Here's What Happened

LOIE

Gold Member
May 11, 2017
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Someone in one of the threads mentioned that in the 1960s black folks seemed to be doing better, holding jobs, owning businesses, having two parent households. I'm sorry I cannot find the exact post. I tend to get lost when I go back and try to find things. I must begin to reply right away when I see something instead of thinking I will reply later. Anyway, I have some things to share:
I would answer the question of what happened by saying deliberate segregation happened. I knew a black man who lived in a large city and spoke of what was mentioned. Black people were working, families were together, neighborhoods were nice. Then, jobs began to be taken away – moved to the suburbs, taking opportunities with them. Blacks who owned cars and could drive to these jobs did so. Many eventually moved out to the burbs. When the best and the brightest moved out, many were left behind to try to make it in a deserted city. Without jobs, homes could not be purchased, it was hard to keep families together and things began a downward spiral.
"Historian Says Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos"
Fifty years after the repeal of Jim Crow, many African-Americans still live in segregated ghettos in the country's metropolitan areas. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America.
"We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls 'de-facto' — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight," Rothstein tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
"It was not the unintended effect of benign policies," he says. "It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that's the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies.”
On real estate agents' practice of "blockbusting"

In the ghettos, government policy — municipal policy, for example — denied adequate services, garbage wasn't collected frequently. African-Americans were crowded into neighborhoods in the ghetto because so much other housing was closed to them and as a result, housing prices in ghettos were much higher than similar housing in white areas. Rents were much higher than similar housing in white areas ... because you had a smaller supply. It's the basic laws of supply and demand. ... So this created slum conditions.
So when African-Americans managed to break out of those slums and buy a home in a neighboring area, whites could be persuaded that slum conditions were going to be brought with them. So the real estate agents would go into these neighborhoods and try to panic white families into selling their homes cheap to the real estate agents.
They used techniques: They would recruit blacks from the ghetto to walk around the neighborhood pushing baby carriages. They would phone call families in the white area and ask for names that were stereotypically African-American. ... All intended to give the impression that this was rapidly turning into another black slum.
The white families who panicked would then sell their homes to the real estate agents or the speculators at prices far below what they were worth. The speculators would then turn around and resell the homes to African-Americans at far more than they were worth because of the restricted supply, and this policy was called "blockbusting" and it was a policy that was condoned by state licensing boards throughout the country.
Excerpts from “American Apartheid: Segregation and the making of the Underclass,” by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton:
“In his 1980 book The Black Underclass, Douglas Glasgow argued that “racism is probably the most basic cause of the underclass condition.” In his view, the persistence of black inner city poverty stems from the systematic failure of American institutions – the schools, the courts, the welfare system, the economy, the government – to address the desperate needs of poor blacks. He argues that bureaucratic practices motivated by racism act to maintain blacks in poverty and perpetuate their underclass position.”

“Because racial segregation confines blacks to a circumscribed and disadvantaged niche in the urban spatial order, it has profound consequences for individual and family well-being.”
“For at least fifty years, African Americans were subject to a system of institutionalize housing discrimination. Each time that a legislative or judicial action was undertaken to ameliorate segregation, it was fought tenaciously by a powerful array of people who benefitted from the status quo (realtors, bankers, politicians; these actors, in turn, relied on the broader indifference and hostility of most white Americans.
Even as conditions deteriorated rapidly in segregated neighborhoods after 1960, legislative efforts to promote open housing were blocked at every juncture; and when a fair housing law finally passed in the aftermath of urban riots and the King assassination, the bill that emerged was deliberately stripped of its enforcement provisions, yielding a Fair Housing Act that was structurally flawed and all but doomed to fail. As documentation of the act’s inherent flaws accumulated, little was done to repair the situation. Until 1989, the institutionalized system of housing discrimination that perpetuated the ghetto as the enabling condition of black oppression was left intact.
Why didn’t political leaders and policymakers take forceful steps to dismantle the ghetto, especially after 1960, when violent riots and the unmistakable spread of social disorder with the black community made clear the price the nation was paying for the persistence of segregation? The simple answer sadly, is, that most people wanted blacks confined to the ghetto and were content to work around the unpleasant consequences.
Ultimate responsibility for the persistence of racial segregation rests with white America. On issues of race and residence, white America continues to be fundamentally hypocritical and self-deceiving. Whites believe that people should be able to live wherever they want to regardless of skin color, but in practice, they think that people -at lease black people -should want to live with members of their own race.
The fundamental dilemma of white America is that though it truly believes that housing markets should be fair and open, it equally does not want to live with black people.

In presenting the case for segregation’s present role as a central cause of urban poverty, we seek to end the specious opposition of race and class. The issue is not whether race or class perpetuates the urban underclass, but how race and class interact to undermine the social and economic well being of black Americans.
We argue that race operates powerfully through urban housing markets, and that racial segregation interacts with black class structure to produce a uniquely disadvantaged neighborhood environment for African Americans.
If the decline in manufacturing, the suburbanization of employment, and the proliferation of unskilled service jobs brought rising rates of poverty and income inequality for blacks, the negative consequences of these trends were exacerbated and magnified through segregation.



 
They allowed the government to corral them, wrangle them, and use them for political means.
They did not stand up and deny government interference, they went with it.

Ghetto's became ghetto's because nobody cared anymore. It's not a difficult thing to keep the yard mowed, keep the trash picked up, and create your own nice neighborhood. But they believed all the lies and promises they were told by the government. The government allowed them to start sucking down those welfare checks..........and they got lazy and fat and stupid..........and violent. Because they allowed themselves to become government cattle.

And blacks, I have found, segregate themselves. Just as the Asians do, along with all the other races. Sure, there are those that aren't afraid to get out in the world and live with other races and types of people, but on the whole, the would rather segregate themselves.

If it weren't for MLK, the blacks would have never stood up at all, for anything, other than free government handouts. They've really never fought the government, because of the "slavery" guilt trip that is still in use today. Why bite the hand that you are stealing from?
 

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