New Alpha Unit. In this post, she clarifies some misconceptions in her earlier post, Race, Sex and Other Dirty Things. I understand her POV, but I wonder if there are cases where it is not true. But her POV does make a lot of sense. I hadn’t quite characterized it that way completely in my mind before.
Part of the problem is that not all racism is based on notions of race purity, so her characterization makes sense more in a modern Western spirit of racism than in that of other cultures and eras. The racial purity thing seems actually to have been a relatively late and often Western innovation. Earlier tribes, I suspect, did not care much about race purity. But tribal males have always cared about protecting access to their own females while willfully attempting to raid the females of other tribes. The points about slavery are well-taken.
Race is not nearly as significant as people would have you believe.
This seems obvious to many people who would say, “We all know that by now. The Human Genome Project told us that.”
Well, I’m saying that Race is an obfuscation. A fog. A smokescreen. A distraction.
Some of the things that one race of people does to another race of people are not rooted in Race. The most obvious example is slavery. Most people understand that slavery is something human beings have been doing to one another for millenia. Every race has practiced it. Every race has been victimized by it. So slavery isn’t coming from Race. It is coming from something else.
There is nothing about being Black that inclines people toward enslaving others. There is nothing about being White that inclines people toward enslaving others. Enslaving others is a human predilection. People love exercising power and control over other people.
Something that upsets many people is what Robert wrote about in his post The Fake White Slavemaster Black Slave Rape Epidemic. The subject is the sexual abuse of female slaves in the South, and also sexual relationships between White men and Black women in the postbellum South. This is a touchy subject for Black women in particular.
But as I pointed out, males have engaged in this sort of behavior throughout history. It crosses racial and ethnic lines. Race complicates the picture a great deal, but this kind of behavior isn’t coming from Race. It’s coming from male sexuality. And human nature. This doesn’t make it any less upsetting. But those guys didn’t act that way because they were White. They acted that way because they were guys.
People wonder what I mean when I say that racism at its core is about sex. Racism isn’t all about sex, but I think sex is its nucleus. I’m not the first person who’s made that suggestion, by the way. The reason sex lies at the heart of racism is that sex is the way a race propagates itself. If racial purity is your objective, then you have to exercise some degree of control over who people in your race are having sex with.
Whites in the United States have written along these lines for a very long time. Not all of them have been virulent racists. One Southern White author from long ago candidly stated that it didn’t matter, even, if there were White men who had a preference, sexually, for Black women. What mattered was the preservation of the White race itself, which was reason enough to avoid such relationships.
Anyone who disputes that male sexual anxiety lies at the heart of racism simply is unfamiliar with what racists themselves have said on the subject. I say that it is primarily male anxiety because other males are the competition when it comes to having and controlling access to women.
So this is what I’m talking about when I say that racism is mainly about sex. And this is what I mean when I say that race can obscure what’s really going on in some situations.
We love fixating on race. It’s very convenient. As long as we’re focusing on race, we don’t have to focus on what’s really in front of us: sex. To me, sex is the Prime Mover in human relations. It’s what everybody really cares about and worries about, on the deepest levels. Racism at its core is all about sex. An honest racist will admit this. Some White men involved in relationships with Black women report that a common, although juvenile, question other White men ask them about their women is “Is it pink on the inside?” One way or another, the real fascination is on sex and sex organs and what it’s like to have sex with someone of another race. Race just can’t keep up with sex when it comes to the way people behave and interact with one another. You might say that the history of Black-White relations in America is really the story of sexual competition between two groups of men. It is well known that when a subjugated people live among those who subjugate them, the women of the subjugated group are at the disposal of those in power. In effect, the men in power own all the women. They have sexual access to the women in the subjugated group but do not allow access to the women in their own group. I submit that this has nothing to do with race. This is purely sexual. This is male behavior. Of course, this is no good whatsoever for relations between men and women in the oppressed group. This can only make a bad situation worse for them. What has happened is that one group of men has defeated the other and is asserting dominance over the men they have defeated. And women are the pawns in this game. So now the men and the women of the oppressed group have a Trust issue. And a Respect issue. Again, this is sexual in nature. This has nothing to do with race. There is nothing extraordinary about what these people did. And nothing extraordinary about how the other people reacted. For some people, it is vitally important to block from their view how ordinary Those Other People really are. And that’s just it: there is nothing extraordinary about them. Your decision that race matters more than anything else says nothing about reality; it says something about you. Who knows what could happen once you start seeing those people the way you see yourself – as rather ordinary? You might have sex with them or something. And you might like it. And then we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.
We love fixating on race. It’s very convenient. As long as we’re focusing on race, we don’t have to focus on what’s really in front of us: sex.
To me, sex is the Prime Mover in human relations. It’s what everybody really cares about and worries about, on the deepest levels. Racism at its core is all about sex. An honest racist will admit this.
Some White men involved in relationships with Black women report that a common, although juvenile, question other White men ask them about their women is “Is it pink on the inside?” One way or another, the real fascination is on sex and sex organs and what it’s like to have sex with someone of another race.
Race just can’t keep up with sex when it comes to the way people behave and interact with one another. You might say that the history of Black-White relations in America is really the story of sexual competition between two groups of men.
It is well known that when a subjugated people live among those who subjugate them, the women of the subjugated group are at the disposal of those in power. In effect, the men in power own all the women. They have sexual access to the women in the subjugated group but do not allow access to the women in their own group.
I submit that this has nothing to do with race. This is purely sexual. This is male behavior.
Of course, this is no good whatsoever for relations between men and women in the oppressed group. This can only make a bad situation worse for them. What has happened is that one group of men has defeated the other and is asserting dominance over the men they have defeated. And women are the pawns in this game. So now the men and the women of the oppressed group have a Trust issue. And a Respect issue.
Again, this is sexual in nature. This has nothing to do with race.
There is nothing extraordinary about what these people did. And nothing extraordinary about how the other people reacted.
For some people, it is vitally important to block from their view how ordinary Those Other People really are. And that’s just it: there is nothing extraordinary about them. Your decision that race matters more than anything else says nothing about reality; it says something about you.
Who knows what could happen once you start seeing those people the way you see yourself – as rather ordinary?
You might have sex with them or something. And you might like it. And then we’re all going to hell in a hand basket.
New post by Alpha Unit. This one is really great! She and I really see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and this is one of them. To me, it’s the idea that men are men and women are women and you just have to deal with that. Radical feminists have decided that men acting men means men being evil, while women acting like women means being the penultimate in righteousness. A lot of the rest of the time, radical feminists seem to be waging a war against biology and indeed reality. I’m all for single Moms. No problems there. But it ought to be clear by now that boys growing up without fathers is not such a good thing. True, outcomes are different in different communities. A lot of the young Hispanic gang members and delinquents that I know were raised by single Moms. In one family I am thinking of, the boys just went insane after the father died of cirrhosis. The mother tried, but she just couldn’t control them at all. In the White community, it’s different, and you end up with these wimpy, passive-aggressive, super-immature Momma’s boy cum psychos. What’s interesting is the resentment you see in a lot of fatherless boys, especially the ones who were abandoned by their fathers. They really hate their Dads for leaving them like that.Hating your father is not the end of the world. 3
Go to a prison and ask those guys about their fathers. The ones who had active fathers all hate them and will tell you they want to kill them. The rest had no active fathers. But most of these guys love their Moms, and I bet their Moms still love them. Having a good relationship with Mom is a good thing for a man; it doesn’t necessarily make you a Momma’s boy. Try calling those prisoners with Mom tattoos Momma’s boys. As soon as they get released, a lot of those grown, hardass men end up on Mom’s doorstep, if only temporarily.On the other hand, it seems like if you have a good relationship with your Dad, it’s hard to be a criminal. How many male criminals get along great with Dad?Hating your Mom does not seem to be good for a man. It’s possible for men who hate their mothers to be normal, but many are not. A lot of them turn into misogynists. They simply project their feelings about Mom onto all the women in their life, or recreate their relationships with Mom with all the new women they meet. Just about every mass murderer or serial killer of women hates his Mom.Hating your Mom is a lot worse than loving your Mom too much, a “problem” much blown out of proportion by society, especially women. Women and girls always resent the mothers of the guys in their lives. This is a fact of nature. The two females are competing for the attention of a male, and females don’t compete all that well. So the females in men’s lives are always accusing their guys of being Momma’s boys if these guys have any affection at all towards their Moms. Fuck that. There are Momma’s boys, but I don’t think there are as many as you think. Society cures you of that affliction pretty quickly. The worse thing that happens to a Momma’s boy is he turns into a wimp, and about 5
Wimpy guys is a woman issue. Women hate them. But I could care less about wimps. If you’re a wimp, that’s your problem. Why should I care? Women are going to be kicking your ass forever anyway, so why should I join the cackling Domintrices in the Misandry Fest? Forget it. I believe in Solidarity with my Brothers. Even the wimps.On to Alpha Unit! If you want to know the end result of Equality Between the Sexes, look no farther than the Black Community. For in the Black Community you can observe what happens when women are seen as equal to men, just as capable of heading families as men, just as capable of raising boys as men. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct when he stated in his controversial report of over forty years ago that such a community asks for and gets chaos. And the reason for that is an indisputable although politically inconvenient fact: fathers are indispensable for the well-being of children. But my focus in not on fatherhood and parenting as much as it is on the idea that women are essentially the same as men. Well, the experience of Black women shows that a woman is great at being a woman but she is a piss-poor substitute for a man. The concept that a woman should have as much autonomy as a man is one we’ve taken for granted for quite some time now in the West. Like most people, I enjoy having as much freedom as I can in the world, and I don’t think I would ever be happy in a place where women are controlled in nearly all their behavior both public and private. But that concept degenerated some time ago into the idea that there are no important differences between men and women; and while some feminists will acknowledge that there are, in fact, important differences, the damage has already been done. Many people think that a woman should and must be able to hold her own in the world alongside men. As I said at the beginning of this post, if you want to know how that experiment turns out, the Black Community in America will give you a good idea. All the historical reasons and explanations for this are a well-traveled road. Everyone can tell you that slavery and segregation demanded that Black women be as “strong” and capable as men. Often it was a matter of survival, not choice. To this day, Black women are accused of being “unfeminine” – as if America ever gave them the luxury of being “feminine” to begin with! So you say to a group of women, “You’re not some dainty, feminine flower in need of sheltering – you are as capable as any man. Now get out there and pull your weight the same as any man.” You say this to them in an environment in which some women are indeed seen and treated as feminine, and in an environment in which no group of men is prepared to tell them anything different. Wouldn’t they end up assuming the traditional roles of men? The only problem is that they are no good at it. Black women are no good at assuming the roles of men. It’s because they’re not men. They aren’t like men. They are no more like men than any other group of women are like men. They were never up to the task of what was expected of them, and they still aren’t. They are weak and incompetent in assuming the roles of men – just as anybody else’s women would be. Black people will recite the familiar refrain that Black men couldn’t assume the traditional protective role toward Black women, because Black women (and men) were the property of White men. And after slavery, Black men, most of whom were in the South, were not allowed to assume the traditional role – because Black men (and women) were under the control of White men. All the excuses have been set in stone by now. But it’s very clear what happens when women are left to their own devices in a society that says they can do anything a man can do. What everyone gets is exactly what Moynihan said they would get.
This one is really great! She and I really see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and this is one of them. To me, it’s the idea that men are men and women are women and you just have to deal with that. Radical feminists have decided that men acting men means men being evil, while women acting like women means being the penultimate in righteousness. A lot of the rest of the time, radical feminists seem to be waging a war against biology and indeed reality.
I’m all for single Moms. No problems there. But it ought to be clear by now that boys growing up without fathers is not such a good thing.
True, outcomes are different in different communities. A lot of the young Hispanic gang members and delinquents that I know were raised by single Moms. In one family I am thinking of, the boys just went insane after the father died of cirrhosis. The mother tried, but she just couldn’t control them at all. In the White community, it’s different, and you end up with these wimpy, passive-aggressive, super-immature Momma’s boy cum psychos.
What’s interesting is the resentment you see in a lot of fatherless boys, especially the ones who were abandoned by their fathers. They really hate their Dads for leaving them like that.
Hating your father is not the end of the world. 3
Go to a prison and ask those guys about their fathers. The ones who had active fathers all hate them and will tell you they want to kill them. The rest had no active fathers.
But most of these guys love their Moms, and I bet their Moms still love them. Having a good relationship with Mom is a good thing for a man; it doesn’t necessarily make you a Momma’s boy. Try calling those prisoners with Mom tattoos Momma’s boys. As soon as they get released, a lot of those grown, hardass men end up on Mom’s doorstep, if only temporarily.
On the other hand, it seems like if you have a good relationship with your Dad, it’s hard to be a criminal. How many male criminals get along great with Dad?
Hating your Mom does not seem to be good for a man. It’s possible for men who hate their mothers to be normal, but many are not. A lot of them turn into misogynists. They simply project their feelings about Mom onto all the women in their life, or recreate their relationships with Mom with all the new women they meet. Just about every mass murderer or serial killer of women hates his Mom.
Hating your Mom is a lot worse than loving your Mom too much, a “problem” much blown out of proportion by society, especially women. Women and girls always resent the mothers of the guys in their lives. This is a fact of nature. The two females are competing for the attention of a male, and females don’t compete all that well. So the females in men’s lives are always accusing their guys of being Momma’s boys if these guys have any affection at all towards their Moms.
Fuck that. There are Momma’s boys, but I don’t think there are as many as you think. Society cures you of that affliction pretty quickly.
The worse thing that happens to a Momma’s boy is he turns into a wimp, and about 5
Wimpy guys is a woman issue. Women hate them. But I could care less about wimps. If you’re a wimp, that’s your problem. Why should I care? Women are going to be kicking your ass forever anyway, so why should I join the cackling Domintrices in the Misandry Fest? Forget it. I believe in Solidarity with my Brothers. Even the wimps.
On to Alpha Unit!
If you want to know the end result of Equality Between the Sexes, look no farther than the Black Community.
For in the Black Community you can observe what happens when women are seen as equal to men, just as capable of heading families as men, just as capable of raising boys as men.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct when he stated in his controversial report of over forty years ago that such a community asks for and gets chaos. And the reason for that is an indisputable although politically inconvenient fact: fathers are indispensable for the well-being of children.
But my focus in not on fatherhood and parenting as much as it is on the idea that women are essentially the same as men. Well, the experience of Black women shows that a woman is great at being a woman but she is a piss-poor substitute for a man.
The concept that a woman should have as much autonomy as a man is one we’ve taken for granted for quite some time now in the West. Like most people, I enjoy having as much freedom as I can in the world, and I don’t think I would ever be happy in a place where women are controlled in nearly all their behavior both public and private.
But that concept degenerated some time ago into the idea that there are no important differences between men and women; and while some feminists will acknowledge that there are, in fact, important differences, the damage has already been done. Many people think that a woman should and must be able to hold her own in the world alongside men.
As I said at the beginning of this post, if you want to know how that experiment turns out, the Black Community in America will give you a good idea.
All the historical reasons and explanations for this are a well-traveled road. Everyone can tell you that slavery and segregation demanded that Black women be as “strong” and capable as men.
Often it was a matter of survival, not choice. To this day, Black women are accused of being “unfeminine” – as if America ever gave them the luxury of being “feminine” to begin with!
So you say to a group of women, “You’re not some dainty, feminine flower in need of sheltering – you are as capable as any man. Now get out there and pull your weight the same as any man.” You say this to them in an environment in which some women are indeed seen and treated as feminine, and in an environment in which no group of men is prepared to tell them anything different.
Wouldn’t they end up assuming the traditional roles of men? The only problem is that they are no good at it. Black women are no good at assuming the roles of men. It’s because they’re not men. They aren’t like men. They are no more like men than any other group of women are like men. They were never up to the task of what was expected of them, and they still aren’t.
They are weak and incompetent in assuming the roles of men – just as anybody else’s women would be.
Black people will recite the familiar refrain that Black men couldn’t assume the traditional protective role toward Black women, because Black women (and men) were the property of White men. And after slavery, Black men, most of whom were in the South, were not allowed to assume the traditional role – because Black men (and women) were under the control of White men.
All the excuses have been set in stone by now.
But it’s very clear what happens when women are left to their own devices in a society that says they can do anything a man can do.
What everyone gets is exactly what Moynihan said they would get.
New Alpha Unit. My Mom works on the board of the Madera County Mental Health Committee. She has her reasons for doing this, which I don’t need to go into. There’s a Black woman on there, older, and pretty funny like a lot of older Black women are. One day she said something like, “I’m Black, or colored, or Negro, or African-American, or whatever the Hell they are calling us nowadays.” I was reminded of that when I read this post. On my birth certificate, issued way back in the early sixties, my mother is declared to be Colored. So am I. I remember hearing my grandmother talking about this or that “colored man” or “colored woman.” I have a distant memory of hearing my mom refer to a “colored” nurse. My earliest school records refer to me as a “colored” child. So I grew up thinking of myself as colored. I have a vivid memory of realizing that I was Black. I was just a little kid, but I can clearly recall James Brown declaring triumphantly through the radio, “Say it loud–I’m Black and I’m proud!” It was roughly the same time that I was hearing “Black is beautiful” all around me. It was a great time to be a little Black kid in America. I was Black all through high school. Everyone was conscious of the need to affirm Blackness, even the White people who ran the school district. So in my high school, it wasn’t enough to have a homecoming queen. We had two homecoming queens–a Black one and a White one. There wasn’t just one girl voted Most Beautiful; we had to vote for a Black one and a White one. Wherever possible, we had to have racial equilibrium. Some time after I entered college I became, for official purposes, African-American. I still don’t know how that happened, actually. I kind of remember the first time I ever heard the term “African-American,” although I have no memory of how or where I encountered it. I remember pondering it for a little while, the way you would examine something interesting you had never seen before. The only other thing I can remember about it is wondering whose idea it was, and guessing, in my youthful and careless way, that maybe it was Jesse Jackson’s idea or something. All I can say is that I hope we’re done thinking of things to call ourselves. I don’t care a whole lot for “African-American,” really. It’s kind of meaningless, since Africa is an entire continent of disparate peoples. I have a feeling that some time in the future someone will decide we should be called something even more interesting and specific. I have a nostalgia for “Black.” I became Black at a very special time in my life. It was Beautiful, something to be Proud of. That’ll do nicely.
New post by Alpha Unit. Good stuff! Once upon a time there was a village where most was well, most of the time. The village was populated by a decent sort of people who understood that of all the villages in the vicinity, their village had the most decency of all. Everything good that could be said about a group of people you could certainly say about them. They were disciplined, hardworking, peaceable, truthful, compassionate people with high parental investment in their children. And so life was good in the village. But then…the Great Disappointment occurred. The Village Elder, who had started out with such promise, turned out not to be such a great elder, having gone on adventures both foreign and domestic to protect the people but who nevertheless left them unhappy and ready for Something Different. A Contender arose to be Elder, someone who had been in the village all along but no one had paid that much attention to. He was the product of a liaison between a woman in the village and a man from That Village Over There, but no one cared that much because he was as peaceable as anyone else and fit in quite well with them. Now he wanted to be Village Elder. And he actually became Village Elder. But not everyone was happy about this. They grumbled about it amongst themselves and began to remind one another of how not just Different the new Elder was but how Awfully Different he was. At first glance he sort of seemed like he was one of them but the more one looked at him, the more Different he seemed. And so these villagers began pointing out to all the rest of them just how Different he was. And that anybody that Different was fundamentally unfit to be telling the people in this village what was good for them. One day, upon pondering these matters, an erstwhile Village Elder named Carter said to the other villagers, “You know, the things we don’t like about the Village Elder are remarkably similar to the things we don’t like about the people in That Village Over There. Anybody else notice that?” Some of the people listening to him gasped. And scowled. A few of them gathered to one side, sullen but furious. Finally, one man spoke up. “Get a rope,” he said.
A commenter argues that American Blacks (Negroes*) were bred with brawn and not brains and this explains a lot of their problems:
The US only imports the top tier of, for instance, Indian and Chinese immigrants. So from an American perspective, Indians and Chinese seem very clever, even though in their home countries there is a broad variety of ability. It’s the same with Africans. Just look at Obama’s father. But Africans descended from slaves had a different selection criteria – physical ability. Not only were they selected for this, but they were bred for this. The Atlantic passage weeded out the weak ones, the institution of slavery encouraged physicality over intellect. The results, in both culture and gene expression, are plain to see. Robert Lindsay often claims that the mere presence of blacks degrades a society. However, would it not be better to import University-level Africans to raise the standard of American blacks? Any white would be happy to live in a suburb of Obamas.
This doesn’t make the tiniest bit of sense. Negroes have IQ’s vastly higher than the Blacks of the Caribbean or Africa, so your thesis doesn’t add up at all. Plus, I think they are a lot more civilized to boot. I don’t think that Negroes are capable of the mass insanity of The Lord’s Army in Uganda, Charles Taylor’s rebels, the horrors of Zaire where 4 million have died and mass rapes often with extreme violence, are committed against women, where cannibalism is still common especially in the context of war where one’s enemies are eaten after being killed, where humans are murdered for being witches, where people are murdered to get body parts for witchcraft ceremonies! Good God! Whether they are less criminal in general is up for grabs, but South African Blacks seem to be much more criminal than Negroes, just looking at figures. Further, many African cities are virtual no-go zones for Whites. A friend used to work for the UN in Nairobi. They had high fences topped with razor wire and armed guards to keep the rabble at bay, plus strict rules about going outside. I also think that Negroes are less corrupt than Africans. Africans do not seem to be capable of creating a non-corrupt society. Even in Equatorial Guinea, which is wealthy at $21,000 PCI, most of the people are horribly poor, malnourished, and the maternal mortality rate is insanely high. Nigeria is a a very oil-rich nation. Any other country, especially an Arab country, should have made something decent of the place. Yet a tiny elite has stolen every other nickel and left the average Joe with pennies. The maternal mortality rate is ridiculous, the poverty and crime is horrible, and the place is basically a failed state. The corruption experiment can be done by looking at the Obama Administration. He’s a Negro President, and he has lots of Negro staffers. Further, reporters on his campaign noted a “basic Black mindset” about the Obama campaign that differed from your typical White POTUS campaign. So, in many ways, the Obama Administration really is a Black administration. If Negroes were naturally corrupt, it should show through. Yet the Administration seems to have markedly low levels of corruption. Along with corruption, we also find in Africa what seems to be a very low rate of altruistic behavior at the societal level. African states simply don’t do the slightest damned thing for their people. The leadership steals nearly everything, lives in gilded palaces with multiple wives and leaves the populace to sicken and die. On the other hand, the Obama Administration seems to be quite altruistic. Many of their projects seem intended to provide for the betterment of all, in particular the workers, the low-income, the poor and the most vulnerable. The assumption is that Negroes have culturally evolved a higher level of altruism than their African brethren, possibly from a being discriminated minority that relied on mutual aid and self-help to get by, and the resulting sympathy for the underdog and the oppressed – the preterit as it were. I have no doubt that Negroes used to act in these ways (see description of Africa above) when they were in Africa, and that they would still act like Africans if they were there. The 1
A good argument can be made that Negro is a product of US civilization, which has always been a White civilization. 300 years of this have changed Negroes, probably culturally in the main, and apparently also in terms of intelligence. Living in the US has been great for the Negro’s brain. He is remarkably more intelligent than his Caribbean and African cousins. An 87 IQ (average IQ of Negroes) is not particularly high, but it’s not that low either. It’s just a bit below the world average of 90. Further,many states with average IQ’s of 87 and even a bit lower have created quite nice and civilized countries. On an intelligence basis alone, Negroes are certainly intelligent enough to create a nice, civilized society. That they often do not is a bit of a mystery, but it’s not because they are stupid! Give a basically decent Negro man a good job, a suit and a tie and a nice car, and he often acts pretty darn good. You see him walking down the sidewalk and he’s just another regular guy. Negroes and Whites have co-evolved in the US whether we like it or not. Negroes are culturally part White, and surely we Whites are culturally part-Negro. We’re like an old married couple whether we like it or not. Old married couples sometimes fight a lot, but they’re stuck with each other and neither one is going anywhere, besides, they are sort of part of one another by now. Race relations in the US cannot be properly analyzed until we realize the extent to which Negroes are part Whitened and US Whites are part-Negrified. Like the old married couple, we are now part of each other. *I will use the often-racist term “Negro” here to distinguish US Blacks from African Blacks.
Black Crimes are Foundation of Whites’ Fears. This fascinating article by an apparently non-racist Yale English professor which ran recently in the New Haven Register generated an incredible number of comments. It included the usual crap from PC anti-racists. One Jewish guy demanded that the article be censored and removed, and then demanded a law forbidding all publication of “hate speech”, which presumably this article would fall foul of. Of course the usual crap from Black commenters was also on display. And sadly the piece did generate some racist comments, probably due to it being widely posted to White nationalist fora. However, many of the comments were very reasonable and spot on, in line with the article. They simply stated the obvious. Whites flee as areas become too Black not because they hate the way Blacks look, or they hate the color of their skin (This is the typical conceit of Blacks – you hate us because of the color of our skin!), or they just hate Blacks for no good reason at all, apparently just because they are different or because they are just not White folks. Sure, some Whites hate Blacks for these reasons, but most do not. How do I know this? I’ve lived around White people my whole life, and I know my people very well. I have heard Whites expressing negative comments, including racist ones, about Blacks more times than I can count. I’m convinced that if Blacks acted more like Whites or Asians and less like Blacks that not too many folks would have issues with their skin color or their facial structure or what not. A few would, but not most. The truth is that what Whites really hate about Blacks is crime. As the
We can go on and on about how Black criminals target mostly Blacks, but that’s not what matters. They target Whites too, and White towns and cities tend to be fairly low crime (I’ve lived in several, and that’s been the case every time). In addition, it really doesn’t matter what’s causing Black crime. If they’re just born that way, or if poverty does it, if Black culture does it, or if racism does it, none of this matters. This is why the usual liberal-Left screeching about how all Black crime is caused by poverty or crime is irrelevant. One brings up Black crime and the Leftie starts screaming that it’s all caused by poverty or racism or whatever, as if this is supposed to end the discussion and negate the reality of the subject. Suppose Black crime is all caused by mean Whites (racist theory) or poverty? What relevance does that have to Whites deciding on which town to move to, or watching nervously as their town slowly darkens? None whatsoever. The damned crime rate is going to go up come Hell or high water no matter what’s causing it, and that’s all that’s important to the Whites living there. All that matters to White crime victims is that they got victimized. Let’s ask the victims. So racism made the mugger do it. So what? They still got mugged, dammit, the victims think. Assuming racism really did do it, then they should stay in this town to get mugged again then? As the White person is getting mugged, they are supposed to think, “Wow, this guy is mugging me due to racism. That means I’m going to stay here and maybe get mugged again. But if he doing it because he’s an evil criminal instead, I would fly out of here tomorrow!” This is why the liberal/Left derailing of all of these conversations into irrelevancies like, “Whites are twice as likely to molest kids,” “Whites commit the majority of crime in the US,” and other Tim White-isms is ridiculous. Have you ever heard of a White person, or any person for that matter, say, “No way am I moving to that White town! Whites commit most of the crime in the US!” Or, “No way! I will never live in a White area! Whites molest children!” Just to show you the power that PC still holds over us, the 100’s of comments that this article quickly generated have now all been deleted, and are not even available on cache. That’s typical, but do you think this PC censorship is going to be able to go on forever? How long before people have had enough of it? That’s right, Lefties. Censor all talk of Black crime. That’ll make it go away. Not.
The quote at the end of the post is from a middle class Black commenter who took tremendous offense at this rather moderate post, accusing it of sounding like the neo-Nazis on Stormfront. He also took issue with my description of this site as anti-racist (In my opinion, it is, and that is one of the foundational themes of this site), and said instead it was a racist site. He has now been banned because you don’t get to call this a racist site, and if you come here and spout PC anti-racism at me, I will soon tire of you and ban you. So this fellow was banned. He objected to many things in the post. One objection is that a Black state in the US would not be a miserable failure. I’m quite sure it would be a disaster, and that is why you hardly see any Blacks crazy enough to advocate for this. In particular, he objected to my saying that all of the Blacks in the US could take off tomorrow, while it would be painful in some respects in that we would lose a lot of quality workers and citizens, I’m confident that on balance, Whites would be better off. Obviously, professional sports would be hit very hard, but White men have been shooting hoops, throwing footballs and catching fly balls for a long time now, and I’m sure they could go back to it. Baseball’s practically a Caribbean Latino sport now anyway. We no longer need Blacks for cheap labor, as we’ve imported millions of illegals to do that. The crime rate would obviously plummet, many of our ruined cities would become quite a bit more livable again, music and other entertainment would become less obviously sociopathic, many of our social pathologies would ameliorate, and perhaps most significantly, we would be free of a lot of racial friction generated by a perpetually grievanced group (Blacks) that many Whites are getting increasingly tired of. Granted, since the 1960’s, Blacks have resembled a bunch of angry people locked out of a really cool party hanging out on the sidewalk and yelling that they want in. Inside, we Whites are partying it up. Whenever you see a scene like that, you know how painful and ugly it is. Well, Obama got elected, and to me that meant that Blacks finally got invited into the party after all this time. Instead of being grateful or happy, they seem just as pissed off as ever. They’re inside the party now, and everyone is having fun, but they still act like they are out on the sidewalk. Many Whites, including me, are exasperated. There is a sense of, “What more do we need to do, anyway, before you all settle down, relax and try to be happy?” What I am saying is that the culture of grievance gets old. US Blacks are the richest, the best educated, the most politically powerful, the most intelligent and the most cultured Blacks on Earth. Despite the ghettos and all, they live quite well here compared to just about any Black or heavily-Black country. Sure, you can find some other White countries that are maybe better for Blacks, but once again, you come back around to the original argument that White cities, regions and states are great places for Blacks to live in. Blacks agree. They vote with their feet. Once a city gets too Black, the most functional Blacks start taking off too, usually to a Whiter area. I’m not a White nationalist or a Back to Africa idiot or any of that. I just note that Whites do not particularly need Blacks in the US, while the converse does not seem to be true. Blacks need Whites. If all the Whites left tomorrow, this country would rapidly turn into the usual Black and mestizo Latin American type country. It would not be a better place for Blacks. So I’m not making any argument for ethnic cleansing or saying Blacks don’t have a right to be here. But this is why quite a few Whites are enthusiastic about a White ethnostate in the US, while almost no Blacks are keen on the idea of a Black ethnostate. Whites look at the White ethnostate with no Blacks and ask, “OK, why is this a problem?” Blacks look at a Black state with no Whites and probably think, “Uh-oh. Detroit. Black Belt. Count me out.” Blacks benefit in the present integrated system to some extent in that Blacks in the US are fairly spread out and diluted and further that many of the victims of Black criminals are non-Blacks. In a Black ethnostate, all of the Black criminals would be concentrated together, and there would be no non-Black victims to dilute the victimhood. Blacks would be seriously hammered by Black criminals in a Black ethnostate as Black criminals turned all of their antisocial fury on the only victims available, other Blacks. Anyway, all the above is surely insulting for a lot of Blacks to think about, so they are going to be pretty defensive about it. On immigration, this guy spouted the standard PC line, which is quite common nowadays. You hear it across the board by the entire US elite. Immigrant advocates are also parroting this nonsense. It’s interesting that the modern version of Political Correctness is really Marxism stripped of class analysis and focusing solely on race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other nonsense. Many of the folks pushing this Leftist line on race are in fact marrying it to explicitly free market economics and reject anything smacking of a Left view of economics, at least according to a friend of mine who is currently taking a syllabus called “Multiculturalism” – mandatory at California state universities now! He calls it “Anti-White Studies.” Considering the Cultural Leftism these folks were pushing, I assumed that they were liberals or even Leftists. But this Cultural Marxism, according to my friend, is married to an embrace of “the free market” and a rejection of most to all government intervention and regulation of economies. This really is the same pro-corporate globalism that is being pushed by the corporations. Our modern corporations feature, along with diversity advisers, multicultural seminars and crazy hate speech and anti-harassment codes, the standard conservative pro-corporate economics. So Political Correctness often nowadays is a bizarre mix of the worst – Right neoliberal madness of the kind that is blowing up our economy mixed with brain-dead stupid and White-toxic Leftist Cultural Marxism. There’s nothing in this for any principled progressive White person. Economically, it’s just conservative gunpowder and matches. The only Left part of it is objectively hostile to Whites and frankly working class folks of all races, as it demands that White nations be flooded with the entirety of the Third World in the name of redress for supposed White crimes and evils. So working Whites get the double-whammy. First we get hit by the Rightist Hurricane Neoliberal side of this template. Next we get hit by Leftist toxic anti-White hate propaganda combined with a tsunami of Third World non-White immigrants driving wages into the gutter and turning once-livable cities into Third World hellholes. There’s nothing here for us. Check out this standard PC line on why mass Third World immigration is necessary for all White countries:
Some Whites will always talk about how we don’t “need” these non-Whites and such and such, but the fact is, if they weren’t needed, they wouldn’t be there in the first place. First off, White countries don’t even reproduce at replacement level, thereby making it imperative to have to bring in non-White immigrants just to keep their rapidly-aging societies from having a labor shortage and to be able to support the social security benefits of Whites retired and soon to be retired. The situation is even more accelerated in Europe with it’s even lower white birthrate than in America. So go ahead and cut off the spigot of non-White immigration, and the White countries will eventually vanish off the face the planet based on their low birthrates alone. You ought to be thankful there are non-White workers coming in to make up the slack for your low-fertility rates. I guess next someone will be blaming Blacks for white low fertility rate since you know, Blacks are responsible for everything bad in the universe.
Does anyone reading this blog actually believe this tripe? Yet this is what passes for standard and unquestioned wisdom by the PC Mafia and entire right to left political spectrum of US elites.
New post by guest poster Alpha Unit. Great stuff! In 1919 a group of Black and White business and academic leaders created a very special Commission on Interracial Cooperation, designed in response to what was happening in the South after the First World War. Black war veterans returning to the South were being told to resume their “place.” The tension created by this demand was leading to violence, and the Commission was formed to quell this violence. There is no evidence of widespread White hostility to this Commission. Perhaps it’s because there were well-respected Southern White men at the helm. “You see?” someone might be tempted to say. “There was a proper way to approach these problems in the South. Things that go through the proper channels have a greater chance of success.” This seems agreeable enough. Lowering the number of lynchings that Whites carried out seemed like a decent goal. How threatening could this really be? What was far more threatening to Southern Whites was the radical notion that a Black man should be treated as the equal of a White man. That a Black man was entitled to the same Constitutional rights as any White man. This was no mere appeal to decency; this meant changing the law. Anyone pushing this idea was a bona fide enemy. That meant Jews. Jewish-led organizations, represented by Jewish attorneys and activists, got right in the face of White Southerners and said, in effect, “What you’re doing is wrong. And we’re going to do everything in our power to stop you.” Such loving kindness and selflessness for their fellow human beings, right? I’m familiar with the accusations made against Jewish civil rights activists. The gist of these accusations is that Jews only involved themselves in Black civil rights for Jewish benefit. That it was self-interest that motivated them, not any genuine concern for the plight of Blacks. Well, so be it. Jewish self-interest it is. During the height of the Jim Crow era in the South, it was Jewish self-interest that brought about Powell v. Alabama, a Supreme Court decision establishing that it wasn’t enough in this country that a defendant be represented by counsel; he had to be represented by competent counsel. It was Jewish self-interest that brought about Norris v. Alabama, which decreed that a state could not exclude a person from a jury solely because of his race. Jewish self-interest resulted in Herndon v. Lowry, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot suppress so-called “revolutionary” speech in and of itself; it had to prove a direct connection between such speech and an actual attempt to overthrow the government. I could go on and on citing cases involving Jewish self-interest. I know that Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement incenses some people. But the same people who cannot stomach Jewish involvement in civil rights aren’t able to muster the slightest disquiet about some of the abuses these Jews were addressing. They don’t seem to express much concern over the fact that there were Americans in the South who were being denied their rights. These weren’t foreigners or illegal immigrants. They were natural born citizens, and one Southern state after another had decided that these people didn’t really need the protections the Constitution had guaranteed them. It was White self-interest at its best. Why doesn’t that bother these people?
Here is a copy of the arrest report for Henry Louis Gates, one of the nation’s pre-eminent Black scholars, who was arrested at his home for, as far as I can tell, Criminal Stupidity and Mouthing Off To a Cop. It looks like he got what he deserved. I won’t go into the details of the case; it’s all over the news and you can read it here. Appears Gates lost the keys to his house and ended up trying to break into his own house. Someone spotted him and called the cops. Cops came and he refused to cooperate, started screaming and yelling like a dumbfuck, and logically got his silly ass arrested. All was not lost, as now he’s probably going to write a book about it and make a bundle. Whenever some big hotshot Jew gets arrested and actually goes to prison for some financial crime, he usually spends the whole time in his cell reading about anti-Semitism. Why? He’s a Jew, he’s in prison, so obviously the only reason that could ever happen is anti-Semitism, right? Blacks are getting just as bad as Jews. That victim-crack has a killer high, but it hooks you real quick, and good luck getting the Jones off your back. Gates is now going to use his arrest to look deeper into race in America. He’s an idiot, but he’s really just a victim-addict, and all addicts are sort of pitiful when they are Jonesing. Instead of researching race in America, he ought to study up on why he’s acting like such a dumbass. Before he thinks twice about pulling this crap again, Gates needs to read my previous post, Don’t Mess With Pigs.
The recent imbroglio over the private swim club renting out space to a summer day camp for Black kids and then revoking the membership when 65 Black kids actually showed up to swim has been in the papers a lot lately. What you don’t hear is that the suburb, Lower Moreland, is significantly Jewish (the Jewish population is
For links to the significant Jewish community extant at the club in question (the Valley Club), see here from Web Archive – The Silverman Community Day, April 30th, Bryn Athyn Hockey Rink. So basically the Jews threw the Black kids out of the pool. The President of club, ethnicity unknown, could be a stand-in for a typical liberal Jew. He voted for Obama, feted Martin Luther King recently, and made a show of renting out space to inner city summer camps. Then when the Black kids actually show up, it’s NIMBY time. As usual with Jews, it’s do as I say, not as I do. Jews are the most wonderful friends the Blacks ever had, until a Black family moves in next door. Hypocrisy, thy name is Jew. I haven’t yet figured out all the mental meanderings, defensive structures, complexes and whatnot are lurking behind the Jewish Hypocrisy Structure, but Jewish Hypocrisy is probably a major driver of anti-Semitism. I generally like Jews pretty much, but their hypocrisy really sends me up the wall, or maybe even through the wall, sometimes. If it does that to a Judeophile, think of what it does to your average semi-Judeophobe fence-sitter. The Jews are always promoting the ideas of non-Whites having sex with Whites*, mass immigration to White countries**, Blacks are just fine, go ahead and move into their wonderful neighborhoods***. What we ought to say to the Jews is, “You first!” How many Jews think it’s cool that their precious JAP is dating some thuggish Black guy with gold chains, rims and a grill? How many Jews think it’s cool that we just go ahead and flood their shitty little country with, say, 50,000 assimilation-hostile, crime-prone Gentiles a year? How many Jews are just itching to leave their lily-White upscale neighborhoods and move into a majority-Black town? You first, Jews. *I am not opposed to Whites dating, breeding with or marrying non-Whites. I’ve been dating non-White women since I was 16. Most of my friends have done this too, a brother has married an Asian woman and has a Hapa daughter and a cousin married a Black woman and has a mixed-race son. **I am not opposed to non-White legal immigration to the US, but I want to reduce all legal immigration to the US to possibly 350,000/yr., initiate a points system and eliminate chain and family reunification immigration. I want to end illegal immigration and revoke the anchor baby nonsense in the Constitution. ***I am an integrationist, but nevertheless, tragically, White flight is often justified.
Repost from the old site. Here is a great paper (very factual, academic and hardly biased at all – come on, Morris Dees, find that bias!) on Gypsy crime (or actually, Roma crime, since the proper term for Gypsies is now Roma) in Europe, mostly in Czechoslovakia. It’s obvious English is not the author’s native language, but the paper is still pretty much intelligible. I always wondered why the East Europeans hate these people so much, to the point of killing them, attacking them, etc. Now I understand. Completely. The Left line on East European Roma, as it is with all criminals nowadays, is appeasement and denial. Are Roma criminals? Well, the Left chortles, they say all Roma are criminals! Surely they are not all criminals? An example of this line are these Wikipedia articles, where Roma crime is barely mentioned, except to say that Roma are arrested at a much higher rate than non-Roma. The reason given is the usual specious nonsense – Roma are arrested more often due to discrimination! The same nonsense is said about Blacks in the US. Well, gosh, could it be because they commit so many more crimes? The Left argument is appealing, until you look at some facts. In the case of US Blacks, globally, there is no evidence at all that Blacks are more likely to be arrested for their crimes, or more likely to be prosecuted, or to receive heavier sentences. Recent studies that show Whites more likely than Blacks in the South to receive a capital sentence even question whether they are more likely to get the death penalty. Another reason given by Wikipedia for Roma crime is that society is mad at Roma for their extreme rate of welfare dependency. Due to the fact that society is hostile towards them, this automagically turns them into criminals! Amazing. Society often seems like it doesn’t like me too much, but the Hell if that is going to turn me into a criminal! The real problem with the Left is an allergy to facts. According to the report linked above, the majority of Roma in Czechoslovakia are either bums, welfare leeches, petty criminals, pimps, whores, thieves, drug dealers, con artists, loan sharks, or some combination, or, if they do not do these things, they defend them in other Roma, which is almost as bad. I realize that that’s not a scientific analysis, but that was what the paper stated. Those on the Left who object are asked to produce sociological studies showing that the majority of Roma are not either engaged in or supportive of these activities. I would still like to see some statistics on how many Roma are actually involved in crime (not how many just get caught), and how these rates compare with non-Roma. As it is, their crime rate seems astronomically high. Like Ashkenazi Jewish culture in Europe, which Kevin MacDonald points out also had a notion of cleanliness-uncleanness – Roma culture divides the world between the tainted and victimizable and the pure and familial. Roma are related to people from India. They probably came from Punjab about 950 years ago. East Indians have a low crime rate in general, so it is dubious that the Roma crime rate is genetic. Extremely dubious! Looking at the individual case histories in the paper, one image flashes over and over: the Black and now Latino underclass in America. It’s the same: broken families, incompetent parents, chronic unemployment, welfare dependency, thievery, illegitimacy, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, pervasive dishonesty, drug dealing, use and addiction, prostitution and pimping, long arrest records, delinquent peers modeling general thuggery, poor grades, aggressive acting out in and eventual dropout of school, on and on it goes. Mostly multi-generational. Both the young and the old appear sociopathic. People in India seem to have low rates of sociopathy along with a surprisingly low crime rate. Much of this is attributed to the Hindu religion. Therefore, comparing them with their genetic twins the Roma, one questions just how genetic sociopathy really is, especially since the best scholars in the field – Lykken – now divide sociopathy into psychopathy (mostly genetic) and sociopathy (largely environmental). It is the latter that Lykken 1, etc. are invited to prove that the (Indian) Roma of Eastern Europe are hereditarily tainted. I have a feeling this will be difficult to prove. What possible selection pressures (great paper, BTW) could have occurred in European Roma populations over 950 years to actually select for criminality, anti-social behavior, con artistry, and general cultural pathology, especially while the most criminal Roma were being slaughtered and imprisoned (thereby thwarting their breeding potential) for centuries? One can argue for a Roma IQ of 85 as a causative factor, which is a fact, yet Indians have the same IQ and commit comparatively little crime. There is a very serious Roma crime problem in the US. Common scams are fortune-telling and Irish Travellers. The race realists are going to have an even harder time explaining this group, who are nothing but White Irishmen who have adopted a “Gypsy” way of life over centuries, all the way down to incorporating Roma phrases in their cant language. Race realists are asked to prove how Irish Travellers are different genetically than other White people. The existence of a group like the Irish Travellers, ordinary White Irish who have adopted and mimicked Roma lifestyle and customs all the way down to fine details, is a perfect case of culturally transmitted criminal and social pathological behavior without a trace of genetic influence. I feel that immigration officials should be extremely judicious in which Roma they allow into the US, and no Irish Travellers should be allowed in period. Only a few carefully selected Roma immigrants should not be allowed to come to this country. I believe I had an experience with Roma recently. I was outside the Walmart when a family band approached me. The woman appeared Hispanic but spoke in a gang-inflected manner peculiar for a woman of 40 or so. She and her band of girls were selling cheap plastic flowers for a 13 year old girl named XXX who was tragically killed by a drive-by shooting in Fresno the week before. They got $1 out of me but then tried to bully me for a $5 or more. As they walked away, they started speaking a strange language. They told me it was Romanian. I then asked if they were Gypsies and the matriarch quickly said no. But Romanians are not as dark-skinned as these people. Now that I look back on it, there was no 13 yr old girl tragically shot dead in a driveby shooting. The dark skin, the clever con game, the wandering matriarchal clan, the large brood, the Romanian language, the gang speech in an older woman, it all adds up. They could only have been Gypsies. In the end, I am having a hard time explaining Roma crime and social pathology, though it is clearly cultural and probably not genetic. How did they end up this way, why, and what is the way forward? Is there a shining path to liberation for these people and those they victimize?
Notes
1. Lykken, D.T. (1995). The Antisocial Personalities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. (Excellent book by the way! Essential reading on sociopathy and psychopathy by one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars on both.)
Repost from the old site: Racists and White nationalists (in practice, identical) like to blame Detroit’s problems on the fact that it is full of Black folks. This is what happens when you have a Black majority city, in the US, Hell, anywhere, they say. I was wondering about it myself for a long time. How about another look at things? From a Detroit Free Press article, now a dead link, so I am going to violate copyright here, and the article is 10 years old anyway:
A Historian Dissects Detroit’s Trouble
Thomas Sugrue, native Detroiter, historian and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis, has spent 20 years in major cities in the United States and in London. He came to the Free Press in the summer of 1998 to talk about the conditions that created present-day Detroit, and the implications for journalists. These are excerpts from his talk. Anyone who has spent time in cities like Detroit in America’s former industrial heartland can’t help but be struck by the eerily apocalyptic landscapes that are so common as one passes through these places. I asked a simple, but very difficult question: “Why?” After digging around in the papers of unions and business, civil rights organizations, census data, city records and countless newspaper articles, I arrived at the conclusion that follows: Detroit’s woes began, not in the 1960s with the riot, not with the election of Coleman Young as mayor, not with the rise of international competition and the auto industry’s globalization, they began amid the steaming prosperity and consensus of the 1950s, and in an era about which we have very little to go on apart from hoary shibboleths and cliches.
A THREE-PART STORY
Three sweeping changes transformed the city. These three things, occurring simultaneously and interacting, dramatically reshaped the metropolis of Detroit and other metropolises like it. First was deindustrialization, the flight of jobs away from the city, something that began unnoticed and unheralded in the 1950s. Next was persistent racial discrimination in labor markets. Racial discrimination remained a very persistent problem despite decades of civil rights activism and some improvement in attitudes and beliefs. Finally was intense residential segregation, a division of the metropolitan area into two metropolitan areas: one black and one white. Any one of these forces would have been devastating, but the fact that all three of them occurred simultaneously and interacted with each other proved to have devastating consequences.
WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION
World War II was a great moment of opportunity for working-class Detroiters, black and white alike. The city was a magnet for workers coming from other parts of the country. African-Americans had been pretty much closed out of the industries that provided skilled jobs, but that pretty much ended during World War II. Only 3 percent of auto workers in Detroit were black in 1940. By 1945, 15 percent of the city’s auto workers were African American. Detroit, then, became a magnet for black migrants who heard about these great opportunities. But the reality for black workers, even in this window of opportunities, was a great deal more complicated and harsher and more frustrating than those statistics would lead us to believe.
DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
One of the supreme ironies of post-war Detroit is that, just as discrimination was under siege, just as blacks found a small window of opportunity in the city’s labor market, that job base began to fall away. First, beginning in the late ’40’s, and especially in the 1950s, began a process that has continued right up to the present. Jobs began to move out of places like Detroit to low-wage regions in other parts of the United States and the world. Companies in Detroit began picking up and moving their production to rural Indiana and Ohio, increasingly to the South and, by the 1970s and beyond, increasingly to the Third World — places where wages and other standards were lower than they were in Detroit. At the same time, industry in Detroit was changing from within. There was introduction of automation, of new, labor-saving technology within the factories. The consequence was a dramatic decline in the number of manufacturing jobs, solid, blue-collar jobs, the jobs that made Detroit the city that it was. Between 1947 and 1963, a period of unprecedented national economic prosperity, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs. This is not the ’70s. This is not when there is any competition from Germany and Japan and Korea for automobiles. These are jobs that were picking up and moving to other parts of the country, or these were jobs that were being replaced by machines. Workers who had come to Detroit during World War II, seeking opportunities, found their choices seriously constrained. The workers who suffered the worst were African Americans, and they suffered because of seniority. African Americans, because they didn’t get their foot into the door until the 1940s, were the first to be fired. So, when companies began moving out of Detroit, the burden was borne disproportionately by black Detroiters. So, in the midst of the 1950s, 15.9 percent of blacks were unemployed, but only 6 percent of whites were unemployed, so we’re talking about black unemployment two and a half times the rate of white unemployment.
RESIDENTIAL DISCRIMINATION
The third and, indeed, probably the most pernicious force was residential discrimination by race. The city was divided into districts by race, divided by invisible lines. These invisible lines were drawn in a whole bunch of different ways by different groups. The federal government subsidized housing development for whites through the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation. But federal policies prohibited making loans to risky properties, and risky properties, according to federal standards, meant homes in old or homes in racially or ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods. It meant that, if you were a black trying to build your own home or trying to get a loan to purchase a home, you had many obstacles to face, whereas if you were a white it was really quite easy. Real estate investors reinforced these invisible racial lines by steering black home buyers to certain neighborhoods and white home buyers to certain other neighborhoods, and stirring up racial anxiety when neighborhoods were along that invisible boundary. In one west-side neighborhood, in the late 1950s, there were more than 50 real estate agents working a several-block area trying to persuade panicked whites to sell now and sell fast because “they’re moving in.” Real estate agents even went so far as to pay African-American women to walk their children through all-white streets to encourage panic among white homeowners. Also reinforcing these invisible boundaries were the actions of ordinary people. There were more than 200 violent racial incidents that accompanied the first blacks who moved into formerly white neighborhoods in Detroit. If you were the first black to move into a formerly all-white block, you could expect, certainly, for your house to be pelted with rocks and stones. In one case, a tree stump went through a window. Regularly, vandals would break 20, 30 — every window in a house. Arson was another popular tactic. As newspaper reporters, if such an incident were happening today, you can be sure that you would be covering it, but until 1956, there was not a mention of any of these incidents in Detroit’s daily newspapers. They were off the radar of the major dailies. This process of housing discrimination set into motion a chain reaction. Blacks were poorer than whites and they had to pay more for housing. They had a harder time getting loans. Hence, they spent more of their income on the purchase of real estate. They were, by and large, confined to the oldest houses in the city, houses that needed lots of repair work. Many of their houses deteriorated as a consequence of them being older, not being able to get loans and folks not having all that much money in their pockets. City officials looked out onto the poor housing stock in poor neighborhoods and said, “we should tear this down.” Moreover, the fact that housing stock was old and in many cases deteriorating in black neighborhoods provided seemingly irrefutable evidence to whites that blacks were irresponsible. “We kept up our property, why aren’t they keeping up their property? Finally, this neighborhood deterioration seemed to lenders definitive proof that blacks were a poor credit risk and justified disinvestment.
CONCLUSION
To talk about Detroit’s problems beginning in 1967, or beginning with the election of Coleman Young, or beginning with the globalization of the 1970s is to miss the boat. The pattern of workplace discrimination, of the massive loss of jobs, of the residential balkanization of the city into black and white — this was already well established by 1967. It wasn’t Coleman Young that led to the harsh racial divisions between blacks and whites in metropolitan Detroit. It was there, and had been festering for a long time. It wasn’t the riot that led to disinvestment from the city of Detroit. Disinvestment had been going on very significantly for years. And it wasn’t globalization that led to the loss of jobs. That loss of jobs was going on when the auto industry was at its very peak.
IMPLICATIONS
We focus on changing the attitudes and motivations of individual workers, rather than challenging larger discriminatory practices. We have a policy mismatch, a gap between the reality that I have described and the policy recommendations to try to address those problems. The premise of welfare reform is to put welfare recipients to work. The problem is that the areas with the greatest job growth in the metropolitan area tend to be the farthest away from where the poorest folk live, in the outer suburbs largely inaccessible by public transportation. So there’s a gap between the reality of jobs and job loss and a policy solution. Another major one,is downtown revitalization and tourism: “Build casinos and they will come. You need to deal with the deeply rooted problems I’ve described: job flight, racial segregation, discrimination. We need to think about providing poor people with access to secure, well-paying jobs, wherever those jobs might be. We need to begin thinking more creatively than we have with the real problem of racial division in our city and in our nation. Conversations on race are not enough. We need to deal with the reality of economic and residential division.
From the Google link to Sugrue’s book, also apparently a dead link, but I copied the text anyway:
Once America’s “arsenal of democracy,” Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation. In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today’s urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II. In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.
See also The Fire Last Time, from the Washington Post last year, for more along the same lines.
In the comments section, Alpha Unit asks, “What is White culture?” I’m not sure what the answer is, but I will try to partially answer that question. I don’t know how to put this into precise words, but as a general rule, a city over 9
I have lived in these places all my life. The places I lived in had almost no crime. You could walk up and down the street at 3 AM. Indeed, I would would see attractive teenage girls walking on the street alone at 5 AM. Sure, they look at you when you drive by with a possibly worried look on their face, but they are out there walking. I used to see that quite a bit as a matter of fact. In a recent book by Robert S. Griffin, Living White: Writings on Race, 2000-2005, one man described the 9
Whenever a tree fell, an Irish guy would come and plant a new tree. Everyone had white picket fences they maintained in the same way just for appearance sake. There was almost no crime. No one was afraid to walk the streets at any time. Further, when people added onto their homes, they did so all in a manner that was consistent with a “style of the city” that the city had developed. There was active civic life. The schools were good and safe. There were no gangs. The drug problem was controllable, at least, people did not stand on the corners and sell dope. The cops were so bored that it was almost a problem; they harassed teenagers because the police had nothing else to do to fill their time. There was little trash or littering. If someone littered, people yelled at you or gave you dirty looks. Then the place started turning. It wasn’t that big of a deal until it hit the proverbial “tipping point,” which is often around 30-4
The city is still 5
Thefts are very common, and there have been some muggings and of course, the rapes. Perpetrators are young Black males. The cops are quite busy. The Irishman is gone, and when a tree falls, no one bothers to plant a new one. Civic life is shot. Everyone knows this story, but people don’t talk about it that much. There’s a reason why Whites, even White liberals, prefer to live in White communities. Even Blacks prefer to live in White communities. They’re a nicer place to live than Black communities, and any Black with a brain has figured that out. Problem is that a certain percentage of Blacks moves in (the tipping point varies), you don’t have that nice White town anymore. You have the beginnings of a Black town, which is frankly what those same Blacks were fleeing. At some point, the place is almost all Black, and it’s more or less a ghetto, at least in parts. Even the Blacks want to move on. I call this process “Black flight.” And so the process begins anew. The Hispanic tipping point is a lot higher than Blacks. Instead of the 15-4
It’s not the same. The process is much slower and not nearly as marked as what happens when a city turns Black, but you would have to be an idiot to say that what took place was not a general decline. Even at 6
There is trash everywhere – Hispanics are notorious litterbugs. There is an increase in crime, most noticeably theft, often petty theft or minor theft. There are a lot more drugs around. There aren’t that many rapes, and women are fairly safe, but there is an increase in sex crimes. There is a lot more drunken driving, and drunken Hispanics start crashing into your cars. Here in California, we are even seeing “Hispanic flight.” The Hispanics with the money sometimes start fleeing to Whiter towns nearby, but they are embarrassed to admit it. Whites? They just keep running. I’m not sure if this has much to do with money. I’ve lived in a poor White town and a poor Hispanic town, and the White town was vastly better. I can’t imagine what a poor Black town must be like. It sounds horrible. Of course, this whole thing is grist for the White separatists, but they are still a tiny minority. Most Whites are still not buying and never will. They will just keep running and running until there’s no place left to run. One solution is integration. I wrote about my old friend Avram Davidson recently. He was a great writer, but he was a bit of a racist too. He used to say, “A Black a block. Spread em out and civilize em!” That’s sounds nasty and racist, but realistically, how can you call an integrationist impulse racist? A few Blacks in a largely White or Hispanic area seem to do all right. Even the ghetto types seem to try a lot harder. Around here, I think some of the Blacks try to compete with the Whites and Hispanics to out-succeed them. I am convinced that these same folks would be ten feet under in a ghetto. Detroit was still a very nice city at about 15-2
Now look at it.