I love outside of Gary Indiana, and yeah it can be dangerous if you look lost or like you have no purpose for being there, but there's also good working people just trying to eke out the same shit living we all are. I hear my mom and sisters say this kind of shit and it's just like. Sigh
Edit; for some fun examples look on any reddit thread about dangerous trips or some shit and people will constantly talk about how badass they were for driving through Gary or St Louis or some shit.
It's not a warzone mayos.
When the gentrification starts coming in with the new stores and supermarkets I know it's time to look for a new place to move to because the rent is definitely going up lol.
When they build a Woolworths supermarket in your neighbourhood, it means that gentrification has been completed™
No Woolworths is the upper class supermarket chain in South Africa. There are lots of jokes about it online. This was the one that went viral years ago
ah ok, they closed their American stores in 1997 and the brand was stale and dated even then
Lmao. Further proof that South Africa is like 30 years in the past.
There are neighborhoods in my city that are referred to by mayos as "The Planet of the Apes." Some of my own relatives have used that phrase. But don't you dare call them racist because they'll get offended and go on a spiel about how not-racist they are.
On that note "The Planet of the Apes" comparison doesn't even make sense when you actually think about the movie. You have a society run by a religious patriarchy that doesn't believe in evolution, is okay with animal abuse, covers up scientific discoveries, silences progressive voices and is propped up by an elite police/military caste.
If anything POTA satirizes the far-right. But the right are horribly media illiterate so the messaging just goes over their heads. :wonder-who-thats-for:
Yeah I moved to a rural town from a major city and some of the mayos keep trying to engage me on "feeling safer"
Like I'm sorry Carol but look at my butch ass. I do not feel safer being this visibly queer in a town of like 300 old white boomers flying Let's Go Brandon flags
I'll usually talk about the times I almost got hit by cars in the city instead though, that shit isn't happening when rush hour traffic is four cars on main street
I’ll usually talk about the times I almost got hit by cars in the city instead though, that shit isn’t happening when rush hour traffic is four cars on main street
If may feel that way but you’re significantly more likely to die by car in rural areas than cities
Oh undeniably, everything outside of town is a completely unlit 2 lane highway and the speed limit is functionally infinite. But like, walking to the grocery store in town is a totally different story
I'm from south Chicago and people here talk like Englewood is some PVE area when my whole life here the only time someone tried to actually mug was literally in the loop when I was smoking in an alley on break. It's so god damn dumb and I'm getting madder the more I type. I HATE THE TERM CHIRAQ. THATS MY HOME YOU FUCKS
Edit: ALSO IT WASNT EVEN A POC WHO TRIED TO MUG ME BUT SOME TRAIN KID WITH A KITCHEN KNIFE. But laughs in CC
I HATE THE TERM CHIRAQ. THATS MY HOME YOU FUCKS
The annoying part is this was originally a term coined by drill rappers and referred to, like, very specific pockets of extreme poverty and gang violence where a lot of them grew up. Of course it got co-opted and now it's just another conservative talking point.
Believe me I know. I grew up a 20 min walk from chief keef. I still fall asleep to war movies/documentaries bc I'm used to gunfire
I've got family that was from that area of Chicago and have gone to visit and never really seemed that bad to me. Now everyone in my immediate family I guess assumes anywhere but up by Wrigley or whatever is just a constant shooting gallery or something.
Granted I also chuckle when I hear the gangs are moving out to x rural area in the state I live in or somewhere I'm visiting and they act like the entire town overnight is going to become "a bad area"
Gary, Indiana is a physical monument to the ramifications of surplus labor exploitation. It's a hallowed out husk of industrial decay caused by neoliberalism's outsourcing. Material conditions declined and exploitation increased as the power of labor collapsed. As material conditions decrease and central planning gives way, crime increases.
The capitalists have zero incentive to rehabilitate Gary, so they won't. And the ramification to this, is that no resources are expended to improve Gary, Indiana because nobody there has any value to capital.
Thus, Gary, Indiana is a "bad area".
Makes more sense than the explanation in World of Darkness, where a vampire mafia keeps Gary oppressed so they have a steady supply of people they can bite with nobody missing them.
Tbf I think wooden stakes work equally well on vampires and capitalists
ive been thinking abt moving to Chicago and so many mayos have pulled the “but its so dangerous” shit. if i bring up actual crime stats that show crime has been decreasing in these areas for the past 20 years they always have some half assed justification for why “its still bad there”. some fucks even bring up the 2020 protests and ill just be like “yeah i was in those and the only violence i saw was from police”
yeah true. but even in my current small city the police are everywhere. and where i live weed is illegal :( so at least in chicago i dont risk getting arrested for driving home from the plug
Heyjackass.com is a dashboard that tracks Chicago crime day by day.
I lived in a "bad neighborhood" in my old city and when people asked me what it was like I'd tell them I heard gunshots outside the high school . . . whenever they hosted track meets.
Of course it's a racist dogwhistle. And of course calling out white folks on it makes them extremely indignant at you saying it's racist. It's one of those things about white society that makes me feel insane. You have to pretend it's totally not racist to say things like this and if you imply otherwise people lose it on you.
White people have spent decades carefully crafting these social norms that allow them to be racist while still having sort of plausible deniability that anything they say or do actually has racist motivations.
Edit: it's obvious but of course only predominantly black areas get hit with that label. Small all-white rural towns get that "totally safe" label, ignoring how dangerous those towns can be for black or visibly queer people. Usually right off the interstate is OK but venture off much further than that in some places...
My career has me in these types of neighborhoods all the time in the Acela corridor and it breaks me up.
All the people leaving for work in the morning are in uniforms: sanitation, UPS, USPS, Home Depot, Starbucks, you name it.
When I’m there during the day I have never ever been bothered, homeless people don’t really stay in these neighborhoods, and even at night if I have been bothered it’s because I walk into or around a busier nightlife street.
I am white and look very out of place. I am carrying extremely expensive photo equipment and almost always alone. I knock on random doors and canvas often.
Consistently, the most threatened I’ve been is in really nice neighborhoods with village police, (threatened with arrest) or outerborough townhomes/ close corridor suburban homes owned by old white guys with Ring cameras. (Threatened with being shot.)
I was in Jburg South Africa for work once. Went fucking everywhere. The white suburb bar near Praetoria was of course the one time I felt threatened .
Every black South African I met was extremely excited by white tourists, and hopeful we’d bring back positive stories, because they know they bring money instead of the security state with them.
The white suburb bar near Praetoria
Very interested in which bar this is, as a South African. And yes it's generally safe to travel, I do it for work all the time, not every township = Cape flats, despite what you hear on the internet.
I can’t remember it was 2013, but it was a billiard bar and the fat white guys got so mad the girls I was traveling with didn’t want to talk to them.
Least weird bar experience on the strip in Hatfield.
Was asking because I know a couple of these bars got busted for letting in underage clients and allowing them to party and drink. The scene over there is just weird, I think people like Jack Parow still perform there.
His whole bit is wearing oversized caps while rapping in Afrikaans.
I don't get it either
If you dig into what they count as a "bad area" it basically always just boils down to :us-foreign-policy: anyway
I remember hearing about how bad Oakland was thought my childhood. When I was 18, I saw the population of Oakland is 400,000+ people and I realized a city can't function with 400k people constantly robbing each other, and it's probably just a place people live and try to get by, like anywhere else. Living there for 7 years confirmed as much
Back when all the "no go zone" hysteria was in full swing and the Daily Mail had produced a list of places in the UK where it's unsafe to be white and Fox News had a guy who couldn't pronounce Birmingham call it a virtual sharia state. I had an argument with an American redditor who was convinced [city I was working in at the time] was comprised almost entirely of Muslims and if you were white and in the wrong street you'd be straight up murdered.
No matter what I told him, he was still convinced he knew more about what it was like in [city I was working in at the time] than I did because he was told the real truth™ (by /pol/ users presumably).
According to reddit and even some people who live in Stockholm, if you stray far from gentrified shitholes like Södermalm you'll be attacked by waves of marauding immigrants who will throw grenades and flaming police cars at you. Which is ironic given that Södermalm used to be regarded as the premium 'bad area' with the nickname 'Kniv-(knife)-söder'. The same types of people who think that going on the blue line is like parachuting into Iraq.
