II: How to Destroy a City
A university president (and true believer) will introduce our historical excursus. Here's one of his many unsolicited, mass-emailed sermons to the flock:
As you have heard, the university is asking its members to take off the afternoon of Friday, June 19 — Juneteenth — to listen, learn, and reflect about the meaning of Juneteenth and systemic racism in our country. We recommend several resources, including recent webcasts posted by the SNF Agora Institute that explore police brutality and inequity, a JSTOR Daily resource guide — Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus, and a resource guide from Smithsonian Magazine 158 Resources to Understanding Systemic Racism in America.
Race-level differences in crime rates are not disclosed in these "resources". However, a prominent root cause averred for current "inequities" (i.e. outcome disparities) is historical segregation.
The narrative is familiar to Americans: From the 1930s - 1950s, the Great Migration brought a large number of Southern black sharecroppers, escaping Depression-era penury and Jim Crow, to the great industrial cities of the North. However--these trustworthy sources assure us--, Northerners had something in common with Southern whites: racism. The newcomers were shunted off by   redlining   to squalid ghettos. Attempts to move out into ethnic white neighborhoods were invariably met with   irrational hatred from the white homeowners, who sold off their properties at bargain basement prices and fled to the newly-built and government-subsidized    suburbs. 
White flight!   Blockbusting!
Negligent  slumlords added to the plight of martyred, left-behind blacks, just as factories and good jobs joined the white runaways in their urban exodus...
What are we to make of all this? Again, in a variation of the "racist police hunting blacks for sport" narrative, we are presented with a Dickensian  morality tale of gratuitous evil inflicted on a victim group. Again, unfortunately, the air becomes redolent of the characteristic scent of bullshit.
We are, of course, prepared to believe that white Americans may be tainted with racism. We are not prepared to believe, without serious corroboration, that millions of them (along with many middle-class Northern blacks!) would incinerate their life savings in the form of housing stock simply out of an atavistic moral taint.
​Indeed, the only thing Americans seem to be more obsessed with than race is money. So, healthy skepticism dictates we look for primary sources from that era, including first-hand testimonies from the white flighters, the internal refugees.
​Obviously, we anticipate dissimulation-- “Oh, no, I didn’t move because I had a problem with black people. I have so many black friends! I sold only because house prices were going to tank!”
​To my surprise, I found nothing of the sort. The recollections are all alike, to a T. In tale after tale after tale, people reminisce in vivid, horrifying details on a tsunami of violence and vandalism    that  washed over once-tight-knit communities and made long-time residents of all races  alike fear for their lives.
In 1950, Philadelphia was a predominantly white city, with blacks comprising about 20 percent of the population. A decade later, that number had risen closer to 30 percent, and four years after that — in the summer of 1964 — racial unrest flared in North Philadelphia, largely over brutality against blacks by white cops. Hundreds were injured or arrested, and more than 200 stores in North Philly were damaged or destroyed in three days of rioting, with many never reopening. White flight only accelerated in the next decade, and today blacks make up 44 percent of the city’s population, and non-Hispanic whites 37 percent.

John, who lives on Woodstock, a leafy side street between Poplar and the northern stone wall of Eastern State Penitentiary, has seen the city’s demographics shift firsthand. He’s 87, and has lived on this block since he was five. Since 1930.
It was a different place then, before the war. You could walk home from the Blue Jay restaurant, at 29th and Girard, at any hour. Or up to Ridge to the Amish Market.
John worked in the offices of local long-distance haulers. He’s small, with a bowling-ball potbelly and macular degeneration; his right eye is closed and sightless. He chain-smokes Virginia Slims as we sit in his enclosed front porch and he describes his neighborhood, back when he was a boy.
Milk and bread and ice delivered to your door. A city worker coming by every evening to climb a ladder to light the gas lamps that cast a beautiful glow. There were four nearby houses of prostitution, and tailors and drugstores, a butcher, barbers, a candy store — a self-contained world. Everybody had a laundry tree in the alley out back, and every Monday there’d be a snow of white — until shirts and towels and sheets began disappearing, right after the Second World War.
That’s when blacks from the South, with chips on their shoulders, John says, moved North. They moved into great brownstones above Girard and trashed them, using banisters and doors to stoke their furnaces instead of buying coal. Before long, it looked like Berlin after the war. Whites moved out.
I ask John when he was last above Girard Avenue. He thinks for a moment. “To a football game,” he says. When? “In 1942.”
​
Over the years he’s been mugged twice, once for a hundred bucks, once for the bottle of liquor he’d just bought. His house was once broken into, and he lost coats and money and Christmas presents and his father’s gold watch. A steel-tipped arrow once shot through his rear kitchen window, impaling a chair just after his nephew had gotten out of it. He watched as four or five black men appeared on the block one afternoon and tried to break into his brand-new Chrysler Imperial. John stood at his door — they walked away when they saw him. Last summer he was sitting on his stoop in a lounge chair and went in to use the bathroom, and when he returned, there was no chair — a neighbor watched a black kid on a bike zero in to lift it.
A certain antinomian element resurfaces here, but might not this John be simply some confabulating racist? Might not the stray steel-tipped arrow have been an innocent hunting accident?

Let's  seek clarity from another witness, a liberal yenta from Charm City itself:
I saw Baltimore burn from my bedroom window in 1968. As a child, I lived in a Baltimore row-house neighborhood made up of working- and middle-class families. My parents’ house perched in a group at the top of a small hill that allowed us to see just over the roofs of other houses from the back bedroom windows.

From the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister, I got a clear view down to the harbor, which in 1968 was nothing but warehouses. Not much of a view, just open sky and rooftops, but on the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve we could watch the fireworks display at Memorial Stadium from that back window. However, on those fateful nights in ’68 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King we watched the entire skyline of Baltimore on fire, a different kind of fireworks altogether.
Casey's family, far from being some nest of Grand Kloogles on the bedsheet circuit, had impeccable progressive credentials.
My parents were true–blue, old-fashioned Democrats. They marched for civil rights. My father was a leader in the teachers’ union uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. All of the children in the family marched on the strike lines with our parents, my mother fervently hoping that the police would arrest her with my baby brother in her arms and Baltimore Sun photographers snapping photos.

​A teacher at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute his entire career, my father supported Poly’s desegregation two years before Brown v. Board of Education and helped make it a reality in our city. My mother worked with NECO, the Northeast Community Organization in Baltimore, to fight for housing rights, to get street lights on dangerous corners, and to support political campaigns of Democrat candidates.

They wept when Kennedy was assassinated. They wept when King was assassinated. They were devastated when they saw their city on fire. Their hearts broke, and their will was finally shattered when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.
Nevertheless, the Casey family decides to flee in the wake of the race riots.
​Within one year of those riots, my grandparents moved out of their modest northeast Baltimore Clifton Park home they had built in the 1920s. Three years later, my family moved out of our Chinquapin Park row home.
That would technically make my family part of the great “white flight” that occurred in many major cities in America during this era.

[Journalists] blame white flight for all of the problems plaguing Baltimore. [They watch the city's ruins today and say], "'Christ, how did it get this bad?' we should already know the answer."

The answer apparently is me and my family, except that like most things, it is never that simple.
Social Justice enters the scene, but not exactly in the role you have been taught to expect.
​I know that white racism is not the cause of Baltimore’s problems, although it is certainly the most politically correct and convenient answer. I will never deny that racism is part of our city’s history, but it is not the main cause of Baltimore’s problems today, especially considering consistent representation of blacks and Democrats in the political power structure of Baltimore for decades.
[...]
​
I know policies and political ideologies pushed changes on Baltimore in the name of social justice that ultimately ended up creating more harm than good. Forced school busing was just one of these programs. The irreparable harm it caused is still evident in the city’s broken school system.

I cannot adequately address all of the factors that have led to the multitude of problems in Baltimore and other failing cities, but I must deconstruct the lies upon which the narrative of white flight is built.
Our witness, Dana  Casey, stresses that the racism narrative is a convenient smokescreen for  the carnivorous and sinister racket of the ideologues and race-baiters that made the Progressive scene in the 1960s.
I will acknowledge that there were a certain percentage of whites who fled because of race aversion. People fear what they do not know; it is human nature, which can be adjusted with exposure and time. The segregation that existed in Baltimore meant many people on both sides did not know each other and therefore had fear. Fear often turns into anger and hatred; there was plenty of that being stoked in the 1960s, but much more than racism caused white flight.

​The violent threats made against white families during and following the '68 riots caused another percentage of whites to flee. Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the Black Panther party who promoted the concept of Black Power, commented on Baltimore radio during the riots.
​
My husband, who was a young father at the time, heard him say that blacks needed to stop burning down their own neighborhoods and start going up to places like McClean Blvd and cause destruction in white neighborhoods. My husband’s young family actually lived right off of McClean Blvd.
​Many men of the neighborhood, including my husband, went to Towson to buy guns out of fear and the need to protect their families. Luckily, none of those guns were put to use.

My father heard Carmichael’s threat, too. We did not live far from McClean Blvd, either. In spite of a daytime curfew on the whole city, my father started pulling out the camping equipment so our large family of young children could evacuate the city if needed. I asked him if we were going to get arrested for breaking the curfew. He assured me that we would not, because we would be heading out of the city.
"Social Justice"-inspired housing desegregation laws wreaked havoc, allowing unscrupulous realtors to  move families from the black  underclass ("generally not the doctors and lawyers from the black community") into white neighborhoods and essentially blackmail the inhabitants into selling their homes for a pittance.

Curious readers with a strong stomach can read this first-person account of the reign of terror unleashed in these neighborhoods as underclass blacks moved in. Chronicles of elderly white women raped or killed in their home by having a broom handle shoved down their throat are a staple of this genre.
Another falsehood is associated with the blockbusting practices of that era. I speak from eyewitness experience supported by stories my parents told me. An urban myth tries to explain what happened when the black families moved into those newly emptied houses [after whites had fled].

[The myth goes like this: "The inflated cost of the suddenly available houses] placed an onerous burden on black homeowners. Already facing steep housing payments, they often found it difficult to get bank loans to make needed repairs on their new homes. Renters in these integrated enclaves faced similar difficulties, notably substandard living conditions imposed by slumlords who viewed these properties as expendable commodities ripe for exploitation. These problems exacerbated declining housing prices and equity loss."

That is exactly what everyone believes is an irrefutable truth, but I witnessed something different. Before the riots, my grandmother’s well-maintained neighborhood was a neighborhood of rose gardens and neighbors talking over the back fence, of bakeries and a walk to the local church on Sundays, of kids playing baseball in the side streets and the local family dog getting scraps from everyone up and down the block.
In less than a year, it no longer looked familiar. There were boarded-up windows and scary guys hanging on corners, trash in the alleys and chained dogs surrounded by piles of excrement in backyards, loud porch parties and screeching children fighting on the front street.

My parents watched a young teen take a baseball bat to the uprights on the railing of the front porch across the street, a bat he used to systematically smash each upright until the porch looked like a mouth of broken and twisted teeth. This was not slumlord neglect, but purposeful destruction of a recently beautiful neighborhood.

​Then the bullets came through my grandparents’ front bedroom window one night, hitting the wall just above their bed. Fear made my grandparents flee, too. The agent who bought the house for far less than it was worth advised my father to take the newel post statuette and the stained glass over the front door and windows, because they would be destroyed shortly after the house was occupied. Destruction of those beautiful art deco architectural elements is exactly what happened not much later.

​There was no time for slumlord neglect to take place; that neighborhood was destroyed in a brief period.
The point I am NOT trying to make is that these are the natural actions of all black people. Those times in Baltimore were different, and people’s experiences were different. Certainly, there were many people who did not act that way, but that is what happened in that neighborhood. I looked up the last sale price on my grandparents’ house in 2012. It was around $5,000. That was probably the price it cost when first built in the 1920s.
Violence precipitated white flight. People ran away because their life was threatened.
​
Contrary to the "atavistic moral taint" narrative, there was plenty of goodwill from white residents if the conditions allowed (i.e. tolerable levels of crime, and no vampirism by "Social Justice" ghouls).
​The neighborhood of my childhood integrated peacefully and looks the same today as it did almost 50 years ago, but it was not targeted by blockbusting. A few white neighbors made some noise about integration and one took a black family to court for putting up a basketball hoop in the alley where we played and rode our bikes. My mother, who was head of the neighborhood association, defended that family in court. The complainer shut up. Life went on. People lived together in peace.

​Then forced school busing started. My family fled Baltimore in 1971 after the failed experiment of forced school busing.
My brothers and sister were in junior high school, I was in elementary school, and my younger brother who was only four was still at home. Our neighborhood had been a relatively safe place. Children had boundaries of three blocks in any direction from the house, but “Don’t cross The Alameda!” Children got into typical playground scuffles where we romped unsupervised. Kids walked to school and back with little fear.
Busing did not affect my elementary school, which was peacefully integrating with black children from the neighborhood. Busing much more heavily affected junior highs and high schools. Students from poor black schools were bused to white, middle-class schools miles away from their neighborhoods, homes, and experiences. White middle-class students were bused to poor black schools also miles away from their neighborhoods, homes, and experiences.

This was supposed to equalize everything, but you cannot force people from either neighborhood to change overnight. The clashes were inevitable. Tough kids from poor neighborhoods used to the life on the streets bullied and beat up the middle-class kids who had no idea how to respond, at least at the junior high level.
I cannot speak from experience about what happened at the locally zoned high schools. Poly, where my father taught, and other citywide schools were a totally different situation, because those schools had already been admitting black, white, or any color of qualified student for over a decade.
An orgy of violence was unleashed by forced busing. The country's urban public schools became a racial battlefield and never recovered.
After months of my brothers and sister getting attacked, the final straw for my parents came one day when my little brother, a sweet, rather sickly little boy, was playing in the alley where we all played. He was riding his Big Wheel up and down behind the house. My mother periodically checked on him from the kitchen window. Then he didn’t pass by for a bit, and she went looking for him.

She found him surrounded by several junior-high-age students who had been bused to the neighborhood school but were playing hooky. They would not let him go home. They kept poking him with sticks and shoving his Big Wheel with their foot, saying, “What you gonna do, white boy?” My mother found him choking in tears and now utterly afraid of a neighborhood that until that day had been utterly safe.

So we fled the city, too.

White flight is not simple racism; sometimes it is just a simple choice to protect one’s family. My family had actively fought for civil rights in the schools, on the streets, and in our neighborhoods. They had tried to tear down the walls of segregation, but found instead that the children of Baltimore, black and white, were being smashed against those walls.

​Whites who hadn’t yet fled out of fear now fled the city to put their children in safe schools. Middle-class blacks who could flee did the same. Those who stayed, and who could afford it, found Catholic schools or private schools.
​The school system, once one of the best in the country, never recovered. The children left behind still suffer from a substandard education.
Social Justice was served. 
Do you start to get a sense of why there are so many elders that aren't palpably enthusiastic about what was done to them and their hometowns and their nation in the name of "Equality" and "Justice"? The official narrative would make them out to be   inexplicably "bigoted", possibly due to early-life asbestos exposure or astrological factors affecting people born before 1960.
We submit they simply remember life before  the revolution.
My current neighborhood has somehow held on, mostly peacefully integrated and slowly returning to the type of neighborhood that I remembered my grandmother’s used to be. There are a few less-successful blocks here and there.
Still, children do not play unsupervised baseball in the park across the street. Teens walking down the street view the sidewalk as a trash can. Sirens and sometimes gunfire split the night air.
The old lady who lived down the street since the 1950s lives there no longer.
​
​Miss Frieda’s house used to be graced with a lovely flower garden on her postage-stamp-size front yard. Overflowing flower pots lined the porch railing. She had been a Polish freedom fighter during World War II. She had survived the concentration camps. She came to America with her husband and settled in that house, where she raised her family, nursed her dying husband in her later years, and now lived alone where she wanted nothing more than to tend her flowers.

My daughters and I met her while she was tending her garden. She took a liking to my girls and even gave them intricate handmade Christmas ornaments she folded out of paper, a craft she learned in Poland in childhood. She was a joyful and generous woman in spite of what she had experienced long ago.

Frieda was driven out of the neighborhood by local angry youths who repeatedly stomped on her flowers, smashed her flower pots, broke a window, and finally made her fear for her safety. Imagine what this woman had survived in life, only to be driven out of her beloved home by uncivil, unsupervised, angry Baltimore teens, just like those who burned and looted Baltimore [in 2015] and who Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby appeased by saying, "This is your day".
​
Frieda’s escape was not "white flight"; it was flight from crime and uncivil behavior.
Dana Casey's testimony is among the most restrained, with understated and allusive references to "angry youths", "smashing of flower pots", and "attacks". The white working-class families stranded in social-justified areas faced an   urban warfare scenario of constant robberies, assaults, murders, isolation, harassment. 
 For a taste of the daily life (from the book "Left Behind in Rosedale"):
LOTS OF FIGHTS were breaking out between black kids and white kids throughout the neighborhood. Some fights I saw. Others I heard about. In one fight, a few months earlier, near 55th and Chester Avenue, a 16-year-old white kid got stabbed in the head with a screwdriver. Doctors had to insert a metal plate in the kid’s head to save his life.
[...]
​The situation in our neighborhood had gotten so bad that me, Joe, and Larry couldn’t even go to the grocery store for Mom anymore without getting attacked…
[...]
Usually, in the past, whenever we were being chased, the kids who were chasing us would go away once we ran into somebody’s house. This group didn’t go away. All of them came right up onto our small front porch and tried to force open the locked door. Dad was bartending at Cahill’s that night. So Mom was home alone with my two youngest brothers.
​[...]
Someone had just punched my mom in the face in our own house, and there was nothing I could do about it. The black kids on the porch were still trying to force their way in. If we had a gun in our house, I would have begun shooting out onto our front porch until I was out of bullets. 
[...]
​Police sirens usually howled all hours of the night.
And remember that these had been cohesive, peaceful, extended-family-like communities just a few years or even months earlier! Their inhabitants saw their whole world disintegrate before their eyes, even as snotty malicious dwarves were crawling out of academia and the media and the political establishment to call them "racists"...
At another level, as an immigrant to America, I find it transfixing to discover that    entire cities were   social-justified    from a state of high-civilization to smoldering ruins (literally).

​After the previous chapter's dumbfounding conclusion that the police doesn't hunt blacks for sport, we  have now discovered that whites don't simply decide to flee their cities en masse because hatred blackens their evil hearts. "Policies and ideologies", enacted in the name of Equality, "ended up doing more harm than good":   Cities were destroyed, the public school system was devastated, and a whole generation lost their life (either literally or metaphorically) to crime, chaos, decay and alienation. 

It is undeniably starting to feel like a mythological narrative was built   ex post facto    to cover up the truth, i.e. that if any villains exist in this poignant story, the heralds of "Progress" may be the only good fit for the role.

"Social scientists" in academia, in particular, were instrumental in the drafting of legislation and in the court decisions that set in  motion the infernal upheaval described above.   We will return later to their motives, after the state of modern academia is exposed to the reader in all its naked vileness in   Chapter IV. 
While  these pages are mainly devoted to helping the many still-sane, open-minded liberals to make sense of an increasingly disturbing present, we cannot pass the opportunity here to disabuse those  who think innate biological differences explain the present-day level of violent crime in the black underclass: Dear friends, by this lazy illusion you betray, paradoxically, the traces of a naïve humanism. Reality surpasses your darkest imaginings.