This is the part that stuck with me:
The McKinney Police Department said officers went to the pool because they got calls about unruly teenagers.
“The initial call came in as a disturbance involving multiple juveniles at the location — who do not live in the area or have permission to be there — refusing to leave,” it said.
“McKinney Police received several additional calls related to this incident advising that juveniles were now actively fighting.”
A woman identified as Tatiana Rhodes, 19, said that she and some friends had organized the party and were enjoying themselves at the Craig Ranch North Community Pool on June 5 when the conflict with a white neighbor broke out.
“This lady was saying racial slurs to some friends that came to the cookout. She was saying such things as ‘black effer’ and ‘that’s why you live in Section 8 homes,’” Rhodes told E. Johnson IV, a photographer who recorded the conversation and uploaded it online.
More insults were traded. One neighbor said “go back to your Section 8 home,” Rhodes said, referring to a form of federal housing assistance for low-income people.
If they’re black, they must be poor. If they’re black and poor, they must be from somewhere else. They must belong somewhere else.
Except they’re not, and they aren’t, and they don’t.
I used to live in a building that accepted Section 8 vouchers. I had no idea it did, until it changed management companies, and the new company stopped fixing things up, and put it out among the gossipy neighbors that it was the Section 8 tenants who were … I don’t know, breaking the plumbing on purpose? Because that’s a thing poor people do, try to make their situation worse?
Most of the tenants in this building were white. Our African-American downstairs neighbors, who were friendly and kind and helped fix my lemon of a car when it broke down for the 500th time, were the ones who got eyed with suspicion, blamed for smoking in the hallway, and told to stop littering everywhere.
Go back to your Section 8 housing. Nice houses are for other people. You’re not one of us. You don’t belong. I can tell that, just by looking at you. The segregation isn’t just physical. This kind of rage, passed down from parent to child as households fled in the face of integration, seeps into a family tree from the roots, and poisons leaf and branch.
Multiple juveniles who do not live here. They cannot live here. They don’t look like us. It’s not possible.
It is 20goddamn15. Some of the time.
A.
Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
I know it’s not in vogue, and everybody has to stand their ground all the time, lest they slide back, but here’s a funny little story from a friend of mine who helps manage a church camp.
One of the things the camp managers ask of folks who come for an event, a weekend or longer, is to clean up after themselves, pick up litter, and generally help keep the rustic camp spruced up. My friend (we’ll call her Lucy) goes into the dish washing area of the kitchen, where a woman is busily rinsing solid food off a plate down the drain. The camp’s ancient plumbing is particularly susceptible to clogging, so Lucy points out that it would be better if the woman scraped her plate into the compost bin before rinsing it.
The woman responds with hostility, which puzzles Lucy a little bit, She also doesn’t stop rinsing her plate. Instead of ramping up the situation, Lucy stepped back and introduced herself: “My name is Lucy, and I’m one of the camp managers. What’s your name?” The other woman introduces herself (let’s call her Ethel). Lucy apologizes for causing Ethel distress, she’s just concerned that the solid food stuff will clog the plumbing. After a little back and forth, Ethel explains that she’s attending the wedding that’s being held at the camp. Her house has been foreclosed on, and she doesn’t have running water, so she figured she’d take advantage of the camp facilities to do her dishes.
Lucy helps Ethel with the rest of her dishes and is very glad that she didn’t meet hostility with hostility.
I wonder how the McKinney situation might have progressed if the initial hostility had been met differently? Probably best not to speculate; cranky bigots should be slapped down.
texass.