Motown Awaits, Mr. Lowry
Over at NRO, editor Rich Lowry has a column on the many problems besetting Detroit. According to Lowry, Detroit's problems began in part as a result of "white flight" that was "fueled partly by racism." How Lowry can say this with a straight face, after recounting all the problems Detroit has experienced, is beyond me. The whites who left Detroit for the suburbs were simply seeking to avoid those problems, problems they had little difficulty foreseeing after Detroit was engulfed in riots. If Lowry thinks this is "racism," he is welcome to move into the inner city of Detroit to establish his non-racist bona fides.
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He would, but it's too far from his place of work.
He doesn't even need to go to Detroit; clearly Lowry's never taken the 4-line Subway above that Hadrian's Wall better known to Upper East Siders as 96th Street.
I wonder if Lowry knows Norman Podhoretz?
What did Michael Jones daughter say when he was driving through Detroit doing research? "Daddy, who broke this place".
Living 5 miles from this hole, I have plenty of answers and it isn't white people. Well, excluding the complicit liberals who helped facilitate it's demise.
Uncle Willie, an older brother of my father, moved to Detroit in the late twenties and was employed for over forty years by Ford to whom he remained very loyal.
Uncle Willie had grown up in a small but bustling sawmill town in rural Louisiana, one of eight children. Blacks and whites worked in the mill for the wages one could expect in rural sawmill town just after the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, with my grandfather earning at his highest wage eleven cents an hour. Folks, black and white, lived in shotgun sawmill houses without running water, electricity or sewer systems. What schools there were were indeed segregated by the turn of the century; but few, black or white, particularly the boys, actually attended very long. Most schools were in secession only a few months of the year. Blacks and white ate the same foods; sweated and toiled at the same jobs; and suffered and died from the same diseases.
My grandmother lost a child because my grandmother's milk was bad. The chld could not tolerate cow, goat or horse milk; and my grandmother could find no wet nurse. Uncle Willie had the same problem. as his little sister had had, but fortunately there was a black wet nurse whom he nursed for nearly two years. As an adult, Uncle Willie could dance really well; he always alleged that he had gotten the talent with the milk.
In his late teen years, just before his 18th birthday, he left town with a circus and eventually, skipping over many stories, found himself in Detroit where he worked and lived until he died in his mid-eighties.
In the early sixties, before the riots of that decade, we visited him. He lived in a beautiful neighborhood. One night at supper, as I recall, with several neighbors present, the topic - a topic of which I had never heard - came up: "block busting." I was given to understand that blacks would buy a house on a street; then the immediate neighbors would be prompted to move, and blacks would take their homes until the block was "busted" of whites. I remember is neighbors being very concerned at the prospect. Uncle Willie, on the other hand, emphatically stated that he had grown up with blacks and that their being his neighbors would be no cause for him to move. However, the riots and the change, unanticipated by Unicle Willie, which actually came with the demographic shift, completely altered Uncle Willie's position. He moved.
On a visit home to Louisiana in the early 70's, he said that he had not anticipated the rise of crime, the devaluation of property, the general brokenness which would come with the shift and the simple lack of manners and propriety.
I suppose that in the mantra of the Marxist narrative Uncle Willie was a racist. But he did not operate in that mantra and neither do I. Who would indeed care, save for the fact that the mantra is use as a weapon to deconstruct our culture with "guilt" and "victm sentimentality."
If any attempt to notice trends and patterns of behavior among a specific group of people (in this case inner city blacks) is considered racist, then anyone on this planet with two eyes and ears will eventually be branded as such.
Perhaps the word 'racist' is so liberally used because of the extreme individualism that is at the foundation of most American politics.
"He doesn’t even need to go to Detroit; clearly Lowry's never taken the 4-line Subway above that Hadrian’s Wall better known to Upper East Siders as 96th Street."
I take the 6 and the 1 into Manhattan and back to the Bronx everyday and I agree wholeheartedly.
I was born and raised in Detroit and moved out of "the city" when I was 22. I saw neighborhood after neighborhood fall into ruin, and finally began to see the ruin in my neighborhood.
My family was victimized by violent crime, taunts, theft, destruction of property, and generally felt unwelcomed in our city. After my material grandfather had a stroke he had a put to his head during a robber; during a hospitalization, we found a stray bullet in his front room. In fifth grade, a classmate's father, Michael Bossuyt, and one of my former soccer coaches, was tied & beaten and shot in the head with his police revolver while investigating a break-in. The summer before leaving, a mother and daughter was gagged and bound as two lads burglerized the home down the street from us.
Flight happened - but it was flight to safety and to some sense of civilization.
"If Lowry thinks this is “racism,” he is welcome to move into the inner city of Detroit to establish his non-racist bona fides."
How about on October 30, a.k.a. Devil's Night, when Detroiters celebrate the day before Halloween by setting fire to abandoned buildings, spraying gunfire, maybe going all-out and robbing a few stores, as if Motown doesn't see enough of this type of action the other 364 days of the year?
Rich will be setting a nice non-racist example for the intolerant Michigan white middle-class. And anyway there's bound to be a nice apartment building left in there for him somewhere. Even after the '43 riots. And the '67 riots. And the Coleman Young administration.
I have read Chronicles for years. I started because I loved the subtitle: A Magazine of American Culture. But this blog seems to not value culture. Race explains everything.
Had the argument been more economic, I would not have been disappointed. Detroit has been hit hard by the decline and dismemberment of our automotive industry. Of course, as a culturist, I would have reminded folks that sometimes poverty is not accompanied by crime and divorce. But I would have accepted it as a contributing factor.
But the arguments are often, unlike the magazine, purely racist on this blog. All blacks and Jews are evil. All whites are good. The only hope is a race war. Well, I guess I do not need to read about culture anymore.
Our whole society has slid in the last 40 years. Whites' genes have not made them impervious to this. Our society has not slid because our genes are mutating. Jewish academics have been especially instrumental in this, but this cultural propensity is not shared by all (me for example). Genes are not destiny.
Chronicles magazine's focus on culture and its decline often saddens me. Then again, the fact that they educate and offer lectures provides hope. Our culture can rise as well as decline. People, in the singular and plural can be improved. But this blogs relentless racism undermines Chronicle's message. It is a shame to bring ugly futility to a project as noble as Chronicle's.
http://www.culturism.us
Of course the decline of the auto industry is a major part of the reason for Detroit's decline. I have written about trade issues for both Chronicles and other publications. I wrote my one paragraph piece not to explain the reasons for Detroit's decline, but to defend those Detroiters who moved to the suburbs from Lowry's accuasation of "racism." I think Mr. Wisniewski's and Mr. Peters' personal accounts of Detroit are interesting and valuable. Alas, the same cannot be said for several other comments, which are ignorant and stupid.
The comments that I (and I believe Mr. Press) objected to appear to have been deleted, so the last sentence in my post number 10 is no longer operative.
What upsets me about Lowry is that he is mad that some white citizens made a PERSONAL DECISION to move.
We have the right to move when we want to in this nation.
If Rich Lowry things that Detroit needs more ethnic diversity and wants to "white the place up a bit", he and JPod and Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Jean Lopez and Richard Brookheiser and Larry Kudlow and especially Victor Davis Hansen can all move their broods to Detroit.
The whites in Detroit left because they wanted to feel safe. Period. Detroit in the seventies and eighties and nineties was a violent, dirty place. Anyone will tell you that.
National Review is morphing into the New Republic.
Mr. Piatak, as usual, makes an excellent point. Periodically we hear that the NAACP or some similar leftist organization has deemed Chicago or Cleveland the most segregated cities in America, which is adduced as proof of the racism of whites who fled to the suburbs. The fact is, that at least since the mid-sixties, the culture of the mostly black underclass has resulted in increased crime, deteriorating housing, awful schools and inefficient, incompetent and corrupt local government in most cities with large black populations. It is completely understandable that anyone sane person, white or black, would want to escape such disasters, and most do when they are able. Racism is not the reason .
It is reassuring to see that Mr. Lowery has caught up to liberals on yet another issue.
And, adding to others' comments, what about those blacks whose economic fortunes have permitted them to flee the inner cities for the same suburbs in which whites have landed? Are they somehow acting out of racism as well?
The poster who wrote that NR is becoming the New Republic had it exactly right.
Mr. Piatak: Great post. Rich Lowry, along with Ramesh Ponnuru, is the most annoying commentator at NR. Both come off as whining women. Many of Lowry's articles result in nothing but the heckling of traditional American conservatives. Heaven forbid that people are attached to their towns, ancestors, and ways of life.
John Press: N.B. 'culture' is largely a creation of the 19th century, at least as we understand it. Cicero did not write about preserving "Roman culture," but rather the mos maiorum, the tradition of his ancestors. But, I suppose, the word is here to stay. Chronicles in Sept. 1994 published the essay "To Hell with Culture" by John Lukacs, which you can special order by emailing the Chronicles subscription office.
Unfortunately, this site (and TakiMag) has been infiltrated by some uncivil knuckleheads, who, by their bad manners, undermine their own cause.
"And, adding to others’ comments, what about those blacks whose economic fortunes have permitted them to flee the inner cities for the same suburbs in which whites have landed? Are they somehow acting out of racism as well?"
I lived in Miami, Florida for several years, the last of which were spent in Coconut Grove, one of the oldest neighbourhoods and despite absorption into the City, proximity to downtown and gentrification, the only one that retains any sort of distinctly Southern pre-great migration character. There's a fairly clean line between the "black" and "white" ends of the neighbourhood. A couple of developments are extremely affluent, but the "shadier" quarters are well-known for drug deals (which appear to be frequently resold at thousand-percent markups at the Flamingo on South Beach). Residents in all sections understand that you do not leave anything inside your car, nor park on the street, nor leave your quarters unblocked.
At work one day a black client asked me where I lived. When I said Coconut Grove, her eyes went huge, and she asked me, almost in a whisper, "Has your house been broken into yet?"
White nationalism aside, there seems to be no solution to this madness. Desegregation came about not from some sudden enlightenment but through the rupturing of familial, religious and communal constraints and institutions that provided people with secure bases to live out of. In post-war America these largely disappeared, along with any potential that different groups could treat each other civilly. It is hard to identify with anything but a visible racial group when your family or autonomous community no longer exists--and it is that much easier to take the face off of the opposing group.
It is indeed absurd to imply that white flight is due to racism. As one who grew up in an inner city Cleveland neighborhood, I can speak to this topic. It is not racism to want to be able to walk down the street with some measure of safety. It is not racism to desire to sleep at night without the continuous din of gunshots, sirens, and barking dogs. It is not racism to hope that your home value will at least remain constant over your lifetime. When I finally left in the early 90's I could not sell the family home for $10,000. Why is it that Bush and Bernanke are quick to bail out the "wizards" of Wall Street, but ignore or worsen the plight of urban dwellers when their neighborhoods become trashed? Why is it that Bush is more interested in rebuilding Iraq (albeit, a nation he is largely responsible for destroying) than the numerous urban hell holes across our country?
Does Lowry deem it racism when blacks escape their brothers in the ghetto because they worked hard to get a better salary? Or does he point out the racism of black crooks who target the dwindling white population in their crumbling neighborhoods because they know that's where the "easy" money lies? Or the racism of black thugs who target other blacks because they know they will more likely get away with their crimes?
The plight of inner cities is the result of several factors but racism is certainly not one of them. I'm not saying federal handouts are needed, but something could be done to improve safety and quality of life. In my opinion, local government should shoulder most of the burden. Though terrible local government plagues Cleveland (and other major cities) to this day.
Instead, the government does nothing positive. Worse, those who want to flee or have fled are not-so-subtly called racists (to borrow from the neocon lexicon, how about "defeatists" too?). Mr. Lowry, you don't know what you're talking about, you annoy me, and you are not worth arguing with.
In an ideal world we would all get along. As Mr. Piatak suggests, perhaps Mr. Lowry could show us the way and move into an urban ghetto. I'm sure he would do so... He's not a (gasp!) racist, is he?
Like hundreds of thousands of other whites that grew up in Prince George's County(Maryland suburbs to the immediate east of Washington DC), I fled that jurisdiction as it became black-majority. I don't think most of us left out of racial hatred but out of fear of violence, a decrease in the quality of schools and a general decline in civilized life. These white-flighters have made the Maryland exurbs more friendly to Republican politics and even provided the difference in electing a Republican governor in 2002 and in making the Maryland legislature, once almost monolithically Democratic, more congenial to the Republican Party and conservative politics.
NATIONAL REVIEW is fond of reading all sorts of conservatives out of its orbit. Does Richard Lowry wish to read out all white-flighters out of the realm of "respectable" conservatism as well? Perhaps Lowry and Frum and Brookhiser and company would relegate conservatism to a few choice Manhattan reading rooms.
Do I sense another "provo" vs. "cosmo" struggle as the cosmos look down their noses once again at the provos for acting upon a basic human instinct to stay alive, healthy and prosperous?
Yes deindustrialism hurt but if the city had been doing its job to provide basic services, keeping neighborhoods together and protecting its citizens regardless of race, most people would have stayed instead of fled. Thats's why cities like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Boston, et al. still have a decent amount of whites compared to Detroit or Atlanta or East St. Louis.
In any case it was a lose-lose either way. Whites may very well have escaped crime and drugs but they lost themselves and their identities in suburbs and now the exburbs which they have fled to like a bow echo further and further away, gobbling up farmland and small towns along the way
Nobody won in the end.
Has anyone thought of asking Lowry what exactly "racism" is?
Although E, Michael Jones and Sean Scallon romanticize the old ethnic neighborhoods of the Urban-Industrial America of the 1960s, let us remember that owning a piece of land larger than a row house is also part of the romantic American dream. Although I plead guilty to living in an atomized world to a degree on Maryland's Eastern Shore, my six(so far) children have a two acre spread in which to roam. We keep chickens and plant a rather large garden on our land. Two acres of land may not have been what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he conceptualized an agrarian paradise but it is what I have for the time being.
Yes, if Detroit were 90% white, the decline of the auto industry would have resulted in the same pathologies! The transformation of Detroit into a hell-hole with no hope of recovery is entirely explained by cultural and economic factors.
To each his own Derek. Some romanticize the agrarian lifeystyle, others remember the old neighborhood with fondness.
@20: And in defense of row houses, speaking as a proponent of urbanism if you're not going to use all the space, you don't need it and shouldn' bother with it. But two acres of land is at least a veritably-sized plot for a decent home (as opposed to the little tiles of grass upon which ugly asymmetrical McMansions are planted), and you're definitely putting it to good use.
By the way, just my opinion, but upward mobility (which should be called "outward mobility"), the "American Dream," and even Thomas Jefferson are rather overrated.
"Yes deindustrialism hurt but if the city had been doing its job to provide basic services, keeping neighborhoods together and protecting its citizens regardless of race, most people would have stayed instead of fled. Thats’s why cities like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Boston, et al. still have a decent amount of whites compared to Detroit or Atlanta or East St. Louis."
It's a matter of degree. There was a lot of incompetence and corruption in most of those cities and they all drove away considerable portions of their white population, but you're right that Detroit was a particularly thorough case of destruction.
The Automotive industry began to decline in Detroit in the late 1970's - a good decade after Detroit began to fall into ruin. The Automotive industry's retreat had nothing to do with un-wed teenage mothers and the root cause of Detroit's problems- the collapse of families.
I agree that the old urban ethnic neighborhoods had a lot of good to say about them. In nearby Baltimore, the Baltimore of a tavern on every corner, dozens of Catholic churches brimming with families, and Lithuanian-American Johnny Unitas and the Colts, the city was a civilized place in which to live until forty years ago. But the Baltimore of Unitas, Thomas D'Alessandro(father of the lovely Mrs. Pelosi) and William Donald Schaefer is no more and has degenerated into a barbarian wasteland but for a few left-wing New Class enclaves like Federal Hill and Canton. The Baltimore of Johnny Unitas is as dead as that of Babe Ruth, H.R. Mencken and Edgar Allen Poe. Mourn the dead city of Baltimore.
True racism is excusing rampant crime and immorality for the sake of blaming white America(or any America) for something that they are simply not guilty of. If we entertain for a moment the idea that some or most white people in America are indeed 'racist,' how is that pertinent to the major problems facing inner city minorities? The connection is not as obvious as usually thought. Illegitimacy, crime, lack of education, and general moral poverty are issues that do not necessarily apply to all non-white people in large cities but they apply to many. These problems are not the result of white racism, and to say so only demonstrates and insincere sympathy for those who suffer in these places daily. Many white people hate Jews, some openly, yet this has done absolutely nothing to prevent Jewish-American success in this country. Ultimately, though, moral transformation in these communities will be up to the people who live within them.
If white students and, teachers are needed for black students to succeed ("separate, but equal is inherently unequal"- presumably as a natural law, not based on the lack of funds), it only makes sense for the left to think that the flight of whites would be detrimental to blacks, who need the help of whites to succeed.
This seems to be the belief of many on the left and, perhaps betrays a sense of white superiority over blacks. These white supremacists from the left think whites must still work to civilize blacks, although they wouldn't describe it in those terms.
Separate but equal might work if everyone had access to the same funds and, the ability to run their own communities. However, if you like the centrally managed society created by social engineers and, corporate leaders, blacks have no hope, but to be brought into the over-credentialed, over-regulated, bureaucratic society of that most whites give nary a second thought.
Let's concede some of these "ethnic whites" were racist. I have no doubt that some were. But many, probably most, were not. That is, they had black acquaintences and friends in the "service," believed everyone deserved a fair shake, and did not like the kind of bigotry and exclusion their Polish and Italian ancestors had been subject to. In other words, they thought a man, as an individual, deserved to be judged by his merits.
But group judgmeents about things like neighborhood demographics are different. They must be about group tendencies, known facts, and things like trends and group behavior. Everyone, including many blacks, know that poor blacks ruin neighborhoods. With them comes increased crime, disorder, wild children, and all the rest. Decent blacks are as victimized by decent whites.
When rooted in a stable society where whites have familiarity with and willingness to demand adherence by blacks to standards (and where black leaders work with whites to demand this adherence), blacks and whites get along better and both profit. Much of the rural south, in spite of its reputation for racism, has this reputation. Whites are not as easily cowed there by charges of racism; at the same time, most of the last two generations have abandoned the mean-spiritedness that characterized the social control of the past. Black leaders and families still do their job, even if there is some gap with whites. The dislocated blacks of the urban north, by contrast, are less rooted, less religious, and more angry than their Southern Cousins. Even today, it's not uncommon for blacks to send their out-of-control sons and daughters down south to live with aunts and uncles and get a taste of hard work and decent values.
There is a cultural element to the demise of Detroit under a black majority, but that's not all there is to it. Even down south in places like New Orleans, cities have suffered by the dislocation of rural blacks to cities where they are cut off from family, tradition, church, and the benign influence of white leadership. The white and Hispanic street gangs of the 50s attest that this is not only a black phenomenon. But to deny differences in the races that simply look at how things are, while remaining somewhat agnostic about the exact mix of genetics and culture, does conservatism a disservice. Conservatism should be, above all, a philosophy of hard-headed realism tempered by Christian compassion. Lowry's sentimentality is neither.
Failure to be realistic about race is the greatest threat to the United States and the western world. Having the luxury of being able to stick our collective heads in the sand and pretending that race differences don't exist have long gone. What race dominates in an American town or city is a good indicator of whether or not that town or city is a desirable place to live.
It is an indisputable fact that every race in the world wants to emigrate to predominantly white countries. This is not because the racist gods have magically given the white people more money or beautiful cities but because white people have created these cities and societies.
Western Europe has been devastated twice in the past 100 years and has been rebuilt beautifully each time. This was due to the fact that western Europe is inhabited by white people and that white people have a talent for creating order! Blacks on the other hand, have taken what was once a very impressive city (Detroit) and have taken less than 50 years to turn it into what it is today. Liberals and their brethren can call it racism, I call it extreme disparity of racial ability!
Many white people look at Obama, Opera and Condoleeza and exclaim; "what you are saying isn't true! They act just like whites and can achieve just what whites can achieve." This is my answer to that statement. When you are talking about racial intelligence, you are talking about averages. Every race has it's high achievers and low achievers. The above mentioned blacks are the high achievers of their race. The problem is with the numbers. For every black with an IQ of 150 you probably have one hundred times as many whites with over that IQ score. Sorry, people with IQ's over 150 are the movers and shakers of society!
IQ isn't the only predictor of racial performance. Self control, ability to work with others, plus many other factors will influence racial performance. Taking these into consideration would make the sensible and honest person lead to the conclusion that racial separation wasn't the great evil that Liberals make it out to be, but the only logical way to organize a society with many disparate
races.
Very good one and all above...the Jack Gates seal of good questioning (which is tantamount to observation) is awarded to you ALL, the few.
Why? Questioning reveals the piety in thought - so as to avoid what may be piously fraudulent along the way in time...
who can suffer much longer pious frauds? But I think we're doing ok.
I say old chaps - carry on!
Why does this sort of thing happen in places like Detroit but not in evil backward places like South Carolina and Mississippi?
Go to city-data.com and check out their list of the "top 100 least-safe cities (pop. 5000+)." Detroit is #30. Lancaster, S.C is #8 and Lake City, S.C. is #27. Atlanta is #13. Six of the "top 100 least safe cities" are in South Carolina, and most are in the South. In 2004, according to the census bureau, South Carolina had the highest violent crime rate of any U.S. state despite not having a single large city.
Although Southern whites on average are more violent and criminal than Northern whites, the primary reason for such facts is obvious to anyone with even a modicum of realism and honesty. Thomas Sowell and Prof. Wilson are both wrong in emphasizing culture. Neither "rednecks" nor "yankees" are to blame for the unique criminal tendencies of blacks. Blacks are blacks, whether they live in Detroit, South Carolina, Toronto, Haiti, London, Brazil, or darkest Africa.
I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier. Tom Piatak, thanks for bringing this up. The Lowry's of this world give cities a bad name. Mr. Peters (@#4), your Uncle Willie is the salt of the earth that shows how all the ideologues of the world are evil. The particular, the real; the abstract, the Lowry.