Muggings on Fifth and 86th in front of the Guggenheim and on West 23rd. Stabbings on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea and in the long-since hypergentrified East Village. Flash mobs in Soho boutiques. And that's to say nothing of the regularly scheduled programming in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. (And Detroit, Baltimore, Altanta, D.C., etc.) And what do ALL of the perps look like? Me! They look like me. How can we BP speak to police brutality and profiling and say NOTHING about the epidemic of violent crime offenders that almost characterizes the essence of our entire community? How do BLM again? How can we expect anyone to take us seriously -- beyond the contributions to music and sports that, together with the depravity, only serve to reinforce the idea that we're not quite working with the same materials as everyone else? Because even I'm starting to wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with most of us. Yes, I said most. This is just beyond out of control. I'm tired of wondering if I barely genetically escaped being a savage unfit for the civilized world. And yet I feel like the only BP who actually thinks this. (Any BA who has never had this thought is either lying or an idiot -- or one of the people I'm talking about.) Well, I know what I'm going to get from some folks, but I don't have the energy to pretend that I can't empathize with racism to some degree at this point. And that's not a nice feeling.
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