"We need to take responsibility and educate people. That's why black folks don't like me. I always say it's our responsibility to make safe neighborhoods. It's our job to get them cleaned up"
About this Quote
Evers is poking a live wire in intracommunity politics: the uneasy line between empowerment and blame. His insistence on "responsibility" and "educate people" is framed as moral tough love, the kind of rhetoric that tries to seize agency in a country eager to deny it. The bite comes from the provocation, "That's why black folks don't like me" - a preemptive defense that casts him as the truth-teller punished for honesty, and implicitly casts his critics as attached to excuses.
"Safe neighborhoods" and "cleaned up" are doing heavy lifting. In the civil-rights era and its aftermath, those phrases were often weaponized by outsiders to rationalize over-policing, disinvestment, and the idea that Black suffering is self-inflicted. Evers reclaims the language, but it still carries the old fumes. The subtext is strategic: if you argue that Black communities can and should police their own norms, you can demand resources without being reduced to a victim narrative. You can also argue for respectability - order, cleanliness, discipline - as political leverage.
That strategy, though, risks smuggling in a familiar hierarchy of who's "responsible" enough to deserve safety. Structural forces - redlining, job flight, municipal neglect, discriminatory sentencing - vanish behind a managerial "our job" cadence. Coming from an activist, it's a pivot from protest to governance: less "change the system" than "build the capacity to survive it". It's bracing, controversial, and calibrated to sound like leadership even when it flirts with the language of social triage.
"Safe neighborhoods" and "cleaned up" are doing heavy lifting. In the civil-rights era and its aftermath, those phrases were often weaponized by outsiders to rationalize over-policing, disinvestment, and the idea that Black suffering is self-inflicted. Evers reclaims the language, but it still carries the old fumes. The subtext is strategic: if you argue that Black communities can and should police their own norms, you can demand resources without being reduced to a victim narrative. You can also argue for respectability - order, cleanliness, discipline - as political leverage.
That strategy, though, risks smuggling in a familiar hierarchy of who's "responsible" enough to deserve safety. Structural forces - redlining, job flight, municipal neglect, discriminatory sentencing - vanish behind a managerial "our job" cadence. Coming from an activist, it's a pivot from protest to governance: less "change the system" than "build the capacity to survive it". It's bracing, controversial, and calibrated to sound like leadership even when it flirts with the language of social triage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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