This Chicago Tribune article, republished by MSN, explains why Chicago’s black population is fleeing the city, county, and state. It’s easy to summarize: peace.
A city that once drew tens of thousands of southern Black residents and once held the nation’s second largest Black population seems to have lost its attraction for Black folks, who continue to leave. Chicago’s Black population dropped to 787,551 in 2020, its lowest total since the mid-1950s.
The Parkses and their four daughters had lived in a modest bungalow on South Euclid Avenue, the same block that Michelle Obama’s family once called home, until violence drove the Parkses out three years after they moved in.
Now they appreciate the active parents at the local schools where their 15-year-old twin daughters are thriving and have part-time jobs after school. Their younger daughters can play in the yard without the possibility of gunfire. Best of all, their new community has shopping of all kinds, and their money seems to go further than on the South Side, which lacked many of the basic neighborhood amenities they expected as homeowners.
“I’m glad that we’re out here. I have friends. I have a sense of community,†said Jennifer Parks, a triage nurse at University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, who grew up in Chicago. “We feel safe. We really do. I know violence is everywhere. If someone wants to hurt you, they’ll hurt you. But I have peace.â€
It’s easy to point out the fly in that ointment: segregation, even self-segregation. The possibility that the trend of people seeking “people who look like me” will increase faster than flight from such segregated neighborhoods concerns me. It only takes a glance at Chicago’s homicide statistics to observe that those statistics are worst in the neighborhoods with the highest concentration of black population. Note that I am not claiming that all black folks are homicidal gangbangers but that some are is an inescapable truth.
Self segregation? They moved from one black neighborhood to another, didn’t they?
There is a big difference between the crime rates in middle class black neighborhoods and underclass black neighborhoods. I don’t know about S. Euclid. What it was a generation ago in Michelle’s childhood is no indicator of what it is today.
But today you have a mayor, a DA, a police commissioner, and numerous city councilmen who are colluding with, inciting, and protecting violent black criminals. That’s Chicago’s real problem. The gangbanger problem grows out of the first.
You should emulate the Parks. You could commute from NW Indiana, too.
Somewhat a tangent, but I thought this was interesting but not surprising.
“For the five-year period 2012 through 2016, 48.2 percent (594) of the shooters who committed justifiable homicides were white, 47.4 percent (585) were black, 2.6 percent (32) were Asian, 0.4 percent (five) were American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 1.4 percent (17) were of unknown race.”
https://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable19.pdf
This is from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data, which doesn’t treat Latino as a race. But basically blacks disproportionately benefit from using guns in self-defense, for no doubt the reason Dave intimates — they are more likely the victims of violent crime (or its attempt).
I’m sure that the day will not arrive in my lifetime that I won’t view Blacks as a threat.
We’ve been in our home too long, the neighborhood is aging and rents are dropping and blacks are moving in.
We’re getting older and they’re sure to notice easy prey.