It looks at first like a demonstration, like Tahrir Square or Occupy Wall Street, but it is, in fact, a fight. The kids are shouting because they are fighting, and they are standing on cars, presumably, because they want to see the fight, or because they are sensing in the vacated street the opportunity to claim any space they want.
What’s the occasion for this? The occasion is that they just got out of school. This is the first time I’ve seen it, but people are saying it happens sometimes. After they get out of school these kids, many from the nearby projects, go down the side streets, side streets with $2 million houses, side streets with coffee shops that sell $4.50 iced lattes made from something called “Intelligentsia coffee,” sidestreets with blond 2-year-olds being walked home from their music enrichment classes. (A woman I know, arriving from Latin America to this neighborhood observed, “It’s so interesting here that so many black women adopt white babies.”)
read more | Katie Roiphe, Dutch Bike Liberals | Slate