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.â€Â 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.â€
“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.
Read: Salon: Say, All These Democrat Policies Created Black Ghettos »
