Salon: Say, All These Democrat Policies Created Black Ghettos

Salon is running an interesting article from the far left Washington Spectator, as written by Richard Rothstein, which does a pretty good job in Blaming Democrats for the current state of Black cities and neighborhoods, saying that the policies led to the current riots. Let’s discuss this, so Eric Holder doesn’t think we are all cowards on race.

America’s big race lie: How big banks and racist policies helped shape segregation, police brutality

A pattern has emerged—in Oakland, New York, Cleveland, Baltimore, the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, and beyond. Police claiming to feel threatened kill unarmed black men. Protests follow, sometimes including violence. The Department of Justice finds a pattern and practice of racially-biased policing. The city agrees to train officers not to use excessive force, encourage sensitivity, prohibit racial profiling. These reforms are all necessary and important, but ignore an obvious reality that the protests are not really (or primarily) about policing.

In racially isolated neighborhoods where jobs are few and transportation to job-rich areas is absent, where poverty rates are high and educational levels are low, where petty misbehavior and more serious crime abound, young men and cops develop the worst expectations of each other, leading to predictable confrontations.

Interesting. That last paragraphs looks much like what one would read at sites like American Renaissance and Stuff Black People Don’t Like, among others, which are termed “White Nationalists” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It describes just how bad it is in Black neighborhoods

In 1968, following more than 100 urban riots nationwide, almost all in response to police brutality or killing by police, a presidential commission concluded that “[o]ur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” and that “[s]egregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.” The Kerner Commission added that “[w]hat white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

“White society” was a euphemism. It was government—federal, state, local—whose explicitly racial laws, policies, and regulations ensured that black Americans would live separately. St. Louis and Baltimore, the bookmarks of our recent incidents, illustrate this.

There’s no arguing that early policies attempted to create separate neighborhoods, both by government ordinance and homeowner association rules. All of which ended up being shot down by courts. Say, who was very much behind these?

Faced with post-war housing shortages, President Harry Truman proposed expanding public housing. Conservative Republicans, rejecting government participation in private markets, introduced a “poison pill” amendment requiring that public housing be integrated. They knew that if the amendment passed, Southern Democrats would oppose any public housing, defeating the program. Northern liberal Democrats like Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota campaigned against the integration amendment, uniting with their Southern colleagues to defeat it, and the 1949 Housing Act funded segregated housing.

It’s cute how the article attempts to blame Republicans for the segregation policies of Democrats, don’t you think? I’d recommend reading the rest of the article up to the ending

We don’t have what is commonly termed “de facto” segregation—primarily resulting from private prejudice, income differences, preferences to live separately, or demographic trends. Our segregation is “de jure,” resulting mostly from racially explicit public policies designed to create residential patterns we too easily accept as natural or accidental. These policies were blatant violations of constitutional guarantees that have never been remedied. Without remedy—desegregation, in short—we are sure to see more Fergusons, and Baltimores, and Clevelands, and vainly hope to avoid them by teaching police to be gentler.

Interesting. Of course, this ignores multiple points. In many of the majority-minority cities, the Black residents are very upset when Whites and others move into their neighborhoods and rejuvenate them. In Detroit, they are very upset that young urban whites have been moving into the downtown area, cleaning it up, replacing light bulbs in the street lights, reducing crime, creating social and economic capital, and making a great place to live. This has the innocuous name “gentrification”. Because it is apparently a bad thing to make property valuable.

Segregation policies are illegal both under the law and by court decision. Far left Social Justice Warriors, such as Salon and Richard Rothstein, have to dig deep to continue their racists narrative. However, to paraphrase the “White Nationalists”, why is it that the Blacks moved into neighborhoods, both of their own/government creation and those abandoned due to white flight, and failed to create/continue vibrant communities? Why did crime rise exponentially, education crash, economic activity crash, social capital crash? Why do we see these terrible conditions within the cities named, and not named? Why has the family collapsed in Black communities? Why is being poor the norm? Why do companies not want to invest in these dangerous communities? Why can’t these Black neighborhoods succeed? Many of these “White Nationalists” say it is simply “Blacks reverting to the mean”. Republicans will say that it is liberalism. But, many mostly white very liberal cities succeed, such as Portland and San Francisco.

Perhaps we can conclude that liberalism fails Blacks, putting them in poor conditions, with little chance to escape. Whatever the cause, Blacks are certainly much, much worse under Democrat policies, both when they were creating segregation by policy/law and now, when they simply leave Blacks in misery.

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28 Responses to “Salon: Say, All These Democrat Policies Created Black Ghettos”

  1. Dana says:

    Our esteemed host quoted:

    In racially isolated neighborhoods where jobs are few and transportation to job-rich areas is absent,

    And in just what urban areas is public transportation absent? Does Baltimore lack buses?

    Don’t just accept the assumption; challenge statements like that!

  2. Jeffery says:

    Salon: Say, All These Democrat (sic) Policies Created Black Ghettos

    Say, that’s not what the article said at all. The Teach pretends that Black ghettos originated from the actions of Harry Truman and the Congress, ignoring the rest of the article.

    Here’s more from the article that doesn’t support The Teach’s misleading construct:

    A hundred years ago, both cities (Baltimore and St. Louis) adopted ordinances prohibiting African Americans from moving to blocks where whites predominated. After the Supreme Court banned such rules in 1917, St. Louis’s planning board preserved the policy. In neighborhoods where deeds prohibited sales to African Americans, the board prohibited anything but single family homes. Where neighborhoods had black families, it permitted multifamily structures, saloons, and factories. It changed zoning designations when necessary to enforce racial boundaries. Baltimore’s official “Committee on Segregation” coordinated building and health inspectors’ efforts to condemn black residences found in white neighborhoods. The committee also organized neighborhood associations to adopt pacts pledging white homeowners never to sell to black purchasers.

    The federal government led nationwide to enforce segregation. In the 1930s, many urban neighborhoods were modestly integrated when both European immigrants and African Americans walked to factory jobs. Cities razed such neighborhoods to construct federally financed segregated public housing—in St. Louis, for example, for blacks on the north side, for whites farther south.

    In fact, Black ghettos were created from the white racism that dominated our society. Only a fool would posit that conservatives were not part of the process.

  3. drowningpuppies says:

    We’ve never stood in your way but we don’t really care if you have good neighborhoods or not. The evidence says you don’t care either, unless we build and maintain them for you, what your enablers call “investments in urban communities.” They don’t mention the return on our past “investments”. Our former neighborhoods weren’t improved by your arrival. Your contempt for ordinary civility tells us no level of “investment” would make a difference. Listen up. It’s simple. Just like our neighborhoods are our responsibility, so are your neighborhoods your responsibility, not ours. Your clownish leaders will tell you otherwise but they’ve always been your responsibility and they always will be your responsibility. Accept it or don’t, you’re the ones who live in them.
    http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2015/06/frankly-my-dear-guest-post-from-ol-remus.html

  4. You make a good point, Dana. Of course, it does often take a along time on public transportation to get from the Dem created ghettos to decent working areas.

  5. Jeffery says:

    dp,

    StormFront too busy today?

  6. drowningpuppies says:

    What is StormFront?
    Found a cure for pederasty yet?

  7. Jeffery says:

    There’s even more the dishonest Teach neglected to use in his “argument”:

    When civilian housing construction recovered, the government promoted suburbanization. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed bank loans to builders on condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. The FHA even provided model deed language barring re-sales to non-whites.

    Such subdivisions blossomed in virtually every metropolitan area. Best known is Levittown, N.Y.—17,000 homes for veterans, sold initially for about twice national median family income (less than $125,000 in today’s dollars). Affordable to working class families of any race, federal policy restricted them to whites.

    As suburbanization accelerated, whites left segregated public housing, lured to racially exclusive communities by FHA or G.I. bill mortgages. Soon, white projects had vacancies while black waiting lists were long. Housing authorities then opened all projects to African Americans. When industry also left inner cities and black workers couldn’t get to good suburban jobs, ghetto impoverishment grew.

    The FHA refused to insure mortgages in black neighborhoods as well—“redlining” neighborhoods to indicate they were uncreditworthy because African Americans lived in (or even near) them.

    Unable to get mortgages and restricted to overcrowded neighborhoods where housing was in short supply, African Americans paid rents considerably higher than those for similar dwellings in white neighborhoods, or bought houses on installment plans with no equity rights. Higher housing costs forced black families to double-up, sometimes subdividing single-family homes. City services declined where black populations increased and neighborhoods turned into slums. If they were close to downtown businesses, federal, state, and local governments collaborated in “slum clearance” programs that relocated black residents to outlying areas.

    White racism created the ghettos. Were there conservative white Democrats back then? You bet. Were they racists? Mostly.

  8. Jeffery says:

    dp asked:

    Found a cure for pederasty yet?

    dp,

    You’ll just have to Teach yourself to fight your urges. Or become a Catholic priest where it’s accepted.

  9. drowningpuppies says:

    I was more worried about your grandkids.

  10. Jeffery says:

    Fortunately, you do not have access to my grandkids.

    But if you’re a true pederast they’re all too young for you.

    Did you really want to start this again?

  11. drowningpuppies says:

    Just curious about Grandpa’s little secret.
    Start anything you like.

  12. Jeffery says:

    What little secret is that?

  13. When some one searches for his vital thing, therefore he/she wants to be available that in detail, so that thing is maintained over here.

  14. John says:

    Should we also blame Republicans for the poverty. That we see inbthevpoorest states which are all Red?

  15. Dana says:

    I’ll be very blunt here: the problem isn’t Democratic policies, but the inner city urban black culture, and Democratic Party policies simply enable that culture to continue.

    Look at the City of Brotherly Love, one which has a huge supply of row houses, which used to be maintained, used to be kept up, but now we see many of them falling into disrepair. On the main road in front of the popular Philadelphia Zoo, you can see the uninhabitable ones.

    Well, my mother had a similar problem: we didn’t have running water for a couple of months when I was in junior high because the pipes froze, and she didn’t have the money for a plumber. But she kept working and scrimped even more, and finally got it taken care of. She knew the way out of poverty, and taught me the same lesson: you simply work, and quit combitching, “Oh, woe is me!” and there is no reason black Americans can’t do the same thing.

    Except for one very Democratic policy: we have enabled people to agree to live in poverty in exchange for not being required to work. If we told them, work or starve, things would change.

  16. Jeffery says:

    Dana,

    Do you really think the much higher unemployment rate for Black Americans is voluntary – that millions of Blacks choose not to work? Do they choose to make less?

  17. Jeffery says:

    A white man walked into a Charleston AME Church and methodically shoots and kills 9 Black people, telling the lone survivor to tell others what he had done, and that he was doing it because “they” were raping our women and taking over our country. Sound familiar, dp?

    They have clear pictures of him and the car he was driving, yet the police haven’t found him yet. Do you think the white folk in Charleston are hiding him or refusing to turn him in? Where are the moderate White Nationalists condemning his actions?

    Do you think “the Blacks” will make this about race? Maybe the shooter was an atheist who hated Christians. Maybe he was a Muslim who hated our freedoms.

  18. Dana says:

    Yes, actually, I do think exactly that!

    Oh, it’s not because all of the black unemployed don’t want to work, but because so many of them don’t want to work that it has set the bar higher for those who do want to work to find a job. It makes prospective employers much more naturally cautious.

    But the solution to poverty is to be willing to make less, if less is all you can earn, but to just keep working. When my mother found herself alone, with three small kids to feed, in the 1960s, she took a job that was probably around minimum wage, because that was all she could find, but kept working at it, until she could find a better job. And she kept working at that one, too, and eventually worked her way up to becoming a vice president of a medium sized mortgage company, even though she was a woman, and never had a day of school beyond high school.

    We were poor, very poor, and then stopped being so poor because my mother simply worked.

  19. Dana says:

    And why did my mother work so hard? Back in the sixties, it was a shame to be on welfare. She (probably) qualified, but never took it. That was another lesson I learned.

  20. Dana says:

    Jeffrey jumped the gun again:

    A white man walked into a Charleston AME Church and methodically shoots and kills 9 Black people, telling the lone survivor to tell others what he had done, and that he was doing it because “they” were raping our women and taking over our country. Sound familiar, dp?

    They have clear pictures of him and the car he was driving, yet the police haven’t found him yet. Do you think the white folk in Charleston are hiding him or refusing to turn him in? Where are the moderate White Nationalists condemning his actions?

    Of course, they arrested a suspect less than 24 hours after the shootings; was that just unacceptably slow?

    And how did “the white folk in Charleston” actually react? The police, white and black alike, engaged in a huge manhunt for the suspect, and caught him. If the evidence supports it — I suppose it’s possible that they’ve got the wrong man — then he’ll be tried on nine counts of first degree murder, which carries a possible death sentence in the Palmetto State. I don’t know what more we could do to him at this point.

  21. Dana says:

    Why, it’s almost as though South Carolina might treat murderers the same way regardless of race.

    When three white thugs dragged James Byrd to death in Texas, there was no cockamamie “hate crimes” statute in place, but the three were convicted of first degree murder, and two of them were actually executed. It’s almost as though Texas law doesn’t care what color the victim is, but sees murder as murder.

    When two goons beat and murdered Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, the one who chose to go to trial — the second man pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence — was convicted and faced a capital sentence; it was probably the plea of Mr Shepard’s mother which got the killer a life sentence rather than the death penalty. Why, it’s almost as though Wyoming law doesn’t care if the victim was homosexual, but sees every human being as just a human being.

  22. Jeffery says:

    Of course, this was no ordinary murder was it.

    This was a right-wing terrorist attack, where a cowardly white racist gunned down 9 fine people, explaining he was out to kill Black people because they “raped our women and were taking over our country”.

    It was also a cowardly political assassination. Reverend Clementa Pinckney was a state Senator.

    I’ve yet to hear moderate racists step forward and condemn this cowardly terrorist act by one of their own.

    The confederate flag still flies in the SC capitol.

  23. Jeffery says:

    so many of them don’t want to work that it has set the bar higher for those who do want to work to find a job. It makes prospective employers much more naturally cautious.

    So you’re admitting that prospective employers discriminate against Blacks?

  24. Dana says:

    Jeffrey wrote:

    So you’re admitting that prospective employers discriminate against Blacks?

    Of course they do; employers discriminate — meaning: To make or constitute a distinction in or between — on all sorts of factors, such as appearance, cleanliness, erudition, dress, hair style, height, weight, smoking, and I have absolutely no doubt that some do on race, ethnicity, sex and sexual orientation as well. Anyone who denies these things, as general occurrences, not necessarily ones specific to a given case, is, at best, self-deluded. Many employers set up the résumé review process to avoid such discrimination points, but once the application process moves into the personal interview stage, human beings act like human beings, trying to take decisions on how applicants will perform in a job on incomplete information and personal biases. This is completely natural among human beings: we react differently to different people, and that will never change.

  25. Dana says:

    Jeffrey wrote:

    Of course, this was no ordinary murder was it.

    This was a right-wing terrorist attack, where a cowardly white racist gunned down 9 fine people, explaining he was out to kill Black people because they “raped our women and were taking over our country”.

    Actually, I think it was an ordinary murder, because I don’t see the victims as any deader than someone killed in a mugging; dead is dead.

  26. Jeffery says:

    Dana,

    You don’t think it was terrorism?

  27. Dana says:

    If one white guy guns down nine black people in South Carolina, and various goons kill nine black guys in Chicago over the weekend, are the nine killed in Chicago any less dead than the ones in Charleston? They’ll certainly be talked about less, but that doesn’t make them somehow less important.

  28. Dana says:

    Jeffrey asked:

    You don’t think it was terrorism?

    Terrorism is an act intended to cow other people into behaving as the terrorists want; ISIS uses murder and mayhem to compel the people they don’t kill to fall in line. What Dylann Roof did doesn’t meet that definition, because there was no indication that he was trying to force other people to do things his way.

    It could be argued that he hoped to inspire similar massacres, but I haven’t heard that one yet. Basically, I think he’s just another nut case.

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