I am honest to God not trying to be That Bitch, and yes I have read Colin Flaherty too, but... I can't speak for the USA. I can speak for where I grew up. I grew up in Coatbridge. Some folks here have probably been there, or know what its like. It has the same post-industrial, "no jobs but top 5% of most deprived UK areas" shit going on. The housing is literally falling down. The heroin problem is incurable. The schools actively need avoided if you don't want battered or shanked.
I understand from US friends that its best comparator is probably Detroit. I have never visited there myself.
This video? I can't speak to a racial angle - Coatbridge is overwhelmingly potato niggers and some orange bastards with a deathwish. But I can tell you that this is what things are like when you grow up poor and most of you are going to jail, going to be junkies, going to be alkies, going to be single mothers, or going to get sectioned. Or usually some combination of all the above. There's nothing to do, no real future for most of you, and a lot of boredom and pent-up anger going around.
So you fight. You fight all the fucking time. You learn to fight at playgroup, or in the street afterwards. You definitely will be shown how to fight before you start primary.
When we "met up to fight", it was called a square go, or a battle if you were bringing your team along. The knives started coming along when we were about nine or ten. I notice here no one brought a blade, which surprised me. What also surprised me is that the white lassies came to an arranged battle apparently not expecting an actual fight.
You all know what I mean by a fight. It's not a few lame swings and then a few insults and someone runs away. You fight until someone's properly fucked, like the white lassie, or you fight until the police come, or until one team shites it and runs away.
Now, I am not saying the white lassie is to blame here. But I have to wonder why the fuck she is a teenager, obviously living amongst poor black people if they were at school together, and her parents have not given her the Talk about how to behave if you don't want done. First and foremost, you do not openly challenge someone to a square go or a battle unless you are fucking mental or you really have no choice because of something they've done. Knowing you're going to have to fight someone because you can't not-fight them is shitty. It's a shitty way to grow up. But. By these lassies' age, the white girls should have learned to keep their fucking heads down, their noses clean, and avoid the black girls. If it is correct that this white lassie actually arranged this fight, I don't know what the fuck her parents are doing letting her mix with black people, because she's no sense.
Secondly, she turned up with like, two pals? To a battle? If you don't have a team you can rely on, you need to make double sure you are not getting into any shit with people, because there's a good chance one of you will get very seriously done, like this lassie did. If they had come with blades, at least one of them would have died at a shambles like this.
I won't say, "carry a blade" because encouraging weans to carry blades is outright encouraging murder. I will say I don't know of any team where I grew up that wouldn't, then and now, bring all the weapons they could to a battle.
Thirdly, she doesn't fight like she has much experience, and this black lassie is twice her fucking size. You cannot run your mouth around people who can batter the fuck out of you, and we knew that as toddlers. We certainly knew it before we went to primary school.
Look, in short, I'm bamboozled by what happened here: how the fuck did this lassie get into a situation where she is offering a whole team of black lassies out for a fight? How the fuck did her parents not make sure, for her own fucking safety, that she knew better? You have to do that as a parent because you know full well that there are plenty of parents whose kids are in your kids' school, in their street, in other teams, who do not give a royal fuck about your kid's safety, and you have to make them streetwise.
This poor lassie was not streetwise. She needed to be kept off the streets, honestly. If you live in a place like this you've got to move. If you can't move you have to put your children wise at a young age.
