BRONX, N.Y. — Last Friday a few dozen protesters gathered at a busy intersection near the northern tip of New York City for “A People’s Tour of the Real Looters of the Bronx.”

But the dedicated activists at the June 12 demonstration were here to tell a much different story — a story about what they say is the real looting going on in the Bronx, and in so many other places across America that Black and brown people call home.

In this current, historic period of mass unrest, which has seen protests against police violence in hundreds of American cities, activists like the ones in the Bronx are working hard to flip that tired media script.

‘None Of These Businesses Here Belong To Us’

Christopher Mathias/HuffPost

A demonstrator in the Bronx's Fordham neighborhood makes the case against the New York borough's true despoilers during "A People's Tour of the Real Looters of the Bronx" on June 12, 2020.

Caitlin Ochs/Reuters

New York City's police commissioner, Dermot Shea, dismissed the connection between the peaceful and violent aspects of the Bronx uprising in early June.