you dismiss law and show a preference for enforcement against some and ignore laws against others, you negated all laws. To ignore laws is to invite a pandemic.
7. They are poor, they often don’t have cars. They will go where they can and it is their neighborhood.
8. They know that if they were to lift a pinky in the white wealthy neighborhoods, police wouldn’t spare bullets, the army wouldn’t spare bombs, the retribution would be swift and unforgiving. They can riot in their poverty-stricken areas where they attack the poor immigrant merchants, but if they were to take on the actual power, they would be destroyed.
9. When a white person says: “they burned their own areas.” Do you really want them to burn white areas, the way it happened in 1992 in Los Angeles?
10. “They” did not burn down their businesses and homes. They young and the angry and the criminals did. They did not loot their own businesses and burn down their buildings, the poor and the angry did. There were no kids looting, no old, most people were at home and most people the following day, black, white and brown from the neighborhoods come out the next day and cleanup. To call all people who loot as black and to put them all into one group is definition of stereotype.