Steada treated,we get tricked
Steada kisses, we get kicked
A black ghetto, also known as the hood or the inner city, is a part of an American city where nearly everyone is black. Most ghettos are poor, but not all. Some of the black parts of Queens in New York, for example, are richer than some of the white parts.
For many who live in black ghettos, even in some middle-class ones, racism seems like more than just a few bad apples. The police, the courts, the press, the hospitals, the schools, the housing market, all of it, seem to be based on the idea that black life is not all that important. Everything is second-rate or kind of broken.
When whites see a black ghetto they think it is completely the creation of blacks living there: drug dealers, hookers, crackheads, bad fathers, poor people, etc. True enough in so far as it goes, but ghettos are not on the moon – they are part of a larger American society.
For example, you would think that city services would be the same all across the city. Not so. They are way worse in black ghettos. Even in the black middle-class parts of town it is not that great. Things like trash pick-up, ambulance service, street repair but, most of all, schools and police protection. Those things are beyond the control of the ghetto.
Whites think ghettos are dangerous because the people there are poor and black. What they forget is that the police are not all that interested in protecting the lives and property of poor black people. Not as interested as they are in protecting rich white people or even not-all-that-rich white people. They will even protect white foreigners over black Americans. I have seen it with my own eyes.
When middle-class whites see buildings and houses falling apart in black ghettos they think it is because “blacks do not take care of their neighbourhoods”. What they do not know is that it is hard to get a bank loan or insurance for property in a place like that. Because the banks and insurance companies redline black ghettos, refusing to put much money there. You might think they are just being hardheaded businessmen. That would be understandable. But no, it goes beyond that into racism.
Government policies after the Second World War made it easier to get money to build a house in the suburbs than to repair an old house in the city. That is part of why so much of America’s cities began to fall apart. And that was just when blacks began moving to the big cities like New York and Chicago in huge numbers. And just when most whites left those cities – white flight.
Despite all this black ghettos have produced some of the world’s greatest music and some great writers too. Amiri Baraka says it is because people there are still in touch with their hearts. Yes, and they also see the world more clearly, they see through the middle-class lies.
See also:
- ghettos
- the arts
- How American cities work:
- media portrayals
Abagond 
Good post. I would add that the obverse of the black ghetto is the white suburb. In fact, the suburb was a factor in the creation of the ghetto, and vice versa — a twisted version of symbiosis. The history of Levittown is the history of post-WWII America in a microcosm. As we now know, Levitt, through racial restrictive covenants in his deeds and then, later, when those were prohibited by court order, he enacted an unwritten but de facto racial exclusivity in his developments, intentionally creating his planned communities as places for white, not black, returning GI’s and their families. In doing so, he drafted the blueprint for suburban development all across the nation.
But the evil wrought by America’s Levittowns runs deeper than just racial exclusion. Suburbs are by definition places where the lifestyle of the residents is dependent on automobile traffic. The developments are not dense, meaning that the tax base is not high (exacerbated by the fact that many suburbs were not initially incorporated into towns). The tax base was not enough to create and maintain the roads and related services necessary to sustain the automobile-based lifestyle of the suburbs. The necessary funding thus came from the state’s general funds coffers, which were funded by income, sales, and property taxes paid by residents of the cities. Of the ghetto. As we know, sales taxes are generally regressive on the poor. Thus, in a very real sense, suburban residents have been the beneficiaries of tax-based welfare funded by city residents, including the poor, minorities, and other disenfranchised inhabitants of the ghetto.
It’s doubly ironic that in most instances these developments were built on fertile, productive farmland. We replaced food with gulags, albeit gulags with attractive trappings, a “cage with golden bars” to borrow from Bukowski. And in the meantime farming was displaced to more distant land, often requiring deforestation to render it tillable, and always requiring more petroleum to ship the distant products back to the urban areas.
Suburban life itself is an unnatural form of social organization from a human perspective. No other culture on earth has chosen to organize its social networks on the American suburban model, for good reason: humans are social animals. We need community to thrive. Suburbs represent the death of community, with each nuclear family retreating into its individual oasis, interaction amongs them limited to occasional formally defined functions — “having the x’s over for dinner,” for example — with tightly constrained limits on duration, subjects for polite conversation, etc. As a result, children grow up in a relative social vacuum. Many of the pathologies we see in today’s youth — the Columbine-type shootings, the “emo” culture, cutting, eating disorders, etc. — are pretty clearly related to the social isolation imposed on young people by the suburban lifestyle.
Finally, the suburban lifestyle consumes a high level of natural resources to sustain an individual life. Petroleum to fuel not only the high level of automobile use, but also to supply utilities, water and sewer service to a large number of small individual users. Paving, repairing, plowing and maintaining miles and miles of roadway used by few users. Today, as we pass the point of peak oil and the natural cycle of supply and demand is driving up the price of petroleum, millions of Americans are feeling the sting of the suburban lifestyle, at the gas pump and on their utility bill. Any engineer who studies these issues will tell you that the most efficient social structure, from the perspective of energy use, is dense urban development. However, in America, the number of Americans inhabiting suburbs is so large, the infrastructure that has been built to support the suburbs so vast, that we simply lack the ability, from an economic perspective, to effect any sort of mass movement of populace from the suburbs into the cities.
In this way, the Levittowns of America, once eagerly embraced by white America as a sort of Wonder Bread utopia, have now become the stone tied around our nation’s neck as we sink into economic decline.
LikeLike
” In this way, the Levittowns of America, once eagerly embraced by white America as a sort of Wonder Bread utopia, have now become the stone tied around our nation’s neck as we sink into economic decline. ”
how do crime rates in the largest cities enter into the equation of our nations economic decline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
why would a person not avoid living in detroit if it were possible to make a living elsewhere. i would suggest that violent crime is the millstone around our necks which drags the nation into decline. heaven forbid some folks would seek to escape murder, rape and property crime.
LikeLike
Blanc2: Very interesting about white suburbs and how they are two sides of the same coin. I did not know that about taxes. You are right about how terrible it is for young people and how it is only made possible by cheap oil.
I know in ancient Greece and ancient Mexico farmers lived in the village or town and then walked out to their fields to work them. The Anglo pattern is the opposite: to live on your land and go into town only when needed. Suburbs replicate that.
LikeLike
roger: places like detroit became hellholes because bad policing.
LikeLike
Roger:
Violent crime plagues all societies and has since recorded history. Compared to most places on earth today, violent crime in the US is relatively minor. From an economic perspective, its effect on the US economy today is negligible. Yes, prisons are a huge industry in this nation, but a large % of the inhabitants come from the so-called “war on drugs,” which, along with Bush’s ineffectual flailing about in Mesopotamia, has been a perennial and monumental waste of taxpayer dollars for decades.
I’m glad you chose Detroit as an example, by the way, because, along with perhaps Buffalo, Milwaukee, and a few other rust belt metros, Detroit presents one of the most stark examples of the lingering effects of systemic, intentional, planned racial exclusion and segregation.
It is true that, later, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Detroit became infested with violence of many sorts. Doesn’t take much delving into the history of Detroit to see that most of its violence was reactive to the combined forces of a couple of generations of pretty hateful and oppressive official and defacto racist policies and practices.
White flight post-WWII pre-dated that violent era for the most part. It was motivated by the lure of cheap housing near readily available, high paying, unionized blue collar work. In places like Detroit, with its plentiful, cheap land stretching out for flat, unbroken miles in most directions, it was cheap and easy for developers to denude the landscape and throw up row after row of cookie cutter housing. States hungry for the growth promised by burgeoning heavy industry eagerly embraced the task of maintaining suburban infrastructure from general funds coffers, notwithstanding the fact that the suburbs generally did not pay their own freight with their property taxes.
Keep in mind that, at the same time, Eisenhower’s administration was aggressively pursuing the construction of our interstate freeway system. The stated purpose of these freeways was “national defense” — Eisenhower claimed to have been motivated by the autobahns built by Hitler. However, even in 1950 it was clear to all serious military strategists that the geographical distances in our nation were far too vast to allow any viable military defense strategy based on vehicle traffic along freeways. Rail, air and barge were far more viable means of moving troops and materiel about the country.
In reality, the “defense” justification for the freeways was a ruse to disguise the use of American taxpayer dollars to subsidize a distribution and population infrastructure based on automobile and truck, rather than rail and mass transit as in Europe. At the same time there were many other instances of this systemic effort to transform America into an automobile nation — including the famous purchase of the light rail system in LA by a consortium of Firestone and other, immortalized in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and the subject of a successful antitrust litigation.
Even today our taxpayer continue to subsidize the trucking industry. The taxes and fees paid by truckers for the privilege of using our nation’s freeways are sufficient to pay for only a fraction of the wear and tear trucks cause on those freeways. The repairs of that wear & tear come from you and me.
But I digress. Post-WWII suburban developers found a ready market among white GI’s. They found also that their market improved if they imposed formal or de-facto segregation in their developments. The simple reality was that most whites did not want to live around blacks. Prior to WWII, this had not been an issue, but post-WWII, with a rising black middle class and many returning black GIs, the possibility became real for many whites. Thus, 8 Mile Road in Detroit has become a literal color line.
LikeLike
” White flight post-WWII pre-dated that violent era for the most part. It was motivated by the lure of cheap housing near readily available, high paying, unionized blue collar work. In places like Detroit, with its plentiful, cheap land stretching out for flat, unbroken miles in most directions, it was cheap and easy for developers to denude the landscape and throw up row after row of cookie cutter housing. ”
folks are attracted to the area because they can find work and purchase a house. violence erupts in the inner city and you are surprised that those who can leave, do in fact leave and purchase a house in a safe place. there is development policy and racial policy and national policy to include the iraq war and then usually separate and independent of the policy which is laid down by government and power is a desire by common folks to escape violence and seek a better life outside of the inner city. do you fault the common everyday factory worker for attempting find the path free from the violence and degradation in the inner city.
cincinnati:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_3_what_really_happened.html
i wasnt there is 2001 and i dont know what timothy thomas was reaching for when shot by police in april of that year. the question remains why would any sensible person with any mean remain in this type of environment.
” In fact, the list of the 15 police victims shows the depraved nature not of Cincinnati’s cops but of its criminals. Harvey Price, who heads the roster, axed his girlfriend’s 15-year-old daughter to death in 1995, then held a SWAT team at bay for four hours with a steak knife, despite being maced and hit with a stun gun. When he lunged at an officer with the knife, the cop shot him. Jermaine Lowe, a parole violator wanted for armed robbery, fled in a stolen car at the sight of a police cruiser, crashed into another car, then unloaded his handgun at the pursuing officers. Alfred Pope robbed, pistol-whipped, and most likely fired at three people in an apartment hallway, just the latest assault by the vicious 23-year-old, who had already racked up 18 felony charges and five convictions. He then aimed his handgun at close range at the pursuing officers, and they shot him dead in return. ”
and you seem to dismiss the common sense actions of common everyday persons as white flight.
LikeLike
” roger: places like detroit became hellholes because bad policing. ”
cincinnati:
” Now, remember the “economic exclusion” argument: Cincinnati’s racist power structure is excluding hordes of qualified young black men. Well, here the men are, and it is ludicrous to attribute their joblessness to corporate bigotry, rather than to their own unemployability. The high school dropout rate in Cincinnati is between 60 and 70 percent. And will the young men across from Johnnie’s show up every day to work on time and respond appropriately to authority? Has any of them even applied for a job and been turned down? Last summer, King’s Island, an amusement park north of the city, had to import 1,000 young Eastern Europeans for summer jobs, because it could find no local youths to apply. Yet the well-intentioned CEO of Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati’s beloved corporate titan, has called, in good riot-ideologue fashion, for the urgent creation of 2,500 government- and privately subsidized summer jobs to forestall another rampage. ”
by this account the problem is unemployability. tell me how to understand this environment.
LikeLike
Fantastic post. This is one of your best. Telling it like it is.
Have you heard of a group called NACA?
They give low interest loans to people who want to buy houses in low income areas to help keep the neighborhoods stable. They help working class people buy and keep their homes.
Check it out.
http://www.naca.com
LikeLike
So true, Abagond. I used to live in a mixed working class Latino-Black area. Along a main street, there wasn’t even a side walk. People would have to walk through dirt – or mud in bad weather, or risk taking a path partially hidden by trees to get to a major bus stop.
Then I moved up county to a nearly all white area. It was beautiful. Rolling hills and perfect lawns. What struck me was that the county had employees out there all the time, landscaping, adding ponds, and making sure their streets were perfect. These people had one or more often two cars. They didn’t need to walk to a bus stop, and if they did, the walk was easy.
It was only after years of the first community fighting for a damn sidewalk and pedestrians getting hit on the avenue (rather than walking in the mud) that they got it a few years ago, and I’ll bet it was the threat of lawsuits.
Happens all the time and everywhere. There really are Two Americas, even in the same county.
LikeLike
Two Americas is right.
LikeLike
Thanks, Stal. Never heard of NACA but I will check it out.
LikeLike
Roger: I cannot speak for every city, but the places I have lived in and near New York, the whites fled long, long before crime was any kind of issue. They did not leave because crime rates rose – they left because they did not want to live with blacks. Simple as that.
It is not even the case that they simply wanted to leave the city for the suburbs, because they would move out of suburbs too that became “too black”. It has nothing to do with a close reading of police reports and everything to do with how whites think of blacks.
LikeLike
Roger: this is how your argument seems to me: whites leave the inner city and let it fall to pieces and then they blame the consequences of that – crime, dropout rates and so on – as an excuse for letting it fall to pieces.
LikeLike
Agabond: I said essentially the same in my post — white flight, at least its first post-WWI wave, predated the descent of the urban core into poverty and crime. In fact, white flight was a catalyst for this descent.
LikeLike
Well said.
LikeLike
i am the ghettoman. i agree
LikeLike
yes. me too
LikeLike
you’re so immature, however i agree as well.
LikeLike
Agabond: I said essentially the same in my post — white flight, at least its first post-WWI wave, predated the descent of the urban core into poverty and crime. In fact, white flight was a catalyst for this descent.
Do you have numbers and dates for various cities…? I know white flight exploded in the 1960s in conjunction with a dramatic rise in crime.
LikeLike
Blacks aren’t all bad.
LikeLike
Roger: I cannot speak for every city, but the places I have lived in and near New York, the whites fled long, long before crime was any kind of issue. They did not leave because crime rates rose – they left because they did not want to live with blacks. Simple as that.
Can you elaborate on this..?
LikeLike
To True:
Blacks aren’t all bad.
Well yes, certainly… but to make a neighborhood bad it only takes about 1% of the population….
(with the rest too harried or intimidated to make the bad guys behave..)
LikeLike
To Abagond:
roger: places like detroit became hellholes because bad policing.
Abagond, Detroit’s mayor, the police chief, most of the city council, and 65% of the police force are black. You think the problems of crime in Detroit are predominantly because of policing…? How would you change it…?
LikeLike
Go to this thread here:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/racelessness/#comment-22147
LikeLike
Uncle Milton said:
Roger: I cannot speak for every city, but the places I have lived in and near New York, the whites fled long, long before crime was any kind of issue. They did not leave because crime rates rose – they left because they did not want to live with blacks. Simple as that.
Can you elaborate on this..?
I wrote a post on white flight:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/white-flight/
It is kind of general. I will write a post on my own experiences, but for now:
I have lived in two places where whites have fled, one in inner-city New York and one in suburban New Jersey. In both cases it was pretty clear that it was not crime they were fleeing. For one thing it was a black middle-class that took their place. After all, banks are not in the habit of giving home loans to crackheads and prostitutes.
By crime I mean a crime rate, something you can google, something halfway objective, not crime as in black-people-are-crooks or black-men-are-a-gazillion-times-more-likely-to-commit-rape or I-am-afraid-of-black-people-and-I-am-going-to-leave-before-they-rob-me-or-kill-me. That is not crime, that is naked racist fear.
LikeLike
This article is highly opinionated and based off of views from an outside source, if one is doing a project on this, do not consider this a viable source for information.
LikeLike
These are speculations the facts are majority of ghettos are black and poor their is a reason for it and I doubt it was from world war 2 i went to school in Miami predominately black and lived here for 23 years u want to be equal but you ask for special privlages like a month dedicated to you lol bet ebony magazine you single yourself out and not to mention blacks come from afica right??? LOOK AT AFRICA NOW LOL those people are not civil with each other and slaughter each other with machetes in America its just guns what makes you think they will care about others im sorry i wish you guys were different but fact of the matter is majority of blacks are negative and contribute to society in a negative way and blacks have their own country and they just slaughter each other i mean what can i say i speak about what i have seen
LikeLike
anhdrew,
You knew Blacks were here when you got off the proverbial boat so if you don’t like it here (you obviously haven’t mastered the English language after 23 years), feel free to pack up your belongings and go back to whatever paradise you hail from.
LikeLike
“anhdrew” scribbled with a crayon: “…blacks have their own country….”
Let me guess…the name of that “country” is Africa, right?
LikeLike
I’ve lived in black neighborhoods all my life. The black ppl who lived on those streets effed up those houses. And I mean houses that were remodeled very nicely. The landlord, black or white, doesn’t have to have the energy and time to repair walls everytime nit-wits get mad and punch holes in the wall. The majority of black neighborhoods become run-down b/c of the ppl living there. It’s there responsibity to keep it clean. Believe it or not ghetto-minded females refuse to cook and clean their homes b/c they associate domestic duties w/ maid’s work nd maid’s work is ALWAYS associated w/ slavery. Many, many black ppl were NEVER slaves or from Africa. But I kinda want them to experience it so that way they’ll recognize that 1.) Nobody’s considered a slave when cleaning their own living quarters. Slavery is a sorry, played out excuse these females use for being lazy.
2.) The HARDSHIPS that real slaves endured doesn’t even compare to these females complaints concerning them having to cook clean.
Trifling ppl living in the ghetto need to take the time to make their neighborhoods a safe and clean area. What, they expecting other ppl to clean up after them? I don’t think so.
LikeLike
When whites see black ghettos? Who cares what whiteppl think! It should bother the black ppl living there that their neighborhood looks so terrible. And it oughtta bother them even more that they are the cause of the destruction.
LikeLike
I agree. It seems that some black people have just fallen into an apathetic state. It makes me sad and frightened.
LikeLike
@ Kiwi
The Blacks they are fleeing are nearly always middle-class as well: poor Blacks cannot afford to buy houses.
LikeLike
Kiwi:
Your claim supposes that school quality is, without limit, proportional to “hardness”. This is highly debatable.
LikeLike
Hey Randy, were you on vacation again, lucky duck!
LikeLike
^^ I think it’s valuable to take time to read and reflect, as well as to engage in discussion and debate.
LikeLike
@ Randy
So how did you enjoy Mein Kampf? 🙂
Of course, I kid.
What were you really reading?
LikeLike
What were you really reading?
Probably some skin mag. Hahahaha!
LikeLike
Randy: Your claim supposes that school quality is, without limit, proportional to “hardness”. This is highly debatable.
Kiwi:
Are you asserting that anything less than the maximum human capacity for academic rigor = mediocrity? Should young children attend classes for 18+ hours per day?
If not, then you’re acknowledging that there exists a point on the academic rigor continuum which even you would assess to be “too much”.
Therefore, judging an academic program to be “too hard” does not necessarily imply that one values mediocrity.
Like with everything else in life, there are zones of balance with regards to academics, neither too much nor too little.
LikeLike
King:
Lately, mostly children’s books. We do a lot of reading in our home, and I find it a worthwhile investment of my time to seek out interesting and thought provoking books to share with my kids.
LikeLike
@ Randy
Good . My parents did much the same with me growing up. First the shelf full of children’s book – read to me until I could read them for myself and the all those glorious library trips throughout my youth.
LikeLike
Kiwi:
You appear to have missed the point.
If one acknowledges that it’s possible for schools to be “too hard”, as you appear to have done, then one cannot correctly assume that parents who judge a particular program as being “too hard” are necessarily supporting mediocrity or acting on bias.
To reasonably form such a conclusion, an examination and assessment of such programs would be needed. This is lacking in your pronouncements.
LikeLike
Kiwi:
I tend to agree with your assessment that many American schools do not place enough emphasis on STEM skills, however, I think anyone with experience in the business world can tell you that STEM skills and “soft skills” are complementary.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to send my kids to a school that didn’t also value humanities and athletics. I don’t think you would disagree that a “balance” (in the many ways in which it can be defined) is important.
The crux of your argument appears to be that white people who move away from predominantly asian school districts do so not because of a reasonable consideration of such a balance, but rather out of uninformed bias.
This may or may not be true, but you have yet to offer any evidence for it.
LikeLike
LikeLike
These signs don’t lie:
LikeLike