Second, black neighborhoods are discounted in the public eye even in comparison to their income levels. I grew up in “progressive” northern Virginia, hearing about how PG County (a suburb of DC) was “ghetto.” Two decades later, when I moved next door, I was quite surprised to learn that PG County is just a middle class predominantly black county. One of the richest predominate black counties in the country, and richer than most counties in Virginia that nobody considers “the ghetto.” Those attitudes almost certainly impact peoples’ views about what places are desirable/undesirable/need renewal/etc.
Those two phenomena also intersect. Places are worth less because black people live there. Take the DC suburbs, for example. To the west and southwest of DC, you have the Virginia suburbs of Fairfax County, Alexandria, and Arlington. To the north, east, and southeast, you have the Maryland suburbs of Montgomery County and PG County. PG County is better served by Metro, both in number of lines and number of stations, than any other suburban county (and that's been true for 30+ years). In DC, property near a Metro station has appreciated incredibly over the past 25 years. Where has most of that growth happened? On the Virginia side, where there are white people and predominantly white schools. Even today, people are fighting through northern Virginia traffic from places like Reston to get to a Metro station that then takes 30 minutes to get to the city center. Meanwhile, they could get a house in a solidly middle class PG County neighborhood with a shorter trip downtown, for half the price. But they don't, because they do not want to send their kids to predominately black schools.
That was kinda my point, but black communities being over-represented among the population at risk does not mean necessarily imply that this action was a targeted predatory action against the black community. If you sample the population of these areas, you're obviously going to find samples representative of larger marginalised communities.
It’s not as simple as deciding whether or not you want to poison a town.
Racism is probably an indirect cause in this particular case because it contributed to the community's lack of power. But I also think that labelling this as racism does more to confuse rather than clarify the issue, and points to solutions along the wrong axis. If the best solution is reduction of racism, then it makes sense to call this problem caused by racism. If it's actually best solved by economic policy or legal changes, then it's probably more helpful to phrase it as an economic problem or so on. Otherwise we'll be looking in the dark for a racist bad guy to punish and solve the problem, but we won't find one.
Does it sufficiently capture reality to say that this discrimination happens to the lower class? In that case, "systemic racism" is mostly acting as shorthand for statistics that black people have less wealth on average, and points to an explanation of why. Or does this happen to black communities over and above that of other communities of comparable wealth? In that case, it makes sense to say that racism is a separate factor, beyond just economics.
I guess what I'm saying is, these are two different concepts with two different implied solutions:
A) A history of racism is why black communities are poor, and all poor communities equally suffer these burdens.
B) Black communities suffer these burdens over and above equally poor communities.
In case A, measures to increase wealth equality might solve the problem. In case B, that might not be sufficient, and deeper causes of lingering racist discrimination might need to be sought.
Just labeling the issue "systemic racism" does more to confuse rather than clarify how to solve it, I think.
I know this is tangential and a bit of a nitpick, but I feel the semantic difference here is important.
So do poorer white communities.
Poor black communities tend to be urban or suburban, right near the cities and commercial hubs where you'd want to build a chemical plant or industrial mill.
Historically and in the current day that is where the black neighborhoods are. However, living in the area for over 20 years people have always spoken better of Shirlington.
PG always had an interesting problem: middle-class professional parents, but teenagers who bought into urban gang culture for no apparent reason. This lead to a higher crime and harassment rate there, leading people to feel like it was a ghetto even if income stats wouldn't reflect.
Annandale had a similar problem, but with the Hispanic crowd.
Disclaimer: I am black. My notions come from the black community.
It’s really easy to see this as FHA published maps with lending guidelines in the mid 20th century. The redline area (is don’t write mortgages) are black neighborhoods in most cities. If you look at the zoning map, those redline areas usually align with shared residential/industrial zoning.
> The legacy of segregation in the suburbs, too, can be attributed in part to Moses’ personal biases, Caro says. The city planner didn’t want poor people of color from the city accessing Jones Beach, which was established while Moses was President of the Long Island State Park Commission, so he made it illegal for buses to travel on the parkways there. Furthermore, Caro says, “Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. ‘Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.’ So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses… this is how you can shape a metropolis for generations.”
Moses built the NYC Metro state park, expressway and parkway systems. He wasn't a fan of blacks, puerto ricans and poor jews, and deliberately built highway bridges about 4 feet too low for busses to pass, to keep "undesirables" out of Long Island beaches. This was also motivated by the attitude on Long Island, where the KKK was a major force at the time.
There's no core principles around business, and particularly at the intersection of business and local government. Realpolitik rules the day.
In terms of redlining, here's a great starting point about the city that I grew up in: http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2017/02/16/albany-redlining...
Key quote to ponder:
> "Yet New Deal housing policy also underwrote racial discrimination. The FHA refused to guarantee mortgages in neighborhoods that were under the threat of "infiltration" by black, Hispanic, or foreign families. This policy remained in force until 1950.
Although the HOLC wound down its operations in 1951, its legacy long outlived it in the form of redlining maps. Between 1935 and 1938, HOLC consulted with realtors, builders, and bankers in cities around the country. Until the passage of fair housing and fair lending laws in the 1970s, these maps (and later versions of them drawn up by local lenders) determined where mortgage money went -- and to whom."
Let's back up a second.
Are you familiar with the history of redlining in the U.S. in the 20th Century?
The plant did not just "happen to appear" in a black neighborhood. A group of someones decided where that plant was going to be installed in the first place. I'm sure there were lots of other "equally good" candidates.
Your argument would work similarly for the incarcerated. Black people make 10% of the US population yet they make 40% of the incarcerated. They lose the right to vote. There's allegedly forced labor and poor sanitary conditions.
Do you think this is also "likely incidental"? That black people "just happens to be more incarcerated" than whites? Please consider the recent US history before answering.
In some specific decisions the racial bias is all incidental. But that's still exacerbating past racism, and if even a little bit of current racism slips in it can be massively magnified. It's not cheap or unfair to highlight these effects. Decisions don't happen in a vacuum.
P much my conclusion is nobody gives a shit what happens to people in rural areas, and ESPECIALLY in the rural South. We're all out here, out of sight, out of mind, just "getting what we voted for." However, what goes on with rural black communities IS racially motivated, or maybe a better phrase is "racially justified." BUT. What goes on in Appalachia is ALSO "racially motivated/justified" in the sense that Appalachians are "white trash" and therefore "lesser than" just like black people and therefore in the eyes of some deserving of all their hardships. It's just instead of race, prejudice against Appalachians centers around having a distinct culture completely separate from the rest of America. The Appalachian dialect being synonymous with backwardness and stupidity is a stereotype over 100 years old.
It's all a caste system, and imo the whole "Trump Country" narrative just serves to reinforce it and give the rest of America an out for fully reckoning with the continuing legacy of slavery in the rural Deep South and finally just plain recognizing the legacy of extractive industry in Appalachia to begin with. The rest of America's wealth was built on the blood of both of these groups.
"Fold up the newspaper, switch off the news and unsubscribe from everything. It isnt informing you, it isnt keeeping you connected to your society, it just feels enough like is that you keep going back for a little bit more, a little bit more. And after how many decades of consuming your prefered brand content nothing has grown. Everyone trusted them and got robbed, sunk cost fallacy, move on."
This to me reads like an informative and actionable piece of information that citizens should know about.
Specifically:
- If there is scientific evidence that living in a certain area can cause cancer, that is something you should probably know.
- If there is evidence that your representatives in your state are ignoring EPA recommendations, that is something you should probably know
- If you don't understand that air quality can cause cancer, that is something you should probably know
Coverage about the opiate epidemic doesn't use personal stories to get the reader to take the issue seriously. They do it to trick the reader into thinking they care about the opiate epidemic for long enough to click some ads. If the death numbers didn't make someone shit their pants and get to work on fixing it, some pictures of white trash aren't going to either.
A person reading the news in New York would much rather hear about the problems with a failing school district in Appalachia than their own county. It (among other things) lets them project their impression of Appalacia onto the problem, and lets them avoid thinking about the fact they're already ignoring all the issues in their own schools. Approximately nobody who will effect the local school district first hears of the problems with it in the paper.
How many people who want to improve the world have actually make it their job? Or volunteer on the side? Or call local leaders every now and then? Or do as little as donate money to charities making a big impact on the world? The presence of real world issues in the news let people lie to themselves that they're doing more than consuming entertainment. The news is written with that in mind. Not consciously, no. But the system has evolved in adaptation to that constraint.
You are part of the problem.
The story makes a compelling case that it was in fact very far from incidental.