[Reader-list] American Builds A Dream World -- And Moves Into It

[Kendall Clark]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 05:40:24PM -0500, t byfield wrote:
> the US has almost 300 million people in it, and is famously -- and 
> truly -- fantastically diverse. anyone who makes a blanket general-
> ization like 'blacks and whites don't want to live together' about 
> this population is either an idiot or an ideologue, and maybe even
> *both*. 

Since roughly the point at American apartheid *formally* ended for African
Americans, with passage of the Civil Rights and Voting acts of the early and
mid-60s, followed by spasms of civil unrest in successive summers in big
cities across the country, white people have been falling all over
themselves to leave big cities, as fast as humanly possible, to avoid living
in close proximity to African Americans. 

White flight is about many things, and it isn't simply reducible to white
racism, but white racism has played a key role in this migration which has
literally reshaped by scaring the face of urban America. Among the many
ill-effects, public transit budgets and federal highway spending are
distorted in order to cater to workers (the super majority of whom are
white) who live 30, 40, even 60+ miles from their workplace. After the
predictable shifts in tax base, America has developed a thoroughly
segregated school system, one part of which is white, suburban (or
exoburban, if you prefer), and well-funded; the other which is non-white,
urban, and tragically under funded. Lots of predictable social ills follow
from that systematic pattern of attention and neglect.

The waning political power of cities -- where suburbanites like to work,
shop, and be entertained, but for which they want to pay no or as little tax
as possible -- has meant that politicians can simultaneously pander to white
suburban interests and play upon white suburban fears of the city, which
both represents and is represented by the unconstrained, unconstrainable
urban Other -- the black welfare queen, the looting Mexican illegal, the
addled crack addict and gang banger, all of which play a crucial role in the
racial subtext of American politics.

Kendall Clark
-- 
Jazz is only what you are. -- Louis Armstrong