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“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black

“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?” Nice tidy quote there. "Typical white person." Yep, when the government terrorizes your neighborhood, and animalistic thugs threaten your very life, the first impulse of polite people is to feel guilt, and question their own motivations. Let's see how this happens: 1. You have a nice neighborhood, and suddenly there's a spike in the black population. If you've seen this happen, you know that going from 0 percent to 5 percent can result in an astonishing increase in the frequency of ugly attitudes, bad behavior, noise, and general violence. 2. The "racists" move out. They are attacked as "racists" and everyone agrees that they are "racists". However, they get out in time before housing prices collapse... 3. As the population shifts, serious crime is high enough that, racist or not, everybody who can get out, including middle-class blacks, gets out. 4. Property values drop to next to nothing. The neighborhood is basically a spread-out inner city. 5. Eventually, given the super-cheap houses, adventurous young men and homosexuals (ie, people who don't have to worry about their wives being raped) move in and clean up the place. Gays are great because "ganstas" don't want any association with them. Gentrification occurs... 6. The poor and violent people are still poor and violent, and so the government tries to "fix" them by introducing them into a new nice neighborhood. The upshot is that there is constant churn in the real estate market. Continual soft ethnic cleansing from city to suburb to city moves literally 100s of billions of dollars of houses. It's a great marketing program. There was some black writer who suggested that the real problem with the black community was the move from southern farms to the cities. Rural blacks simply don't have the same problems, and never have...

logjam 18y ago
I'm mildly curious about whether you have any actual data to back up some of this, because frankly it sounds like you are really overgeneralizing in an unreasonable and very emotional way. You could have more accurately noted that poor people moving into an area drive property values down and bring crime, and are not created by the "spike in the black population." Instead, your anecdotes focused on black people as the culprit of all this evil. Why?
- smanek 18y ago
  Because, statistically speaking, race is a good predictor of violent crime. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides, or about 400% more than expected. However, poor people (arbitrarily defining poor as a household income of under $25k) only account for ~double as many crimes as expected. (The government doesn't actually keep data on income of violent crime perpetrators - I used the household income of violent crime victims from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm weighted by census data from http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm as a proxy) Now, maybe income is a better predictor; I couldn't say conclusively with the data at hand. But you have to agree that race is pretty important.
maxklein 18y ago
You realise that as the population shifts, a generation of kids grow up in nice area suburbia, and become those university students with ghetto parents. You can condemn people to generations of ghetto, or you can move them into suburbia:- this will not change the attitude they grew up with, but their children will grow up very different. Every neighbourhood has bad people. Every neighbourhood has disorderly people. But if a neighbourhood has a few black people who are disorderly, every black person walking around is immediately stamped as being the same. There is nothing wrong with being angry at people disturbing or changing your neighbourhood, but don't them stamp people as 'animalistic', 'ganstas', 'stay in farms'.
menloparkbum 18y ago
Is there an area where this has actually happened? It's a weird version of the standard gentrification fable. It is incorrect in most situations where it could be descriptive because the gentrification "success stories" did not happen in african-american neighborhoods. For example, Williamsburg, Brooklyn was an industrial area surrounded by Polish, Puerto Rican and Hasidic communities. Also, the story doesn't work if you take into account the actual locations the article mentions. No adventurous young gays and art students will ever be moving to Antioch or the suburbs of Salinas and Mobile, Alabama.
ltbarcly 18y ago
The neighborhood I live in is almost exactly 50% Black, 50% White (at least my cul-de-sac is exactly 50%, if you count per-house, probably about that per-person). I have yet to see anybody I would consider scary at all, and that is not because I have a high tolerance or something. So your generalization is complete and utter bullshit right on the face of it. I think you need to be much more careful in your assertions about race. When people are subsidized into a neighborhood, you are getting people who's life skills aren't up to par with the other members of that neighborhood, race has nothing to do with that whatsoever. If you managed to get some German tribesman in 500 AD and put him up in a well to do Baghdad neighborhood of the time, the hard working Arab neighbors would probably find them vulgur, dirty, and likely to steal when the opportunity allowed for it. Hell, we Europeans walked on to the stage of history as backward celts getting dumped on by Romans and worshiping trees, or crazed Asian nomadic barbarian hoards smashing the greatest cities and civilization to that point (talk about bad neighbors). Anyway, I have a title I would like to recommend for your post. "Protocols of the Elders of Africa."

logjam 18y ago

I'm mildly curious about whether you have any actual data to back up some of this, because frankly it sounds like you are really overgeneralizing in an unreasonable and very emotional way. You could have more accurately noted that poor people moving into an area drive property values down and bring crime, and are not created by the "spike in the black population." Instead, your anecdotes focused on black people as the culprit of all this evil. Why?

smanek 18y ago
Because, statistically speaking, race is a good predictor of violent crime. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides, or about 400% more than expected. However, poor people (arbitrarily defining poor as a household income of under $25k) only account for ~double as many crimes as expected. (The government doesn't actually keep data on income of violent crime perpetrators - I used the household income of violent crime victims from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm weighted by census data from http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm as a proxy) Now, maybe income is a better predictor; I couldn't say conclusively with the data at hand. But you have to agree that race is pretty important.

maxklein 18y ago

You realise that as the population shifts, a generation of kids grow up in nice area suburbia, and become those university students with ghetto parents. You can condemn people to generations of ghetto, or you can move them into suburbia:- this will not change the attitude they grew up with, but their children will grow up very different. Every neighbourhood has bad people. Every neighbourhood has disorderly people. But if a neighbourhood has a few black people who are disorderly, every black person walking around is immediately stamped as being the same. There is nothing wrong with being angry at people disturbing or changing your neighbourhood, but don't them stamp people as 'animalistic', 'ganstas', 'stay in farms'.

menloparkbum 18y ago

Is there an area where this has actually happened? It's a weird version of the standard gentrification fable. It is incorrect in most situations where it could be descriptive because the gentrification "success stories" did not happen in african-american neighborhoods. For example, Williamsburg, Brooklyn was an industrial area surrounded by Polish, Puerto Rican and Hasidic communities. Also, the story doesn't work if you take into account the actual locations the article mentions. No adventurous young gays and art students will ever be moving to Antioch or the suburbs of Salinas and Mobile, Alabama.

ltbarcly 18y ago

The neighborhood I live in is almost exactly 50% Black, 50% White (at least my cul-de-sac is exactly 50%, if you count per-house, probably about that per-person). I have yet to see anybody I would consider scary at all, and that is not because I have a high tolerance or something. So your generalization is complete and utter bullshit right on the face of it. I think you need to be much more careful in your assertions about race. When people are subsidized into a neighborhood, you are getting people who's life skills aren't up to par with the other members of that neighborhood, race has nothing to do with that whatsoever. If you managed to get some German tribesman in 500 AD and put him up in a well to do Baghdad neighborhood of the time, the hard working Arab neighbors would probably find them vulgur, dirty, and likely to steal when the opportunity allowed for it. Hell, we Europeans walked on to the stage of history as backward celts getting dumped on by Romans and worshiping trees, or crazed Asian nomadic barbarian hoards smashing the greatest cities and civilization to that point (talk about bad neighbors). Anyway, I have a title I would like to recommend for your post. "Protocols of the Elders of Africa."