Friday, January 16, 2015

There goes the neighborhood, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the Blacks

It started slowly, first a few Black families moved into the neighborhood but quickly more and more of them came. 
People in the neighborhood didn't know what to think at first.  They'd heard the stories about how the Blacks were lazy, shiftless, prone to violence, into drugs, liked to drink, and were promiscuous.  But as time went along most of us saw the Blacks were normal folks, just like us.

They held down jobs, some owned their own businesses, they raised families, and had their problems, just like all other families did.  It was pretty common to see them out riding bikes, going to the park, and enjoying life when they could, and enduring things when life was bad.
 The Blacks celebrated Christmas and other holidays.  But some didn't.  It was no big deal.
Turns out the rumors of the Blacks being dirty and smelly weren't true.  Some of the Blacks kept their houses and families cleaner than others in the neighborhood did.
The Blacks didn't like the cold weather much but they did like New Year's Eve and a few even learned to put up with it and do stuff like skating.

And of course some of the neighborhood boys fell really hard for the Black girls.  But when some local girls fell for some of the Black boys, a lot of the folks in the neighborhood who said publicly that they had no problem or beef with the Blacks got out of sorts if their daughters dated any of the Black males.  But as time went on, even that become more and more accepted.
The Blacks always pitched in on neighborhood clean up day and they went out of their way to help out neighbors who needed it in times of crisis.
But sometimes at night, someone from outside of the neighborhood liked to throw rocks at the homes of the Blacks, and toilet paper the trees of some of the Black families in our neighborhood.  The vandals would scream at the Blacks and tell them to go back to where they came from.
 That kind of behavior drove some of the Blacks to drink.

And then some of the neighborhood folks started hiding their valuables when they knew the Blacks were coming over, which was kind of stupid because no one really wanted to steal their mingy shit anyway.


Then some uptight business owners didn't like that the presence of the Black families in the neighborhood caused outsiders to come in and destroy stuff, they began to resent the Blacks and some stopped serving them in restaurants and stores.
But that didn't stop the Blacks from continuing to move in our neighborhood.  In fact, so many moved in and made friends and intermarried with the other families that they became the majority and any business that didn't serve them soon went out of business.  And we started a neighborhood watch programs that quickly dealt with anyone that had ideas of messing with the Blacks and the rest of our neighborhood.

So considering everything, it's been great having the Blacks in our neighborhood.

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