The Calm Before the Whatsit

From time to time I’ve mentioned that blogging is a reactive or responsive form—I tend to respond to editorials, newspaper columns, op-eds, or other blog posts. Right now there’s just a real lack of anything meaty to which to respond.

I think that’s a characteristic of the protests going on right now in various large cities including Chicago, too. They have plenty to protest against but I don’t see much that could be effected by policy, at least not in my lifetime. These are different from the student protests of the 1960s. They were protesting the Viet Nam War. Pull out of Viet Nam—the protests stopped.

The civil rights protests of the earlier sixties largely ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (and the attendant enforcement).

I don’t think the protesters have noticed how much has changed over the last half century and are looking for some sort of six sigma in policing. That’s not going to happen. We may have gradual, incremental improvement as our police forces become better educated and have more social exposure to black people and Hispanics. There will still be police killings of unarmed young black men.

33 comments… add one
  • Modulo Myself Link

    Most protesters are in their 20s and 30s–I doubt they are going to be swayed by how much has changed.

    More importantly, it’s people who are in their 50s and 60s who aren’t noticing how much has changed in their lifetimes regarding the crime rate. Or if they have, these people are clones of Rudy Guiliani, for whom it’s impossible that black communities were capable of change or for being part of the reduction in violence. For Guiliani, blacks are always thugs, protesters are Al Sharpton, and cops are the good guys, present to protect the innocent from thuggery. I’m fairly certain this is the view most cops have, as well as most whites, even a few liberals. It’s deranged, and has nothing to do with day-to-day reality, but few things do.

    The protests are only about disarming people with that view and getting them out. No one gives a shit about having solidarity with the third-generation forsaken of Staten Island or some downtrodden white flight suburb of St Louis. These places are hellholes, or about to become them.

    I think that’s why there’s such fear and mystification. Unlike the sixties, there’s hardly any organized violence (a couple of nights of rioting does not equal Newark, DC, LA, Detroit plus the Weather Underground and the Panthers), and there’s simply nobody left with the brainpower who can put together a theory about why people are angry that doesn’t incriminate whites. The demands being made are not revolutionary–they’re not even close to MLK linking the genocide of the Vietnamese to economic and racial oppression. They’re basically what every citizen of this country wants: don’t place retarded morons with guns and authority near me, and don’t permit their fellow retarded morons on juries and or in DA offices to have any authority over my life.

  • Guarneri Link

    And, given that we have limited resources Modulo, what do we do about blacks killing their fellow blacks in numbers that dwarf the parties you cite, and in the process contributing to a hair trigger environment and the self defeating destruction of minority enterprises.

    I was thinking there might be a teeny-weeny chance there was something more efficacious than calling the police and grand juries “retarded morons.”

  • Modulo Myself Link

    I don’t know. How about a police force composed of individuals who see blacks as individuals, not as a component in a racist us vs them schema, which allows basically any kind of injustice under the idea that it had to be done in order to fight crime? Or how about treating black people who apply for loans or jobs the same as whites, which does not happen?

    Personally, I don’t think either of those will happen in my lifetime. Redlining occurs because people are greedy and black people have less wealth and social capital and thus can be screwed over better than white people. The police are an institution. They don’t want to change. They love the us vs them attitude, and what it permits.

  • TastyBits Link

    The millennial generation is willing to protest as long as they do not have to live around black people. When their parents pull up stakes and move, the millennial generation will move into the new basement.

    If they wanted to move out, they could get a really cheap place to live in the poor black areas. The landlord probably does not like black tenets (or any other black people), and he/she will do anything to get you to rent.

    As soon as the economy picks up, millennials will run away from black people just like their hippie parents.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    As far as the term ‘retarded moron’ goes–I stand by it.

    Imagine the dumbest day you have ever spent dealing with something bureaucratic on the phone. Replace the person on the phone with the justice system, from the officer holding the gun to the citizens who sit in judgement, with that day, and then have that lurk in the background for the rest of your life.

    That’s what happens when you’re black. You should have no trust in any truth or honesty coming from the justice system any more than you should trust someone on the phone telling you ‘Have a nice day’ or that the issue has been resolved. It’s a piece of total shit.

  • steve Link

    Actually, almost everyone makes it a point to note that things are better now than they used to be. Not sure where you got that idea. Heck, you were the one citing Rock and how things are better. Every black writer of significance has acknowledged improvements.

    TB-Fraid I don’t follow your line of argument. Unless white kids are willing to live with blacks they should not protest police killing unarmed people?

    Steve

  • Actually, almost everyone makes it a point to note that things are better now than they used to be. Not sure where you got that idea.

    From listening to interviews with local black leaders. The frequently expressed opinion is “Nothing has changed in 50 years”.

  • .... Link

    TB-Fraid I don’t follow your line of argument. Unless white kids are willing to live with blacks they should not protest police killing unarmed people?

    The point is they’re doing what’s easy, and asking others to take actions for which the millennials won’t have to face consequences. “Now you people play nice with the Negros, while we go off to live in Whitopia.”

  • TastyBits Link

    @steve

    For the millennials, this is a fad. They are spoiled brats. They do not want to live around black people any more than the people they accuse of being racists, and when their move because of white fright, they will move as well.

    The hippies were going to change the world, and then, they had to pay the bills. Once you are paying the bills, your priorities change, and they will have little use for black people.

    It is not a coincidence that white people do not live, work, eat, shop, or send their children to school in a black majority area. Life in a black majority area is a different world. You are the minority, and you have nowhere to run. You begin to get an idea of what it is like. I never had a problem, but I think that is because I do not fit in with the mainstream.

    I have known several Democrats who were liberal until their neighborhood flipped. Then, I heard about “the g*ddamn n*gg*rs.” Usually followed by, “there are black people, and there are n*gg*rs.” It has been a while since I last heard anybody say that, but I do not have time to bother with idiots.

  • ... Link

    For the record: Don’t steal cars in Orange County Florida. The police really REALLY hate car thieves down here.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    TB–
    I live in a majority black neighborhood in NYC. My brother and his wife have three kids. They send them to a majority black school in Atlanta. They’re not crazed reformers. They’re basic liberal yuppies–architect and lawyer, with money in the bank. Their friends do the same thing. In fact, there’s an adorable photo of my six-year old nephew playing a bus driver and sending a little black girl playing Rosa Parks to the back of the bus in a skit for Black History month.

    You have no idea what you are talking about.

  • TastyBits Link

    @Modulo Myself

    The vast majority of white liberals do not live around black people. Period. In a few areas, they will move into poor black area, and then, begin to get rid of the poor black people.

    You may know a handful of people, and that is great. The majority live in lily white communities, and they move whenever too many black people move into the neighborhood.

    The majority black areas are not majority black because the black people tried to get away from white liberals.

  • ... Link

    Funny, Modulo, I don’t see all the hipster douche bag liberal protestors in Orlando clamoring to move into Pine Hills with me and the Gorillaz. (That’s a street gang, by the way, currently having “difficulties” with Death Before Mercy, which is another street gang, and not the local chapter of The Police Benevolent Society.) We’ve got all these empty and cheap houses, which have stood up to hurricanes from Donna (1960) to Charley, Frances & Jeanne (2004), with great slab & block construction, plus wood PLANKING under the shingles, not that worthless ply-wood shit the fancy new neighborhoods use.

    And the houses are cheap! The house next door, formerly of PR dirtbag wife-beating dog-fighting infamy, sold for $35,000 recently. The new owners, God bless them, put a lot of money, probably ten to fifteen thousand (plus a lot of sweat equity), into the house to make it habitable for human beings, and we’ve got a lovely couple renting it now with a couple of children. (How do I know they’re lovely? I talked to the woman and the children one day, I nod at the man as we pass going in and out, and haven’t heard a peep from them otherwise – nor them from us. Next time I see the man I’m going to ask if he’d like me to mow their lawn, as they don’t have their own mower.)

    The house on the other side of me is bank-owned and assessed at $36,000. There’s an empty house behind that one, and another empty house across the street and down one. (Or two, depending on how you want to count it.) And those are just the empty houses within a Frisbee toss of my house, there are lots of others all through the neighborhoods of Pine Hills.

    But none of you white liberals are clamoring to move here despite the obvious and irrefutable value. Well-built houses, cheap even if one goes in and renovates the Hell out of the inside AND puts on a new roof on top of the wood planking, just waiting for people with a little bit of money to spend.

    But the only white people here are those that either (a) are old and bought in when it was lily white and won’t/can’t move (this is where the Romney yard signs went up two years ago), (b) people like me that inherited from group (a) and can’t afford to live elsewhere, and (c) poor whites desperate to stay off the streets.

    Not a one of the tragically hip and thoughtlessly progressive/transgressive amongst us. Though to be perfectly honest I actually count that a good thing. They’d no doubt expect me to help them out when they started fucking up with the other locals, and I’m not interested in charity for the privileged.

  • ... Link

    There SHOULD be a small fortune in the roof planking around here alone. These houses went up when most of the wood in the roofs came from central Florida itself. (It ain’t called Shingle Creek for nuthin’, people.) I’m wondering how many of the McMansions that went up in the last 15 years have wood of such quality in the roofs? Probably none. I doubt anyone thought to save the wood from the houses that got raised, even though it’ll hold up MUCH better than the treated ply-wood used these days.

    Which is to say, someone has missed a nice add-on feature for the homes of nouveau riche status-seekers. “Oh yes, Robert and I INSISTED on keeping the wood planking from the old roof – local wood, you know, and environmentally sustainable. Oh, you didn’t think to do that? Oh dear.”

    Hmm….

  • steve Link

    “The point is they’re doing what’s easy, and asking others to take actions for which the millennials won’t have to face consequences.”

    So instead they should just ignore what is going on? Police killing people for trivial crime, or not even crime just suspected crime, is ok?

    Meh. You are just making the hypocrite argument, which is probably true for some of those millenials. So look, liberals are hypocrites because they support higher taxes but won’t voluntarily pay more taxes themselves. Conservatives are hypocrites because they believe in small govt and support massive wars of choice having nothing to do with self defense and torturing people in the process. Both sides are full of hypocrites. I don’t think that negates the fact that these kinds of police killings are problematic. If some 20-30 y/o people care enough about this to leave their video game consoles for a few hours I think it is a positive.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Ice–
    That’s reality. Young people want to buy a beat-up home in North Philly or Detroit and be part or start a real community. They want to live somewhere real, somewhere far away from the mistakes of white flight and the unceasing belief in shitty property values and empty cash. And they’re able to spot the difference between dangerous neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. And they probably don’t want to move next to anyone who despises them.

  • TastyBits Link

    @steve

    These spontaneous protests are no different than the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street. They are people being used for other purposes, and the people being used will soon move on to the next big thing. Nothing will have been accomplished, but they will be able to check the “helped save the world” box. They will have done their good deed.

    It has to do with reality not hypocrisy. The millennials are not marching because they care about black people. They are marching because they care about themselves. This is the latest fashion, and they are fashionable. They have a pile of debt and no job, and they want to bolster themselves.

    On the other thread, you linked to a Philadelphia story about Jamil Moses who was killed by police, but nobody protested his death. I guess not all black lives matter. Either, it was a black cop, or the new iPhone came out.

    What about the police where the white liberals live. Are they non-racists? I seriously doubt it. They use the same tactics to keep the undesirables out of the white neighborhoods. Why are there no white liberals protesting in the upscale zip codes?

    The reason is because the white liberals pay the cops to beat the sh*t out of any black man, woman, or child with the audacity to drag their unwashed black ass into the sparkling clean white bread neighborhood.

  • ... Link

    So instead they should just ignore what is going on? Police killing people for trivial crime, or not even crime just suspected crime, is ok?

    Brown got his dumb ass shot for assaulting a police officer. That is not a trivial offense. Garner? Yes, that was trivial. It was also avoidable if he had listened to police instructions. When you start resisting, the chances for bad things to happen increases rapidly.

    Seriously, are the police supposed to just ignore law enforcement? Or only when the crime is non-violent? Does that mean I can stop paying my taxes as long as I don’t dress up like an Injun and knock over the shipping yards? (Seriously, do we really believe all those original tea partiers didn’t keep SOMETHING for themselves?)

    Or should they just ignore enforcement when the suspect is black?

    Really, I’m not sure what you’re expecting the police to do, other than give blacks a pass on everything.

  • ... Link

    They want to live somewhere real, somewhere far away from the mistakes of white flight and the unceasing belief in shitty property values and empty cash. And they’re able to spot the difference between dangerous neighborhoods and black neighborhoods.

    I keep thinking you couldn’t possibly be more full of shit, and you keep managing to be more full of shit. I’m not seeing all these people wanting to be part of something real looking or make their own communities. That’s not happening. I can look outside my house and see all the evidence of that NOT happening.

    And yes, I’m sure the douchebags aren’t moving here because they know I’m not going to like them. I’m sure that is ALL it is.

  • ... Link

    This is the latest fashion, and they are fashionable. They have a pile of debt and no job, and they want to bolster themselves.

    Status seeking is the main goal in life, it seems.

  • CStanley Link

    Modulo- your brother’s family experience is not typical of most of Atlanta, so while it’s nice that there are pockets of communities like that the anecdote certainly doesn’t disprove the argument that ice and others are making.

  • TastyBits Link

    @Icepick

    I meant more like sheep. As to being part of a community, it is a virtual community, and they do not “Like” you on Facebook.

    The older generation thinks the youngsters are causing the country “to go to hell in a handbasket”, and the younger generation are going to fix the injustice of the old people. It will be no different this time.

    Lasting change takes a long time, and a generation that thinks a two year old cellphone is obsolete does not have the attention span for lasting change.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Modulo- your brother’s family experience is not typical of most of Atlanta, so while it’s nice that there are pockets of communities like that the anecdote certainly doesn’t disprove the argument that ice and others are making.

    The argument they’re making is that whites will always flee blacks. I don’t think this is true. Do you? I think the reverse is beginning to occur. White people who want to live in cities will live in poorer minority neighborhoods. Why wouldn’t they? Supposedly we’ve come a long way with race. Why would white flight occur again if whites are not as racist as they once were?

  • CStanley Link

    You made their argument false by inserting the word “always”.

    The reverse of white flight has been happening for a while in the form of gentrification. It has happened in areas of Atlanta like East Lake and Kirkwood. I don’t know the racial demographics but generally I hear that gentrified neighborhoods are not supported by a lot of black leaders because the poorer blacks tend to get driven out as real estate prices rise.

    As to why (some) white people would not want to flock there? Higher crime (I grew up in New Orleans and now enjoy that my kids can forget to bring their bikes in overnight and still have a bike the next morning), and mostly terrible schools. We can’t afford a house that I’d consider big enough for my family of five people plus two large dogs, let alone adding in private school tuition for all of the kids.

  • TastyBits Link

    @Modulo Myself

    Not every white person is going to flee from black people. The usual reason white people move into black neighborhoods is to gentrify them, and to do that, they move out the black people who live there.

    I would like to see a show of hand of the black people living in black majority neighborhoods who have had white families moving in.

    I would like to see another show of hands of the third black family moving onto a white majority block and suddenly the for sale signs popping up.

    I could be very wrong, but I suspect the second will have more hands than the first, and I predict that the second will have more hands than the second even when millennials begin paying the bills.

    Almost no first class citizen is ever going to voluntarily become a second class citizen, and first class citizens are not going to allow their status to be diluted. Most white people are first class, and most black people are second class.

    White liberals will keep black people around as pets, but they had better not try to get in the house. White conservatives will let black people into the house as soon as they wash their feet. Of course, the soap is inside, and they cannot get the soap until they have already used the soap.

  • CStanley Link

    Honestly my opinion borne of my own experience of race relations is somewhere in between TB’s pessimism and MM’s optimism.

    I’ve lived in the northern Atlanta suburbs for almost twenty years. When we first moved here it was predominantly white, by far, and we encountered a lot of redneck mentality. Now we have a large Hispanic population and the number of blacks has grown steadily too. The first black family moved into our neighborhood shortly after we moved in, and several more have followed with no fanfare- just like any other new neighbors moving in. There are definitely some lower middle class neighborhoods nearby that have higher percentage of blacks than ours does, but that’s economics not race, and the kids all end up in the same high school. Lots of interracial dating there, by the way, a trend that I think is healthy.

  • ... Link

    TB, I was referring to a previous comment from Modulo when I was talking about people not moving in to my neighborhood.

  • ... Link

    CStanley, my irritation comes from hearing the same BS over & over again. TB is much closer to the truth than MM is, especially when it comes to urban gentrification.

    And saying it’s about economics & not race is a dodge. The reason poor whites avoid living in poor black neighborhoods has little to do with money, some to do with racism , and a lot to do with violence. Adjusting for income, blacks are more violent. This has been true for decades & decades. I don’t care what the reason is, it’s just a persistent fact. I know it, the red neck with the John Deere cap knows it, the Cubano tattoo artist down the street knows it, and even the blacks in the neighborhood know it. The stats bear it out.

    Pretending this isn’t at the root of a lot of the problems is stupid.

  • CStanley Link

    And saying it’s about economics & not race is a dodge. The reason poor whites avoid living in poor black neighborhoods has little to do with money, some to do with racism , and a lot to do with violence. Adjusting for income, blacks are more violent. This has been true for decades & decades.

    I will cop to using a euphemism, when a more appropriate word for what I was getting at would be “class”. My point is that the difference between the lower and mid to upper middle class neighborhoods involves a lot of factors other than the race of the inhabitants: education level, size and quality of the homes, degree of maintenance, yard size, landscaping, family structure, etc. (and schools of course.)

    Your point about violence isn’t something I’ve looked at. I’ve always assumed violence and crime were correlated with poverty, not necessarily on a direct line but taking into account the generational effects and deterioration of neighborhoods. If there is data indicating a higher propensity for violence, I haven’t seen it (again, haven’t looked) and I can see why it would be problematic to discuss or study it because the information will be misused.

  • TastyBits Link

    The reason you find criminals among the poor is because the poor cannot easily move away, and when the police cannot or will not protect them, helping the police becomes deadly. It is better to keep your mouth shut.

    When the Italian and Irish gangs were prominent, they did not operate in the uptown areas.

  • TastyBits Link

    @CStanley

    A lot of what is considered racial issues are really socio-economic or social class issues, and the historic racism only makes it worse. Many middle and upper class people look down on poor and lower class people.

    I have known people who are racist, and I have known people who are biased, prejudiced, or ignorant. There is a big difference. Most people who are accusing others of being racist have never met a racist.

    Here is a little test you can use: Tell the potential racist(s) that if they hate n*gg*rs so much, they should go kill a few. If they hop into your truck and tell you to use the .357’s instead of the less powerful .38’s, they are probably a racist. It is best to end the friendship at that point.

    Most people are just ignorant. I would like to think that progress could be made, but then, my inner Minister Farrakhan starts coming out (except the UFO stuff). If I were a black man, I would know he could not be bought, and he scares the crap out of liberal and conservative white folks.

  • IMO the high levels of violence among urban blacks is prima facie evidence that there’s a problem. We can have pretty fair confidence that the problem is neither race nor economic but cultural.

    The reasons we can have pretty fair confidence it’s neither race nor economic is because rural blacks have roughly the same homicide rate as rural whites or urban whites do and rural blacks are significantly poorer than urban blacks. If it were race, rural and urban blacks would have similarly high homicide rates; they don’t. Ditto with economic.

  • jan Link

    Dave, you make a salient point when comparing black rural and urban statistics. In the rural areas you’re just too busy making a life, rather than parsing words or making up rationales about what does and doesn’t constitute racism.

    Cities, though, tend to breed alienation, mainly from everyone desperately trying to be so politically correct or on the side of what mob mentality is thinking, defining, and/or demanding “justice” to be at any given moment. For instance, one protester, who dared protest the violence around him, was hit with a hammer by another protester. It’s simply unforgivable to be out of sync with the crowd.

    Also, as for Modulo’s example of an upwardly mobile couple integrating into a black neighborhood — so what! Congratulating one’s self or one’s friends for successfully living around others different from yourself seems irrelevant, and not worth mentioning. Our son’s k-8 school experience was one where he was a minority being white. He loved it, only begrudging the fact that he was so white! My only negative observation was that the worker-bee parents did not reflect the demographics of the school, as few AA or Hispanic parents volunteered. I found that to be deeply discouraging.

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