By Rich Blackmon
- Crisis exploitation: “Here’s a crying child drinking out of a lead pipe, but we’re never doing a follow-up story on their removal.”
- The utopian: “This single corporate development is the city’s savior.”
- The self-fulfilling prophecy: “Newark is bad if one bad thing happens anywhere in its borders.”
- The exception: “Desirable parts of the city that defy stereotypes are not ‘really’ Newark.”
- Tricky headline semantics: “If it’s a positive story, something great is happening in New Jersey, but if it’s negative, it becomes a story about Newark.”
- Framing pessimism as concern: “Don’t get excited for record low crime and widespread development because it means you hate poor people.”
- The uncritical White flight: “Growing up, I never had any reason to go to Newark. There’s no redemption narrative coming, I’m still very comfortable revealing this is the way I see human beings that don’t come from my socio-economic (and racial) background.”
- The no self-awareness: “I’m not sure Newark can have a Whole Foods. This is Reg Chapman, reporting live from my Northern Harlem Heights apartment on 249th Street in Manhattan.”
- The partisan: “Forget the legacies of factory jobs leaving America, white flight, and the War on Drugs. Democrats are lazy minority communists that are too stupid to be Republicans.”
- The clueless White liberal: “I just watched 25 Black and Latino residents walk out of their $3,000 a month luxury apartments, but I’m still going to ask when gentrification will come to Newark.”
Rich Blackmon is an award-winning slam poet, satirist, and Black elitist.
Featured photo by Pexels
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