10 ms·

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 D

by temphn 15y ago

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.

tptacek 15y ago
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.
- winestock 15y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    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.
    - winestock 15y ago
      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.
    - temphn 15y ago
      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? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing Or for Coleman Young to literally raze Poletown? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922498,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922498,00.h... Some believe it takes two hands to clap.
- temphn 15y ago
  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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NEzu8cQgs&t=0m55s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NEzu8cQgs&t=0m55s
  - tptacek 15y ago
    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").
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - arthurwellesley 15y ago
      (continued from above) 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.
winestock 15y ago
Your comment is closely connected to what Paul Graham wrote about in his essay, "What You Can't Say." If no one has the courage to describe what is in front of our faces, then pointing at it must suffice.
- cosgroveb 15y ago
  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?
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    We should also point out that countries inhabited largely by caucasians never have these sort of COUGH EASTERN EUROPE COUGH problems.

by temphn 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

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.

winestock 15y ago
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.
- tptacek 15y ago
  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.
  - winestock 15y ago
    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.
  - temphn 15y ago
    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? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing Or for Coleman Young to literally raze Poletown? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poletown http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922498,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922498,00.h... Some believe it takes two hands to clap.
temphn 15y ago
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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NEzu8cQgs&t=0m55s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NEzu8cQgs&t=0m55s
- tptacek 15y ago
  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").
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - arthurwellesley 15y ago
    (continued from above) 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.

winestock 15y ago

Your comment is closely connected to what Paul Graham wrote about in his essay, "What You Can't Say." If no one has the courage to describe what is in front of our faces, then pointing at it must suffice.

cosgroveb 15y ago
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?
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  We should also point out that countries inhabited largely by caucasians never have these sort of COUGH EASTERN EUROPE COUGH problems.