Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s noticed what may just be a coincidence but sure looks like a systematic policy. The Chicago Tribune reports:
Democratic governor candidate Chris Kennedy on Wednesday accused Mayor Rahm Emanuel of leading a “strategic gentrification plan†aimed at forcing African-Americans and other minorities out of Chicago to make the city “whiter†and wealthier.
“I believe that black people are being pushed out of Chicago intentionally by a strategy that involves disinvestment in communities being implemented by the city administration, and I believe Rahm Emanuel is the head of the city administration and therefore needs to be held responsible for those outcomes,†Kennedy said during a news conference about gun violence in North Lawndale.
“This is involuntary. That we’re cutting off funding for schools, cutting off funding for police, allowing people to be forced to live in food deserts, closing hospitals, closing access to mental health facilities. What choice do people have but to move, to leave?†Kennedy added. “And I think that’s part of a strategic gentrification plan being implemented by the city of Chicago to push people of color out of the city. The city is becoming smaller, and as it becomes smaller, it’s become whiter.â€
The mayor’s office responded by trying to link Kennedy to two Republican politicians who enjoy little popularity in Chicago — President Donald Trump and Gov. Bruce Rauner, whom Kennedy wants to replace.
What do the cities—New York, Los Angeles, Seattle—that have been touting their low homicide rates have in common that Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis do not? Fewer than 30% of their populations are black.
Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel seems to be engaged in a citywide experiment. If you make life miserable enough for black folk while providing amenities targeted at “creative class” whites, will the ensuing gentrification and “black flight” reduce the crime rate? Maybe it’s just coincidence but it sure doesn’t look like one.
Probably not. NYC’s black population has been pretty stable–25% in 1980, 28% in 1990, 26% in 2000, 25% in 2010.
A much more plausible explanation for NYC’s drop in crime is that a decrease in racism in NYC would be beneficial to black people.
For those who aren’t aware, Chris Kennedy is the son of Bobby Kennedy. He appears to be an underdog, coasting on name-recognition, out-of-state financial support, and what appear to be occasional bouts of uncomfortable truths.
Ummm, where do blacks “forced” out of Chicago evacuate to? Springfield? Detroit? Cleveland?
I’m sort of dubious about this, now that I think about it. Yeah, you can probably drive some low income blacks out of the core city by cutting back services and other games. But what strikes me is that this strategy first drives out medium income blacks who infrequently use city services, and have the income to relocate. Then it drives out middling-to-low income blacks who really have to reach to find the funds for relocating. And then you’re left with really low income people who are basically incapable of moving out. They’re the folks who really push up the welfare bills. So what’s your strategy for them? Special camps with WERKE MACHE FREI inscribed over the entrance gates and long windowless structures with never ending pillars of smoke?
Going on … maybe it seems to make sense to eastern US folks to think of cities as being composed of whites and blacks, but it’s different out here. Los Angeles County has ten million people, give or take, and a bit less than a million are black. The City of Los Angeles has just under four million people, of which about a half million are black. Bear in mind that the county ranges about 70 miles north and south, and about 70 miles east and west — and that the city covers just about the same distances, with cities like Long Beach and Santa Monica and Encino and Downey and so on wrapped in the embrace of the larger entity just as firmly as Queens and the Bronx are in New York. There are street signs to tell a motorist he’s left South Central LA and entered Compton -0- there’s nothing on the ground to tell him he’s in another city.
So. That said, what matters about LA and its crime rates is not that the number of blacks is so small, it’s that over the last 30-40 years the city (and the county) has shifted from about 20% Hispanic to 50%. And the crime rate has dropped, while the non-Hispanic white population has fallen from over ^0% to about 25%,
You want to bring your crime rate down? Oh boy, it is so easy! Just bring in a big batch of Mexicans and other Latin Americans, and once the local Republicans gave vomited themselves to death, which will take just a few years, everything will be magically better.
Science proves it!
Some are moving to collar suburbs, others moving south.
I hope it’s true. Whites need to take back the cities they built. White control of America’s cities is necessary to the defense of the country. The African underclass is the greatest threat to the continued existence of our representative democracy.
“Ummm, where do blacks “forced†out of Chicago evacuate to?”
To Daves point. (Get a map out) When I worked in NW Indiana I lived in the southern suburb of Glenwood IL. Mostly white. As was ELansing, Homewood, Flossmoor, Thornton etc etc. now? Complete transformation. Black.
Yeah well. I guess my perspective is a bit skewed … Used to be, I was a kid in Ohio back in the 1950’s, living in small towns — 500 people or less, and most of those places are still around oddly enough, still with under 500 people. Just about all white. Black folks sometimes showed up on the TV news, but where I lived … I used to joke that if wanted to see someone black in Crawford County, you had to go to the county seat and schedule an appointment. Non-whites were RARE.
Then I moved to California for a couple of years, and blacks were still pretty hard to see, but there were Hispanics. Mexicans worked in the big big field behind our house in Mountain View, and we white kids could see them,, and there was an even a Mexican kid in my fifth grade class — well, not my class, bit another fifth grade class in my elementary school, and I knew his name — David Sanchez — even if I never had the courage to speak to him.
And then I went to Vermont for a year, in another small town, and there still weren’t any blacks. But we did have an inferior racial minority to hate, so we were modern in that respect — French Canadians! The scum of the earth, who crept over the borders!
And when I was in 7th grade, back in Ohio, we had a couple of black neighbors, and some of the kids in my school were black. In 8th grade, I even had a classmate who was Jewish. Boy, that was cosmopolitan!
But it didn’t last, my family moved to another small all-white community for a few years. I didn’t run into blacks again until we moved into Dayton my senior year and suddenly there were DOZENS of them in my school, even in some of my classes! And lots of Jews, some of them friendly. And Greeks. And Poles. And even some Italians. And bunches and bunches of Catholics! Golly that was exotic! And I was so naïve, I thought that even though this was all new, it was the way life was supposed to be in a big city and I should just act like it was normal. And then I went to college in Boston, and y’know — after 1964, the whole world changed.
So some time has passed, and I’ve shed a few conceptions and maybe picked up a little polish, and I’ve bounced around a bit, and I understand that in most of the US, black-vs-white issues are still very big. But anymore, personally, I find it hard to care. I don’t think it’s sophistication that makes Americans so concerned about race, I think a batch of rather nasty people make a heap of money from keeping black-white confrontations going. I think a lot of mentally ill people keep themselves going by looking down on other races and other religions.
And I wish to hell we could a way to move past this.
BTW – many politicians have moved to the S-SW. Homer Glen or Lamont. Very white.
Imagine that!?
mike schupp:
I spent my first ten years in what might politely be called a “changing neighborhood” in St. Louis. Blacks replacing working class whites. For the next seven years we lived in a Jewish and Anglo upper middle class neighborhood in a well-to-do suburb, a place mostly inhabited by people with old money. Unlike my siblings I attended high school in a city high school where my classmates were of every race and social class. At seventeen I left St. Louis to go to college.
My siblings say I had a different childhood than they. They’re right.
O K, here in Lincoln , Ne. working class whites like me live in the same neighborhoods as Blacks, but we live in houses built from 1890-1930, while Blacks live in brand new habitat for humanity homes, we rarely speak as they rarely come outside, and wouldn’t lower themselves anyway. BTW, you’ll never see a working age BLACK MAN in those homes.