At the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. They were rebuilt into gleaming cities because they were inhabited by the Japanese.
Today it's Detroit that looks like it was nuked. Except it was the inhabitants that nuked themselves, with quaint festivals like Devil's Night.
No one has the courage to say what ruined Detroit, or Rhodesia, or South Africa. You have to pretend like it just happened. People get far more angry at those who state why it happened than they do at the drug dealers and criminals who've ruined the city.
Were Rhodesia and South Africa ruined by a sudden and deliberate demographic shift that decimated the region's tax base and created dysfunction in the regions politics, followed by three decades of setbacks for core economic engine for the region mixed with offshoring?
Because I thought that's what did Detroit in. Not drug dealers. We have those in Chicago too, but also Boeing and stuff.
The "sudden and deliberate demographic shift", also known as white flight, may indeed have happened because whites were and are irrationally racist. This is certainly the conventional wisdom. And by the end, there was surely no dearth of white racists, especially among the Polish community after the confrontation with Coleman Young.
But is it legitimate for people to state that there may be other factors as well, in addition to pure white racism? Or should they be verbally assaulted and shunned for expressing the view that history is complex?
EDIT: For example, incidents like this may have played a role in promoting white flight.
No, it's not illegitimate to state that. Racism was a small factor. There was virulent racism in Chicago as well. The big reason is economics.
The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor (or, worse, "an international Jewish conspiracy to take over American culture").
"The viewpoint that will (rightly) get you shunned is the one that says "black people" were a factor"
Do you shun that viewpoint because it is false and slanderous? Or do you believe that it is true, but that it must not be talked about, because the wrong people might exploit the history for undesirable ends?
It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit". It's every bit as true as saying, "White people played a role in the 1906 Atlanta riots" or "Mongols played a role in the sacking of Baghdad in 1258" or "Irish played a major role in the degeneracy of New York's five points in the 1850's". Obviously, this is not to say that all central-asians are responsible for sacking Baghdad or that all blacks are responsible for the destruction of Detroit. But it is true that both of the events had an ethnic component to them, and if you want to understand what happened, you need to understand how different groups of people played a part.
I've spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to piece together what happened to leave so many American areas in ruins. Detroit is the worst, but large swaths of cities like Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Haven, NY, Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, etc, show the same patterns of blight, abandonment, decay, crime, drug abuse, and gang violence.
The quickest summary I can produce is:
a) The U.S. has always had a crime problem. A good deal of this crime problem has stemmed from the fact that the police and justice system have always been much less effective at bringing criminals to justice than have the European systems. This was the case in the early 1900's and it's still the case today. Read this book if you want more details: http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&dq=raymond...
b) In the U.S. in the early 1900's, the south had the most ineffective policing system. Judges were horribly corrupt and murderers could often buy a non-guilty plea for as low as $50. And in the south, the black communities had the least justice. Police and the courts did not care when black people killed black people. Not suprisingly, crime was a huge problem among the black population. If you look at murder rates by city in the 1910's, its always the cities with large black populations that had the highest rates, and if you look at crime by race, you see the same effect.
c) During the 1910's through the 1960's, black people migrated north in large numbers. The migration was due to push factors (escaping Jim Crow, loss of jobs due to mechanization in the cotton fields) and pull factors (the two world wars creating lots of manufacturing jobs).
d) American law enforcement was always lax, but in the 1950's and 1960's it became even more so. A series of court rulings made it more difficult to arrest and convict. Liberal leaning mayors and progressive activists helped curb the age-old practice of police dealing "street justice". During that time period, the average expected punishment for a given act of burglary declined by 75%.
e) The civil rights movement quickly branched out into the "black power" movement. Parts of the black power movement blamed whites in general for all the ills of the world, and gave justifications for violence. Young men always have supressed desire to riot and rampage, to exert their own sense of power and dominance. Many black young men latched on to the ideas of the black power movement as a rationalization for violence against all whites (even those who had zero responsibility for slavery or discrimination).
f) As part of urban renewal push, city planners razed entire blocks and neighborhoods. The government erected housing projects, populated largely by blacks, in replacement. Most of the housing projects had little or no police or security precense. Complex bureaucratic rules made it impossible to evict misbehaving neighbors. Without any government law and order, gang rule took over and anarchy ensued.
g) So altogether, you have a population that historically has had quite high crime rates moving in to Detroit. The policing at the time is becoming much more lax. The housing projects knock down existing blocks and place these new, high crime residents right in the middle of more middle class residents. These high crime residents often bear a special grudge towards white people. As a result, these middle class residents are exposed to a level of violence and social degeneracy that is schocking. Muggings and assults become a frequent occurrence. Naturally, they flee.
h) The biggest tipping point was the 1967 riots, during which (almost entirely black) mobs torched buildings, looted stores, and killed residents. They killed people like Sheren George "a married mother of two. Shot while in the car driven by her husband (Ross), as they tried flee from a mob of black youths beating a white man." and Krikor Messerlian, "A 68 year-old Armenian immigrant, beaten to death by a group of black youths, one wielding a baseball bat." The police stood back most of the first day of the riots, but by the third day the military was called in and started using live rounds. They killed a bunch of rioters and some innocent people. After the riots, the rate of exodus from Detroit rose from 20,000 a year to 80,000 a year.
(comment got too long for HN to handle, breaking into a second comment)
> It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit".
That statement, as it stands, is ambiguous, and that its implications depend a lot on what it's taken to mean.
Statement 1: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black.
Statement 2: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay.
Statement 3: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay because of some actual difference between black people and white people.
Statement 4: Many of the people involved in the decay of Detroit were black, and their blackness was an important factor in the decay because black people are stupider or nastier or crazier than white people.
Statement 1 is clearly true. Statement 2 is not clearly true. Statement 3 is very likely false. Statement 4 is almost certainly false. (These are of course all my own opinions; I am not claiming that they are self-evident.)
Statement 4, if true, might well have implications like "We should try to get rid of the black people" or "We should make it easy for white people to keep black people away from them" or "Black and white people should be segregated". Statement 1, on its own, would not.
There are plenty of people around who would endorse something like statement 4, and who would be happy to draw such conclusions. It is widely considered (and I agree) that these are not very nice people, and that the policies they prefer would be socially harmful, and that many of the things they believe about black people are factually wrong, and that if their ideas were more widely believed it would be a very bad thing.
That is why expressing views like statement 4 may "get you shunned". For the same reason, if what you intend is (say) only statement 1 then it seems to me that you ought to make that clear.
(I must say that I don't see why anyone would find statement 1 interesting, unless they think that what's really true is one of those later statements. And if someone finds such statements worth making, I am going to suspect that they may have in mind some conclusions of the sort I mentioned above. I suspect I'm not alone in this.)
People misunderstand the issue at hand in these conversations a lot so I figured I'd chime in a bit. Is there a difference between blacks and whites? Yes and no, it's complicated. The real differences at hand, as I think some commenters below pointed out is the difference between affluent and those that are less so. These are cultural differences and tend to manifest themselves as racial differences because of the disparate wealth numbers for the different demographics (25% of Blacks are in poverty and the median income amongst blacks is about 16k less than that of the national average).
It would be more correct to refer to this group as a sort of sub-culture, the group includes people of other ethnicities also. Sadly, this doesn't answer the original question. We have a subculture in America, one made up of primarily African Americans, that the glamorizes drugs, violence, and a victim mentality; While simultaneously villainizing education and success. Is this a trait of "blacks"? No, absolutely not. It is however the traits of the culture many blacks have aligned themselves with.
Thank you. You expressed that more clearly than I could have expressed it. Unfortunately, even starting to go down this path can cause misunderstanding.
Your thorough breakdown of that part of the issue -- as good as it is -- is still only a part of the problem. Wrapping our heads around the whole thing would require making as thorough a breakdown as yours on all of the other factors, as well.
In the context of America, black is an ethnicity as well as a race. Maybe we should have two different words to distinguish the two, but we don't, and that's the way the word is used. A racial-ethnic group is a group up people who share characteristics of lineage, culture, dialect, mores, norms, etc. Obviously, all talk of ethnic characteristics will be unfortunately general. Not every Italian likes espresso, not every American-urban-black person likes fried chicken, etc.
I think it is a very well supported statement to say that the "american-black-ethnic-group" that moved north into Detroit had levels of crime that the prior residents of Detroit found quite disturbing. And a major proportion of this crime was directed at white people in a racially charged manner. That is not to say that violence is an indelible attribute of all black ethnic groups, at all times, and all places. But high rates of violence was a property of this particular ethnic group, at this time, at this place. The movement of this ethnic group into the city, and the interactions of this ethnic group with other ethnic groups in the city, is important for understanding what happened. The Detroit story is partly a story of an ethnic-sectarian conflict, just as in Kosovo, Israel, post-bellum Atlanta, or innumerable other times and places in history.
What are the practical reasons is it important to recognize and talk about the ethnic nature of the conflict? I can think of a couple:
a) The current conventional wisdom (that I learned in college) was that white flight was due to an irrational and bigoted revulsion of black people. Thus the solution to preventing future white is to re-educate white people to make them not racist. The actual story, I think, is that white flight was a result of ethnic violence. White people feared black people moving into their neighborhood, because they had the quite rational and well-supported belief that this would dramatically increase the probability of black-on-white ethnic violence. The solution, then, is to take the same techniques of law enforcement and re-education that were used with tremendous success to reduce white-on-black ethnic violence and white-on-black racism, and use those techniques to reduce black-on-white racism and black-on-white violence.
b) If you are governing a city or a country that's experiencing a large influx of ethnic migration, and that ethnic group has cultural patterns that are causing problems, you need to work on strengthening your institutions to handle that influx. And if the influx is too much and too sudden, and your rate of building institutions too slow, you might want to think about ways to limit the influx, so you can properly assimilate the migrants, before the migration overwhelms your institutions entirely and you lose the city.
Studies show that becoming criminal has nothing to do with race or background. It has to do with lack of social control from families, neighborhoods and governments.
So I think you are right but it doesn't have anything to do with being black.
Don't blame people for calling you a racist because words like "(almost entirely black)" are setting the tone of your article.
I don't know the particular study you are talking about, so it's hard for me to comment on it.
In the grand scheme of things, I'm inclined to agree that it's social control from families, neighborhoods, and governments that determines crime. In the case of the decline of Detroit, the lack of social control was intricately tried to race in all sorts of way (ex. a history of societal neglect under Jim Crow that gave rise to an underclass culture, the black power movement that gave young black men a rationale for beating on whitey, racist policing that failed to police the black projects). Again, we're not discussing race to lay blame, we're trying to understand what happened. And in the context of this discussion, I had to emphasize and highlight the racial aspect, because the parent comment to my comment specifically denied that there was any racial aspect at all.
Imagine we are talking about slavery. I can certainly imagine a study that proves that slavery is not innately based on race, but rather has to do with relations of power (black on black slavery in Africa was really common, white on white slavery used to be common in Europe, a few slaveholders in the antebellum south were black, slavery has been common in virtually all civilizations, etc). Now imagine someone denies that "whiteness" had anything to do with slave owning in the American south, and that anyone who discusess it should be shunned. Someone else replies extensively and highlights that slave owning and oppression of slaves in the American south of the 1800's was "almost entirely white" and was intricately tied to race. Is that person racist against "white" people? No. Is that blaming all whites living now for what happened then? No. Should we not talk about the racial aspect of slavery, because some racist young black men might use it has a justification for violence? No. Understanding the racial aspect of slavery in that particular time is essential for understanding what happened in that time. Similarly, understanding the racial aspect of crime in the 1960's and 1970's is essential for understanding what happened to Detroit.
I'm no stormfronter. I grew up progressive, went to progressive schools, I've volunteered in inner city neighborhoods mentoring kids and fixing up houses. I live in a neighborhood that's mostly middle class black, I play pick up football with kids from the projects, and I even have the cliched black roommate.
I studied the issue of urban decay because I spent a lot of time living near and walking through these neighborhoods. I read dozens of books and articles to try and figure out what happened. The interpretation above is the best I can do.
If you find stormfront repugnant (as I do), then don't put yourself in a position where the stormfronters are on the side of truth and you are on the side of falsehood. Otherwise you will be giving good people, who would otherwise be reasonable progressives, incentive to ally themselves with the stormfronter crowd. Recognizing the role of blacks in the destruction of Detroit's white neighbhorhoods should be viewed the same way as viewing the role of whites in the 1906 destruction of Atlanta's black neighborhoods. You can recognize and speak the truth about 1906 Atlanta without being racist against whites, and you can speak the truth about Detroit without being racist against blacks.
I would simply object that the division of blame along black/white lines is arbitrary and serves no useful purpose. I'm sure that people of every different skin tone have had a role in Detroit's decline, I just don't see the point in trying to figure out which skin tones are to more blame for what, any more than I would think it sensible to partition blame according to how much bread people ate, as if to set the bread-eaters against the rest.
Or to put my point more succinctly, a person's skin color doesn't tell us anything about them, and we shouldn't treat it as if it does. But I realize that the fundamental attribution error is deeply engrained.
I don't think anyone was claiming that skin tone mattered. Imagine you have a structure supported by two pillars, where one is painted red and the other green and weaknesses in one pillar will make the whole structure fall apart.
No one gives a damn that the pillars are different color. However, it is not politically correct to point out that there are structural weaknesses in the green pillar that need fixing simply because they are different color, so the problem is not addressed.
The pillars could be interpreted as two different communities. What make a pillar weak or strong could be social inequalities, culture, social cohesion, unemployment, etc... Political correctness in the last 40 years has made it impossible to discuss these things in public.
Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.
> Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.
Would that that were true. In your example, one could instead identify the cracks or other structural problems and focus on those, rather than which pillar had more of them.
Otherwise, one gets left with the impression that the color is what made the pillar weak, rather than the cracked foundations. Focusing on the color of the pillar is an unnecessary and harmful distraction.
I don't think it should be about blame at all. It's about identifying causes, so you can fix stuff and prevent it from happening again.
You can't blame any individual black or white person for what happened, unless he was personally involved in it. But you can identify what happened in specific communities and sub-communities in order to understand the processes at work. If you don't want to do that because some communities happen to be dominated by certain skin colors, you'll never understand exactly what happened.
And let's face it, in the US, skin color matters. It might not be right, but for cultural and social reasons, many people do tend to hang out with people of the same skin color, however silly that may be.
i) The overall homicide rate in Detroit rose from around ~7 per 100k in 1918 to a peak of 60 per 100k in 1991. That's nearly a 10X increase. That rise in crime was predominantly black on black and black on white. Naturally, the middle class whites who could afford it, fled the city. The book "Devil's Night" by Chafets gives some first hand documentation of the people who left, but I haven't read it. I have read "Carnasie" by Jonathan Rieder, who chronicles the exact same process in Brooklyn. Rieder's actually a liberal, but he's quite frank in his descriptions. Here a few excerpts:
Page 68: I met few residents who were strangers to street crime. If they had not been victimized, usually only one link in the chain of intimacy separated them from the victims...Most had a favorite story of horror. A trucker remembered defecating in his pants a few years earlier when five black youths cornered him in an elevator and placed a knifeblade against his throat. "They got two hundred dollars and a gold watch. They told me, 'Listen you white motherfucker, you ain't calling the law.' I ran and got in my car and set off the alarm. A group of blacks got around the car. If anybody made a move, I'd have run them over. The police came and we caught one of them. The judge gave them fucking to-year probation." The experience left an indelible imprint. He still relived the humiliation of soiling himself.
Page 69: One police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of times in five years. "I only been mugged by a white buy one time. All right, one instance, I went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They got a huge mugging rate there. I was dressed like an old man, a scar on my face, a little blood dripping like I was just anaccident, a cast on my arm, wearing old clothes." He had been out on the street for barely five or ten minutes when a band of black youths approached him. "First words I heard were, 'Get the old white man.' Somebody got around me, I got kicked, I got punched, one guy says, 'Grab him, let's take his wallet,' I got stabbed in the hand. It was a savage thing. I also found that it was because I was white. 'Look at the old white guy', 'Let's get the old white guy,' 'Get the fucking white scumbag.' What the hell does 'white' mean?"
Page 71: Many Canarsian's, concluding that vast stretches of Brooklyn had become dangerous places, nervously shifted their patterns of movement through the city or retreated into protective asylums...Whites ceded many areas of the city, but crime followed them into Canarsie. Social policy and administrative decisions, such as housing for the poor in middle income neighborhoods, school zoning and busing schemes, and inadaquate screening of public housing, increased the permeability of the community."
Page 73: After a flurry of muggings by black youths around the subway station near the low-income project, the residents were especially unnerved...One evening dozens of people crowded into a synagogue basement to discuss the muggins. The rabbi sermonized, "...Five blacks broke the ribs and shoulder bone of the last person who was attacked. The entire perimeter of the proejct has become hazardous...."
The statistics and the anectdotal evidence are overwhelming. Urban decay happened primarily because of violence committed by a subgroup of lower class black youths against whites. Once the middle class whites and blacks had fled those neighborhoods, the remaining lower class blacks did not have the cultural or economic capital to start businesses and create jobs, so the areas remained depressed.
This pattern of violence and decay happened all across America, from Boston to L.A.. But Detroit got it the worst and has basically never recovered. Why did Detroit get it the worst? A bunch of reasons: 1) Detroit had a higher perecentage of black residents. Detroit was 29% black in 1960, Chicago 22%, Boston only 9%. 2) Detroit went a lot further with its lax policing and urban housing projects, for liberals of the time it was considered a model city 3) style of urban renewal - as I understand it, Chicago restricted most of its housing projects to certain areas which resulted in only those areas getting blighted 4) chance of leadership - sometimes its just bad luck that one city gets a particularly destructive mayor 5) decline of the automative sector. I think this factor matters, but it's been overrated. The decline of Detroit itself went into high gear from 1965 to 1975. The automobile industry didn't really start to decline until the late 70's and 80's. Overall, Detroit metro gained population from 1960 through 2000. The real economic hardship to the region didn't hit until the 2008 crisis. That said, Detroit doesn't really have a strategic location, it was something of a one industry city, and it did not have any great universities, so the decline on that industry has meant the city has basically completely died, rather than limp along like Phildalphia 6) tipping point effects - all the small differences above can combine to pass a tipping point in which the city becomes completely unlivable.
There's cities all over America that were devastated by white flight, including my neighbor across the river, East Saint Louis. If you go to downtown ESL, the base architecture and infrastructure is really cool. It has these wide boulevards and all these old style 40's and 50's architecture you don't see too much in St Louis proper. ESL High used to be an all white school, which explains the strange mix of black kids and old white people at the football games. Integration happened and the whole thing started to fall apart.
However, things really didn't start getting bad until all the BLACK people with money started leaving too. The whites moved out to St. Charles and the blacks moved out to the Illinois suburbs. Commerce (and Busch Stadium, let's be real) kept gangs from totally taking over St Louis during crack fever era, but the same did not happen in ESL. Now it's basically unfixable. The corruption, schools, and law enforcement is too awful to have anyone consider moving back there.
At least in St Louis if you have some money you can send your kids to private schools (and you would, the public school system is atrocious) in the city. Old North City has even sprung back to life with some redevelopment, and this was one of the most run down marginal neighborhoods in town a decade ago. (If you've ever been to the world famous Crown Candy Kitchen, that's the neighborhood it's in.) I live in Lafayette Square, formerly known as Slum D, which was one of the most violent neighborhoods in the US 40 years ago. My old doctor grew up there and vividly remembers what that neighborhood was like a few dozen years back. The difference between these two things and places like ESL and Detroit is the proximity of services. Even when Lafayette Square was at its worst, if you could solve the crime, downtown and Soulard were only blocks away.
Detroit and ESL are essentially urban deserts. You can live in the desert because you grew up there, but you're going to have a hard time convincing new people it's the place to be.
That begs the question: What caused that sudden and deliberate demographic shift? What shifted in? What shifted out? Whatever caused millions of people to move out of their neighborhoods must have been intimidating.
Whatever force caused people to sic dogs on elderly women marching for the right to vote must be very powerful indeed, because it sure would take a lot to make me do something so horrible.
Are you sure you want to chase this conversation down this path? I'm happy to just have us agree that economics are what fucked Detroit over.
Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding.
Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools.
So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera.
Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.
Whites committed many racist atrocities to preserve white majority rule. Those who did are rightly condemned today.
However, do you believe it was legitimate for Nelson Mandela's wife and the ANC to engage in necklacing of those who opposed black majority rule in South Africa?
OK so we should come right out and say it then rather than beating around the bush. What you're trying to say is the one thing Detroit, Rhodesia, and South Africa have in common is large numbers of black people, right?
If we're going to be racist dicks we might as well get to the point, eh?
Today it's Detroit that looks like it was nuked. Except it was the inhabitants that nuked themselves, with quaint festivals like Devil's Night.
No one has the courage to say what ruined Detroit, or Rhodesia, or South Africa. You have to pretend like it just happened. People get far more angry at those who state why it happened than they do at the drug dealers and criminals who've ruined the city.