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njlauren -> RE: Being silent in Philly (3/23/2013 2:07:16 PM)
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ORIGINAL: DomKen
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ORIGINAL: DarkSteven
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ORIGINAL: DomKen
However it is also quite American to point out the inherent racism of the article. The poorest urban neighborhoods are predominantly minority because the white majority has systematically denied them the economic opportunities needed to advance out of poverty.
Ken, my take is different than yours.
The main thing I took away from the article is how whites PERCEIVE blacks, not so much what reality is. While it is true that perception is based in reality, I didn't see that as the main focus. And the perception was not so much "poor" as "tending towards criminality".
And that is also racist. Most crimes are commited by whites.
Be very, very careful about that one, I am not saying you tie any group to crime, but you have to be careful. Sure, whites commit more crimes then blacks, but that is statistics at work, something like half the population these days is white, give or take.......statistically, blacks tend both to be the victims of crimes, and also the perpetrators, at a far higher rate then among whites. That is like saying the number of car accident deaths in Montana is a lot less then NYC, so people in Montana are better drivers..it is why statistics are given on a basis where you can compare...comparing percentage of the population versus criminal activity, it tells a different picture. It also leaves out the reasons why, and where those crimes happen, whites fear black crime, but the overwhelming majority of crimes are black on black, and the fact that blacks commit higher rates of crimes also has to do with the fact that they often are at the bottom of the ladder. If you went back before WWII, and looked at the crime blotter, most of the crimes in NYC were committed by Italians and Irish folks, to a large extent because they were at the bottom of the food chain....
There is a huge racial problem in this country, and it is one we still haven't had a conversation about. Someone said that people live where they want to, and that isn't true. For example, a lot of towns zone so that the only things that can be built there are houses of a certain size, on certain size lots, and often that is done (it is called restrictive housing) because they don't want anyone else living there. They restrict things like town homes, and rental apartments, because they are afraid of 'those people' moving in, and that is a reality. People talk about Jim Crow, but if you look at the areas many of us live in, it is as segregated as anything down south used to be.... people freaked out in NJ when they had laws about affordable housing, they saw this as meaning huge, teaming apartment buildings, generally full of low income blacks and hispanics, that would bring in crime and such...when the laws required in new construction certain apartments be lower then market rate (the developers got tax breaks for doing that), and it wasn't like they were moving people on welfare in there, but that is what people projected.
Part of the tea party movement is based in racism (I say part, I wont speak for all of them). I have attended tea party meetings in my local town, have seen statements, and they are coded racism in more then a small part. When I hear things like "we can get rid of the federal budget deficits if we just stopped spending money on welfare and social programs", "If we just made sure that people took care of and paid for themselves, not the government" and the like, they point to a widespread myth that is out there, that somehow federal deficits are welfare and social service spending, it was promulgated by Reagan with the myth of welfare queens in cadillacs (like, in popular stereotype, what do blacks favor? You got it, Cadillacs). ...anyone actually reading the federal budget would know differently, that the largest expenditures are military, and the entitlement programs like SS and Medicare, but don't tell them that (I especially love hearing that from farm state people, with the almost 100 billion we spend on farm and agriculturallly based subsidies...).
I think the article was supposed to be about the attitudes of whites towards blacks in Philadelphia, about what they are feeling, and quite honestly, it wasn't a shock to me, I have heard similar stuff said for years. I lived in a neighborhood in NYC that had been an Italian/Jewish working class area, that by the time I lived there was on the borderline with a heavily black area, that otherwise was identical in terms of housing and so forth, and I heard much the same thing (hell,my neighbor, who was dominican, said much the same things). Part of it is people feeling like they have to live locked in their own homes, that if you leave anything of value, it would be stolen, or you spent a lot of time picking up crap that passersby threw on the sidewalk and ground, or into your yard, not caring, it was the feeling like what to them had once been a safe area deteriorates. I am not condoning beliefs like that, but I also understand why the people feel like they do. When you have to put bars on the window, when you are spending time cleaning up graffiti, when someone throws bottles at your house and you have to clean up the glass, you aren't going to sit and think about the causes, when an old woman gets beaten up and mugged for a couple of dollars, you aren't going to think of the implications of social policy.
There also was the question, that no one could figure out, that in the surrounding black area a lot of the people were homeowners, they were people working for the city and such that paid relatively decent wages, yet in those neighborhoods you saw the ills people were afraid of.....grafitti all over the place, garbage laying around, the signs of decay, lot of street crime, home breakins, and yet economically, according to city figures, that neighborhood was no different than the one I lived in.....again, I am saying why people will make the statements they do, not that I agree with them (it is always complicated, among which, the city didn't have compunction about steering families with Section 8 housing vouchers into predominantly minority areas, and would look the other way when places in more white areas wouldn't take them).
And yeah, there is blame to go around, like I said. Philadelphia has had a history of racially based housing discrimination, where all kinds of tactics were used to keep minorities out of 'white' areas and concentrated in certain places, but there is another side to that, too, and that is looking around and blaming racism for everything, and basically excusing it. It kind of reminds me when I hear these black preachers hooing and hollering about same sex marriage is going to 'undermine' the sanctity of marriage, destroy the social framework, when 80% of black kids are born to single moms and marriages are always in great shape.......
That doesn't mean that the article doesn't contain racist images or statements, but besides speaking out and protesting it, or for example having middle class blacks talk about issues they have had, both with crime and such and with being treated like shit even though they are hard working, middle class people, I also think something like this is valuable because it also shows what the perceptions are on the other side of things, and you can figure out how to answer them. For years, the religious right and conservative fuckwads in general have portrayed LGBT people as these immoral perverts, who want to convert the young into our 'lifestyle', how gay men are nothing more then the promiscuous seed of Soddom and Gommorah and so forth......and while I think some on the LGBT community went over the top trying to portray all LGBT people as a mirror of your typical, stolid, middle class straight person, the reality is that the LGBT community made it a point to bring out their message, to show how fucking boring and ordinary our lives often area, that many of us have families, go to jobs, complain there isn't enough time for sex, etc, or more importantly, that we are human beings, and it has worked. The fucktards are out there, we still have people like Rick Santorum taken seriously as a candidate, but most people these days don't believe the stereotypes.
I think what an article like that should do is give people some time to sit and think, and as Brandeis once said, the answer to 'bad' speech is more 'good' speech. You know what people are thinking, then get out there what people on the 'other side' of this are thinking. If a black homeowner speaks out and say yeah, I understand being upset about crime and so forth, I have the same problems, I am just as frustrated, but I also had a cop pull me over because I drive a nice car and harass me why I was driving it, or pulled over my teenage son and gave him the third degree about a crime that he didn't even fit the description, it is how you get people to understand.
Put it this way, so this article is not published, now what? What has changed? The people interviewed still think that 'blacks are', the black community is sitting there saying "you know, those white people are just a bunch of racist fuckers, who don't give a shit about us", and nothing is done about it, people pretend like it doesn't exist, and it simmers and nothing is done. Sometimes opening up a wound leads to healing....I think the answer to this article is the mayor can criticize it, they can condemn it, but I think also it tells them they have a fucking divide they better figure out how to fix, because eventually it could end up blowing the city apart. Just take a look at Newark, that despite all the blab about it coming back, has never recovered from the 1967 riots. It has a lot going for it, it is close to NYC, pretty easy commute, has housing and access and all that, but it still festers.....It is a pretty good example of what happens when you don't settle the problems, not that anyone has fully.
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