II: How to Destroy a City
A Johns Hopkins dean (and a true believer) will introduce our historical excursus. Here's one of his many unsolicited mass sermons to the flock:
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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 poor, 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, even more so in the 1960s than now. 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 aversion to black neighbors. 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. |
A certain antinomian element resurfaces here, but might not this John chap be simply some hidebound, 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. |
Casey's family, far from being some nest of Grand Kloogles on the bedsheet circuit, had impeccable progressive credentials.
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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. |
Nevertheless, the Casey family decides to flee in the wake of the race riots.
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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. |
Social Justice enters the scene, but not exactly in the role you have been taught to expect.
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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. |
Our witness, Dana Casey, stresses that the racism narrative, although built around a kernel of truth, is a convenient smokescreen for the carnivorous and sinister racket of the ideologues and race-baiters that made the Progressive scene in the 1960s.
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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. |
"Social Justice"-inspired housing desegregation laws unleashed hell, 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 below market value.
The curious 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]. |
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. |
Violence precipitated white flight. People ran away because their physical safety was threatened.
Contrary to the "atavistic racism" narrative, there was plenty of goodwill from white residents if the conditions allowed (i.e. tolerable levels of crime, and no wrecking 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. |
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. |
An orgy of violence was unleashed by forced busing. The country's urban public schools became a racial battlefield and never recovered.
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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. |
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 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 that 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. |
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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"):
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. 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.
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