By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker, August 6, 2021
On June 1st last year, a week after George Floyd was murdered, more than three hundred fires blazed across Philadelphia, according to police. In the previous days, there had been reports of two hundred commercial burglaries—otherwise known as looting—and more than a hundred and fifty acts of vandalism. Four hundred people had been arrested, and the National Guard was on the way. By that Saturday, June 6th, tens of thousands of people clogged the streets of downtown, demanding justice, proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. For eight consecutive nights, the city was choked with tear gas, ruled by curfews. It wasn’t yet summer, but Philadelphia was on fire.
The intensity and the duration of the protests indicated that the problems went much deeper than the lynching of a Black man in Minneapolis. Beyond the issue of racist police violence, Philadelphia has the largest portion of its population living in poverty of any major city in the United States. Not coincidentally, it also has one of the largest Black populations of major American cities. Bitterness rising out of neglect and indifference to poverty, drug addiction, and housing insecurity in poor and working-class Black neighborhoods came back to haunt the political and economic élite.
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