From another board re: The South

[dazzleman]

I think that article shows a great deal of blind prejudice, and is a gross exaggeration.  It's funny how those who preach "tolerance" never seem to find any for those who don't agree with their views.

The types of people described in that article exist in all parts of the country, generally in poor areas.  I have seen a good number of those types in New York and Connecticut, and many of them are minorities, so it shouldn't just be looked at as a white trash southern thing.  And there's plenty of white trash up north, too.

I think it's a gross distortion to claim that these types of problems exist only, or predominantly, in the south.  It's all over, and many of the people who exhibit this type of behavior are......gasp......Democrats.

I find that liberals are very tolerant of this dysfunctional behavior when people who vote for them engage in it.  Only those who engage in this type of behavior, and vote Republican, are worthy of contempt.  Those who vote Democratic are victims of circumstance.

It's amazing how the Democrats, since this past election, have come totally out in the open with the regional bigotry that they have been trying (not too successfully) to hide for so long.

[dazzleman]

Except that during 9th grade, my highschool(Milton High School) had to be shut down for near a week because of conflicts between students that were in the KKK and black students.
Keep in mind that that school was in one of the richest, most advanced sections of the south, northern Fulton County.

This is nothing compared to what happened when forced busing was brought to Boston in the 1970s.

White parents organized a massive boycott of the school system that lasted for months.  Buses bringing black students to schools in white neighborhoods were attacked with rocks and lug nuts.  People tried to run the buses off the roads with their cars.

The schools were closed for almost a month after a riot in South Boston when a fight at the high school, which included a stabbing of a white student by a black student, precipitated a riot in the streets.  Thousands of people surrounded the high school, with the black students trapped inside, screaming "ni**ers eat sh*t" and turned over police cars.  Only by using decoy buses to distract the rioters were police able to get the black children out safely.  The decoy buses were viciously attacked by the rioters and destroyed.

The only thing that brought relative peace (aside from the usual violence in urban schools) back to the schools in Boston is the fact that virtually all the white parents pulled their kids out of the Boston public schools on a permanent basis, and the system became virtually all minorities.  It is now less integrated than it was before busing.

All this took place in the great liberal north, the citadel of liberalism, "liberty's chosen home."  The city of Boston.  So I think we northerners ought to be a little more careful about pointing the finger at the south.

[dazzleman]

I notice it totally escaped Dazzle that Dan claimed nowhere that these people he was talking about were White.

Yes that's true.  But when liberals attack "the south," it's implied that they're attacking white trash.  Many liberals tend to judge the same behavior differently, depending upon ethnic background, and I assumed the same thing was happening here.  And I'm pretty sure I was right.

[dazzleman]

Very interesting discussion about segregation in the north, particularly in the New York City area.

I have long said, as an answer to those who harp on the south, the entire New York area has a deeply entrenched pattern of racial separation.

It is different in the city than in the suburbs.  Those in the rich sections of Manhattan are pretty secure that blacks can't afford to move in, or those that can will be pretty respectable, so they get to assume the liberal pose of deep concern for the poor, while knowing that nobody poor will live anywhere near them.  Also in rich parts of Manhattan, most housing is co-ops rather than rentals, and the boards of these co-ops decide who can live there, and don't have to give the reason why they're rejecting somebody.

In the outer boroughs, there are lower middle class white neighborhoods in close proximity to poor black and hispanic neighborhoods.  These white neighborhoods greatly fear an influx of poor minorities from the surrounding communities because they don't want the crime and mayhem that will come with them if the numbers are large enough.  Many of these neighborhoods are populated by people who have been forced to move from other neighborhoods that became hellholes of crime and violence when poor minorities moved in.  People in these neighborhoods will sometimes resort to tactics of intimidation and violence to keep their neighborhoods white.

Neighborhoods in the city that are integrated on paper are usually not stable, but in transition, either from all-black to predominantly white, in the case of gentrification, or from predominantly white to predominantly minority, if the neighborhood is "going down the toilet" as people say.  The reality is, the arrival of blacks is assumed to herald a descent into hell for the neighborhood, and everybody in New York knows what signs to look for.

In the suburbs, there are almost no truly integreted areas.  The battle in the suburbs are less intense because the nicer areas are so expensive that they present an economic barrier to poorer people coming in.  People in the suburbs can be a little more secure that even if blacks do come into the neighborhood, they will be more successful and respectable, and probably small in number.  Still, when I was selling my house, people in the neighborhood were aghast when a couple of black people, and one Indian couple, looked at the house.

The point of all this is that this problem exists everywhere, and it's just wrong for those of us in the north to single out the south for criticism, as liberals who live in lily-white northern suburbs tend to do.

Forced integration of neighborhoods and schools has failed, and will always fail, because it doesn't take certain realities into accout.  Number one, economic integration is futile.  Upper middle class and wealthy people simply will not live next door to poor people, whatever the races involved.  Even without a racial barrier, this would be a very difficult thing to pull off.  To base a social policy on the expectation that the government can force middle to upper middle class whites to live next to, and send their kids to school with, poor blacks is absurd.  It's just not going to happen.  It wouldn't happen even if you removed the black component.

Number two, people want to live near others that share their lifestyle and values.  On the one hand, we keep emphasizing that blacks are different, have different values, a different culture, etc. and that they have no wish to merge themselves with the greater culture.  With hispanics it's the same thing - they want to maintain their language, their heritage, etc.  The reality is that among other groups, like Italians, Irish, etc, integration or assimilation did not take place until these differences were effectively abandoned.  And it won't with blacks or hispanics either.

I see integration of blacks as a much tougher case than hispanic integration.  Socially, blacks continue to be worse off than just about any other group, and the statistics about poverty, family breakdown, crime and violence are generally known to all.  The leaders of the black community continue to blame other people for their problems rather than acknowledge that only they can solve their problems.  What I see happening, unless there is a radical change, is blacks being bypassed once again, this time by hispanics.  It's happening already.  There are those hispanics who are doing well, and moving to basically white neighborhoods, fitting in, and effectively shedding their minority status.

The problem with those who pushed forced integration is that they thought they could pull it off without ever laying the proper groundwork for it.  They said that integration would lead to education.  The truth is just the opposite.  Blacks will become more integrated when the social, economic and cultural gap with whites is significantly narrowed such that it is no longer perceived that a black presence in a neighborhood will bring significant and negative change to the neighborhood.

[dazzleman]

Lewis Trondheim -

Your response is the classic liberal response.  What is missing from this attitude is any recognition of WHY middle class whites move when their neighborhood starts turning black, other than blind racism, which is a gross oversimplification.

And I think we need to end the political correctness in this discussion.  There's no reason to tell me to be "careful" about what I say.  That's the whole problem with this issue - people get terribly upset any time somebody acknowledges the truth.  But guess what - people recognize the truth and act upon it in large numbers, which is why the situation continues.

I think the answer to the problem of racial separation is to narrow the differences between black and white culture, rather than emphasizing the differences, as we have been doing.  We emphasize the differences, set a lower standard of behavior for blacks than for whites, tell whites that they're not allowed to speak about the problems that result, and then say that we must learn to live together.  It's a loser.  If we truly narrow the differences, then racial differences will become insignificant.

Class integration, regardless of race, is never going to happen on a large scale.  Maybe you have it in Europe, but not here.  There's no point in pushing for something that is impossible.  It goes against every deeply ingrained American tradition.

I disagree that integration is done by the majority.  It requires, effectively, minority conformity with majority cultural norms, and that's why it hasn't happened yet.  The majority cannot deem the kind of differences in family structure, crime rate, etc. that currently exist to be insignificant in any case, because these differences are quite significant.  There can't be real integration until these differences are in fact insignificant.  Liberals have deemed them to be insignificant, while exempting themselves from any real contact through convenient economic barriers.  Liberals simply want lower middle class whites (the type they speak of so contemptuously) to bear the brunt of the extreme degredation in quality of life that would result from true, broad integration under current conditions.

I also disagree that the cultural gap cannot narrow without integration.  Those who truly want integration will narrow the gap sufficiently that they become part of the mainstream.  Other ethnic have done this, and it precedes assimilation or integration.  Many blacks and hispanics have in fact done this also.

What I see in your response is the usual liberal double standard - denying or excusing high crime rates among minorities, saying that whites should deem them to be irrelevant (which they're not after you been knocked to the ground and robbed for the third time), that whites aren't allowed to even express concern about these hard facts, and then blaming whites, and only whites, for their response to the issue, after you have removed all their options, and conveniently exempted yourself from the effects of all this.

This is not a simple issue, but the liberal solution has obviously failed miserably, and no amount of smooth liberal double-talk is going to cover that up.

[dazzleman]

Some interesting points.

With respect to your comment on short-sightedness, it's easy to take the long view when you know you have the money to move if things go sour.  On the other hand, I understand your point - that the automatic ASSUMPTION that a black presence in the neighborhood will degrade it sometimes leads to the reality more quickly, because panic then sets in and sends the neighborhood on a downward spiral.  This has happened many places.

There is really no political support, even among liberals, for the social engineering that would be necessary to bring about economic integration.  Most people don't want it in any case, so I see no reason to pursue it.

Slavery was not a conservative solution as you say.  Slavery is what created the whole problem to begin with, and is not conservative or liberal.  It was simply an abomination.  The need to view people as inferior based upon a factor that they can't control, like racial or ethnic background, is more a psychological problem than a political issue, and one with which Europeans are quite familiar, with deadlier results than we ever had here.  When I speak of conservative solutions, I speak of bottom-up programs (as opposed to top-down liberal programs) that are designed to put more control over their destiny into the hands of people who are less well-off to help them improve their lot in life.  As an example, school vouchers in areas with failing education could help poor people, many of them black, to escape public schools that are, whether we want to admit it or not, unfixable under current political conditions.

The education problem has little to do with funding.  If that were really the solution, the problem would have been solved a long time ago.  In my state, Hartford schools get so much aid that they spend more per student than most of the richest districts.  Yet those schools are still battle zone hellholes.  Money is not the solution; family structure and parents who instill an interest in education is much more important.  We need to give kids who desire an education a chance to escape the toxic environment that exists in urban schools, and that money alone can't cure.

I never said that sometimes violent tactics whites have used to fight integration are OK.  I simply said that it's highly hypocritical for liberals, who have exempted themselves from integration to begin with, to condemn only whites for violence, while excusing the high levels of crime and violence prevalent in largely black neighborhoods and schools.  Generally, when you attempt to force people to submit to a degredation in their quality of life, in return for nothing, and exempt yourself from this sacrifice in the progress, you can expect to get a less than enthusiastic reaction.  It is also an oversimplification to say that crime doesn't cross racial lines.  It does, and when it does, whites are victimized by blacks at 9x the rate at which blacks are victimized by whites.


Personally, I've never been one of those people who has a fit if somebody black moves into the neighborhood.  I welcome blacks who share a lifestyle and values that are compatible with the type of neighborhood in which I want to live (i.e., crime-free, well-kept homes, friendly, etc.)  So much of what I have said is not necessarily based upon my own thoughts or experiences, but those of the white population in general.

This whole problem was created by slavery and the forced segregation that followed it.  When blacks tried to fit in and become part of the majority, they were violently rejected.  I can't blame them for being reluctant to try again, but I think it's sad to see them playing the opposite side of the same coin as white racists, emphasizing differences rather than stressing similarities.

This is a complex issue that needs input from all sides.  Political correctness has made that impossible.  Recognition of reality is taboo in these cases, but reality is where we must start.  And the reality I can't get past is the 70% black illegitimacy rate.  This is the greatest single barrier at this time to black advancement in the educational and economic sphere.