Timothy Birdnow

Here is a decent article about white flight, how it was mischaracterized by the media and portrayed as white racism when in fact it was a logical response to a deteriorating situation.

I agree; the neighborhood I grew up in is now basically the ghetto and the place where I bought my first house is now a war zone, wholly uninhabitable. This didn't happen because white folks moved out; the neighborhood went to pot THEN the white people left.

And in fact many of the kids I went to grade school with had grown up deeper in the city and had moved out to my near-suburb largely to escape crime. For instance, my best friend's family moved only after one of his sisters got beaten up by some black girls.

And nothing has changed as of yet. I worked in real estate and a lot of black folks would call me and ask me to help them find a place "with white people". They would tell me they feared living in black neighborhoods.

Of course this would mean ruining a white neighborhood. These were decent black people but they were also the primary prey of the bad ones, and where they moved the bad ones followed. Prides of lions follow gazelles, and packs of wolves follow deer or caribou Criminals follow black people.

Growing up we lived a few blocks away from a shopping mall. My grandparents, who lived across the street (having fled from their own declining neighborhood in the city) were followed home from the mall twice and robbed right in front of their home - after the public busses started using that mall as a hub. It was right about that time that good black people moved into the neighborhood. They were good neighbors and until my father died many of them watched out for him. But of course their children had friends and a lot of times bad friends. And even if they didn't they still made the criminals comfortable in what had been hostile territory before; thuggish looking black men riding around with loud music blaring would have been noticed when the neighborhood was predominantly white.

It wasn't that the white people moved then the neighborhood declined, it was because the neighborhood was declining the white people moved. Most everyone I knew loved my neighborhood and would be there still if it was safe. For years the local bars there had a lot of patrons from the exurbs drive in - they wanted to hang with their old friends at the old haunts even though they had abandoned the neighborhood because it was unsafe. Of course that lack of safety eventually killed even the bars.

At any rate the lies about white flight go way back. I remember an episode of the old T.V. show The Equalizer (the Edward Woodward one, not the modern version with Queen Latifa) where a character complained "so much has happened. The plant closed, throwing a lot of us out of work, then the blacks started moving in". That's not how it usually went; it was the blacks moving in that often led to the plant closures and definitely led to the white folks moving out. And it had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with security. The good black people in those neighborhoods moved out as soon as they could too.

Yes, there are bad white people but the bad white people were not so well protected by the law as were the bad blacks. Cops wouldn't tolerate from the bad whites what they tolerated from bad blacks out of fear of being accused of racism and disciplined. Ferguson Missouri is a prime example of how that happens. Ferguson was once a lilly-white community (I grew up not far from there) and actually well-to-do in many places. Beautiful Victorian homes! It had been a country town when St. Louis County was just a rural area. But the City of St. Louis, which owns Lambert International Airport, decided to expand and add runways - right across the historic black community of Kinloch. (Kinloch had always been black.) The people there moved into Ferguson, which was next door. Soon the problems that beset declining neighborhoods showed up in Ferguson, with gang activity and violence becoming common. So Mike Brown robbed a convenience store by beating up the clerk and stealing cigars he intended to use to make "blunts" and he confidently strolled down the middle of the street, fearing nothing because he knew the law would protect him from law enforcement. Officer Daron Wilson saw him and asked him to move to the sidewalk, which he did but then he moved right back to the middle of the street. Wilson came back and Brown assaulted him in is car. Wilson got out and Brown's friend was looping around to get him from behind and Wilson had no choice but shoot Brown. And then the shit hit the fan.

That would never have happened had the neighborhood not been declining thanks to a major influx of black folks - good and bad.

So what do you do? We can't implement a kind of apartheid. The good black folks deserve to live in safe, secure neighborhoods. What we need is for the government to get out of the way and stop the enforcement of laws. Let cops enforce the laws on blacks as they do on whites. And the Federal government has long had programs to integrate neighborhoods. I know; when I was in real estate I dealt with a lot of such, and heard stories. A lot of black folks moved way out into rural areas because the government paid for them to do so, to bust the rural areas open for integration. That kind of thing has to end. Government needs to get out of the business of subsidizing block busting.

For decades we have encouraged criminality and bad behavior in the black community, especially among the young. And we have systematically DISCOURAGED stable families with welfare programs and other things that destroyed the black family. That too must end.

But to do anything of any value we must first admit what the problem is, and we seem unwilling to do so. It is not poverty that causes crime but rather often crime that causes poverty. How do you find a job when all the businesses are gone? And who wants to hire you if you come from an area with a lot of criminals?

Until we honestly admit the truth of this we won't make any headway. Liberal social theories are crackpot and have caused a disaster in America, and indeed throughout the Western World. It's pure racism, only a different sort, one that puts minorities on a pedestal. We've turned racism upside down, but it's still racism. We now discriminate FOR minorities (and aliens) instead of against them, but discriminate we do.

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