June 17, 2013

Middle class blacks v. underclass blacks in suburban Michigan

Corey Williams of the Associated Press reports on the traditionally middle class Detroit suburb of Southfield, which has gone from 54% black in 2000 to 70% black in 2010. 
Three years ago, Lamar Grace left Detroit for the suburb of Southfield. He got a good deal — a 3,000-square-foot colonial that once was worth $220,000. In foreclosure, he paid $109,000.
The neighbors were not pleased.
"They don't want to live next door to ghetto folks," he says.
That his neighbors are black, like Grace, is immaterial. Many in the black middle class moved out of Detroit and settled in the northern suburbs years ago; now, due to foreclosures, it is easy to buy or rent houses on the cheap here.

Middle class blacks tend not to be penny-pinchers, so I suspect a fair number got caught up in cash-out refinancings during the subprime bubble.
The result has been a new, poorer wave of arrivals from the city, and growing tensions between established residents and the newcome ...
People like John Clanton, a retired auto worker, say the new arrivals have brought behavior more common in the inner city — increased trash, adults and children on the streets at all times of the night, a disregard for others' property. 
"During the summer months, I sat in the garage and at 3 o'clock in the morning you see them walking up and the down the streets on their cell phones talking," Clanton says. "They pull up (in cars) in the middle of the street, and they'll hold a conversation. You can't get in your driveway. You blow the horn and they look back at you and keep on talking. That's all Detroit."

The tensions have not gone unnoticed by local officials. 
"I've got people of color who don't want people of color to move into the city," says Southfield Police Chief Joseph Thomas, who is himself black. "It's not a black-white thing. This is a black-black thing. My six-figure blacks are very concerned about multiple-family, economically depressed people moving into rental homes and apartments, bringing in their bad behaviors." 
For example, "They still think it's OK to play basketball at 3 o'clock in the morning; it's OK to play football in the streets when there's a car coming; it's OK to walk down the streets three abreast. That's unacceptable in this city." 
Thomas has seen the desperation of the new arrivals. His officers, handling complaints, have found two or more families living in a single house, pooling their money for rent. They have "no food in the refrigerator and no furniture," Thomas says. "They can't afford the food. They can't afford the furniture." But they were eager to flee the gunfire of their old neighborhoods in Detroit. 
The foreclosure crisis made it possible. 
"We had a large number of people who have purchased homes from 2005 on, where the banks were very generous with their credit and they've allowed for people without documentation and income verification to borrow 95 to 100 percent of home values," Southfield Treasurer Irv Lowenberg says. "Many purchased homes when they had two jobs in the household and one of the jobs was lost. 
"As values began dropping, people were looking around and saying 'Why should I stay and pay my mortgage when other people aren't?' They decided to hand the keys back to the bank." 
Many of the foreclosed upon Southfield homes were going for $40,000 to $60,000. 
... With so many empty houses available, rents also dipped by hundreds of dollars. Renters increased from about 13,100 in 2006 to 15,400 in 2009. 
Now, suburbs closest to big cities are "bedeviled" by the same problems that helped spur urban flight decades ago, Schragger adds. "And you're seeing further flight out. Rising crime levels, some rising levels of disorder."

These were the things that prompted Richard Twiggs to leave Detroit 23 years ago for the safety, quiet and peace of mind Southfield offered. 
"The reason suburbs are the way they are is because a certain element can't afford to live in your community," adds Twiggs, a 54-year-old printer. "If you have $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 homes you're relatively secure in the fact that (the homeowners) are people who can afford it. 
"But when you have this crash, people who normally couldn't afford to live in Southfield are moving in. When you have a house for $9,900 on the corner over there — that just destroys my property." 
The pride that comes with home ownership and a large financial investment in the property is missing, says Clanton, who lives across the street from Twiggs on Stahelin, about a half-mile north of Detroit. Back yards are deep and mostly tree-shaded. Sidewalks are few. 
"I treasure what I bought," Clanton says. "I want to keep it, but I don't need somebody to come in and throw their garbage on mine. Why would they come and make our lives miserable because they don't care?" 
Though they acknowledge they would lose money by selling their current homes, Clanton and Twiggs are contemplating moving further north. 

So, middle class blacks are following middle class whites to the exurbs. But if gasoline goes to $10 per gallon, how will that work out?

In the very long run, lower class blacks will likely end up warehoused in small towns in the middle of nowhere. But, small towns have far fewer surplus resources to support ghetto blacks than do rich big cities like New York and Washington D.C. that are currently shoving them out. So, it's likely that small towns that tip black will be chewed up rapidly and then begin depopulating as the least dysfunctional poor blacks get out. (For example, the population of East St. Louis has dropped from 82,000 to 27,000.) So, there will be a lot of churn in rural America, which I guess is good for the real estate and homebuilding industries.
Sheryll Cashin, who teaches constitutional law and race and American law at Georgetown University, says it would be a shame if black flight from the city set off black flight from the near suburbs. 
Some blacks just don't want to live near other blacks, she says: "There is classism within the black community. The foreclosure crisis may be accelerating it." But she says middle-class blacks, like middle-class whites, are also put off by behavior of impoverished blacks who "have developed their own culture, one that is very different from mainstream America."
Those who contemplate fleeing have fallen into what Cashin calls the "black middle-class dilemma." 
"You have a choice of whether you are willing to be around your people or go 180 degrees in the other direction," she says. "To the higher income black people, if you don't want to love and help your lower-income black brethren, why would you expect white people to? If you can't do it, no one in society can do it. You can try to flee or you can be part of the solution."

Racism as an all-purpose explanation for black dysfunction is a two-edged sword for non-dysfunctional blacks. It justifies all sorts of affirmative action and social service jobs that middle class blacks benefit from more than underclass blacks. On the other hand, it also disarms middle class blacks in trying to shame underclass blacks into acting better. Ghetto blacks have assimilated the message of American society that the highest moral priority is the War on Racism. And underclass blacks believe that by Keepin' It Real (i.e., acting in a selfish, anti-social manner), they are fighting the good fight against Racism. Of course, this also makes them extremely obnoxious to middle class blacks who can't get away from them.

In Southfield, the middle class blacks are using the police power to be obnoxious back:
Southfield officials say one solution to changing neighborhoods is blight enforcement, other ordinances and costly fines. The idea, said the police chief, Thomas, is not to chase people away, but to help them assimilate. 
Soon after Grace, the telephone company analyst, moved into his house, he was cited for parking a small trailer on the property and storing interior doors outside. These are things that would have drawn little notice in Detroit amid the crime and failing schools, he said.

He paid $400 in fines, got rid of the doors and put the trailer in paid storage. 
... He was fined $200 for noxious weeds because the grass was too high and dandelions covered much of the front lawn. 

Uh, oh. Better get too work on the dandelions on my lawn.

But, really, there's no end to the way nice things are nicer than not nice things. For example, I have one of the scruffier lawns on the block (and the lady with a similarly mediocre lawn across the street is 98 years old). But, instead of getting fined $200, I once got paid $2,000 to rent out my lawn for a day because a company shooting a beer commercial nearby needed to shoot 3 seconds of the Average American Beerdrinker's Lawn and my neighbors' Marathon-sodded lawns look like the Average American Pinot Noir Sipper's Lawn.
"It wouldn't happen in Detroit," he says. "Your property is pretty much your property. I think, here, they are going a little overboard."

Obviously, it would be nicer to have a self-disciplining culture (and sending the cops out to enforce a lot of neatness laws sounds like an invitation to corruption). Still, this seems like the best of a number of bad options. Hopefully, the fact that political power in Southfield is mostly black will protect the middle class from the usual federal discrimination lawsuits.

One thing I'm struck by is the lack of social science research into how to get lower class minorities to stop being such bad neighbors. Generally, research is organized either from the perspective of lower class minorities as victims of society, or, in a few cases, around preventing major crimes (J.Q. Wilson's famous "broken windows" theory). But how best to combat simple ghetto obnoxiousness, such as people strolling down the middle of the street blocking traffic, is not a popular academic topic.

For example, I haven't looked into it, but my vague impression is that over the last decade or so the LAPD has lessened the number of Mexicans who welcome in New Year's by shooting their guns in the air at midnight on January 1st. The method appears to have been to run PSA ads on TV telling people that it was against the law to shoot their guns into the air, and then killing one or two drunken shooters each New Year's Eve who wouldn't put their guns down.

For some reason, though, social scientists haven't been enthusiastic about studying this question.

Don't richwine me, bro!

110 comments:

LemmusLemmus said...

"One thing I'm struck by is the lack of social science research into how to get lower class minorities to stop being such bad neighbors."

Sure. That's the fast lane to tenure.

Orthodox said...

That's a wedge issue a mile wide sitting there for the taking.

Anonymous said...

"NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s path from security guard to security clearance

Edward Snowden dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade, yet won high-paying positions that came with overseas travel and access to some of the world’s most closely held secrets."

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/06/16/nsa_leaker_edward_snowdens_path_from_security_guard_to_security_clearance.html

"Halfway through 10th grade, during the 1998-1999 school year, Snowden dropped out of Arundel High School, where he had made little impression.

Three years later, his parents divorced. He dipped in and out of course work over the next dozen years and was eventually certified as a Microsoft Solutions Expert — a gateway to tech jobs. But Snowden felt stuck in those first years of adulthood.

In 2004, he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit but less than four months later he was discharged.

Snowden struggled through a period of joblessness, spending long nights playing computer games and chatting online.

In 2006, Snowden made a remarkable leap from security guard at the University of Maryland to security clearance. His new position with the CIA put him on the path to extensive travel, a six-figure income and extraordinary access to classified material.

How he managed that jump remains unclear."


**Some of the scuttlebutt out there is that this is about intra-gov't fighting between CIA and the Pentagon, NSA snooping being under Pentagon command. Apparently CIA has been losing power/influence to the Pentagon.

sunbeam said...

"They pull up (in cars) in the middle of the street, and they'll hold a conversation. You can't get in your driveway. You blow the horn and they look back at you and keep on talking. That's all Detroit."

That's actually a pretty southern thing to do, at least in rural areas.

But I've never seen anyone not move if a car was coming, and I've never seen anyone block someone's driveway.

You don't see it so much anymore, but when I was a kid I wouldn't have thought it unusual at all for someone in a car to have a fifteen minute conversation with someone walking. Usually they would lean on the car and talk through the rolled down window (this was pre-widespread air conditioning in cars).

Of course in those days it might have taken an hour for another car to come down the road.

I wonder if they do the "finger" up there. Not the middle finger, but if you go down the road someone in the other car will lift their index finger as you drive by, whether they know you or not. I think it is a wave, I've done it myself. No idea where this comes from. Probably another rural thing dying out even in rural areas. Not sure I have seen any people in cities do it.

Dsgntd_Plyr said...

"But how best to combat simple ghetto obnoxiousness, such as people strolling down the middle of the street blocking traffic, is not a popular academic topic."

My senior year in high school I spent 1 period-a-day as a teacher aide for my favorite teacher. The period was his lowest IQ class with the most NAMs. I noticed the worst thing about the class wasn't the low IQ, but the fact the students wouldn't shut-up and sit still.

Marc B said...

I see this sort of thing play out a lot when I am back in Memphis, and these middle class blacks don't behave as middle class as they think once they comprise 1/4 of any neighborhood. It's the same pit bull owning, porch posting, and rap blaring behavior minus the old hoopties with tricked out rims and poorly manicured lawns. They move into an area as soon as Memphis annexes it from the county.

eh said...

"There is classism within the black community.

But she won't admit that so-called white 'racism' is actually classism, too. That stuff about stopping their car in the middle of a street to have a conversation? That happens in S.F. too.

Anonymous said...

"Alabama's Football Program Is Installing A Waterfall In Its Locker Room"

http://www.businessinsider.com/sec-alabama-installing-waterfall-locker-room-2013-6

Anonymous said...

It's a good job those middle class blacks aren't white, or they'd be racists.

Anonymous said...

"A Marco Rubio Aide Sparked A Firestorm On Immigration By Saying Some American Workers 'Can't Cut It'"

http://www.businessinsider.com/marco-rubio-aide-immigration-reform-american-workers-dont-cut-it-2013-6

"U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) office sparked a bit of a firestorm on Sunday when a quote attributed to one of his aides claimed that immigration reform is necessary because some American workers "just can't cut it."

The aide made the comment to The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza in an article published early Monday morning, explaining why Rubio sided with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the issue of a guest-worker program for the construction industry.

“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,” the Rubio aide told Lizza. “There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.""

Davis said...

This reminds me of Prince George's County (America's Suburban Black Mecca). During the housing boom the black, upper-middle class went nuts with the mcmansions and Bluth style homes in general. They left behind older construction, townhomes and modest suburban single family homes.

All of the townhomes look normal from the front but the back doors and windows are covered by metal bars. The new arrivals from DC and western PG County following the bust have ghettofied the modest neighborhoods and many of the mcmansions are sitting empty to the tune of about 1 a block.

Poor blacks have filled the vacuum and I'm sure the original black homeowners aren't terribly pleased about their new neighbors. There are many pit bulls behind 3 foot fences, cars on lawns and the ever present porch-sitting and wandering around the neighborhood. There's trash on lawns (usually alcohol bottles) and blunt wrappers everywhere.

Anonymous said...

Very few, if any, "middle class" (or higher!) blacks are more than 2 degrees separated from appallingly antisocial if not criminal blacks, whether through relatives, friends, or hangers-on. I would guess that the majority are only 1 degree separated.

Anonymous said...

Pot calling the kettle black...

MKP said...

"I see this sort of thing play out a lot when I am back in Memphis, and these middle class blacks don't behave as middle class as they think once they comprise 1/4 of any neighborhood."

Exactly. I'm highly skeptical that there are large numbers of well-behaved middle class blacks who strongly object to their ghetto cousins' behavior. I mean, there are surely some - and this retired auto worker in suburban Michigan probably is one - but it's not a large demographic.

Most of the "middle class" suburban blacks that I know would react to 3 AM drinking and music in the street by joining in.

Aaron Gross said...

"Broken Windows" was not about "preventing major crimes." It was about public order, neighborhood quality of life issues exactly as described in this article. As the authors put it, they were restoring the proper attention to the "order" half of "law and order." So if you're looking for a counterpart to "broken windows" that applies here, read "Broken Windows."

When Bratton and Giuliani implemented the concept, they discovered that by stopping "disorder" misdemeanors such as turnstile-jumping, they happened to catch lots of people who were wanted for serious crimes. But preventing serious crime wasn't the motivation; it was just icing on the cake.

It's been years since I read the "Broken Windows" article, so maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I remember it.

Matthew said...

Steve, don't forget
the big 7-11 scandal
:

"Four defendants who hold both U.S. and Pakistani citizenship...prosecutors said in court papers as they highlighted foreign ties while seeking to have the defendants held without bail until trial. Another defendant is a citizen of the Philippines. The government said the defendants pocketed tens of millions of dollars in the scheme, hiding some of the money. Federal indictments naming eight men and one woman allege that since 2000 they employed more than 50 immigrants who didn’t have permission to be in the U.S."

Also, the big

Cail Corishev said...

I wonder if they do the "finger" up there. Not the middle finger, but if you go down the road someone in the other car will lift their index finger as you drive by, whether they know you or not. I think it is a wave, I've done it myself.

Yeah, it's just a quiet wave. We still do it here in the rural Midwest. Only on country roads, though, where you aren't meeting a car every few seconds, and where there's a decent chance that you know the person.

Big Bill said...

A black woman in our "changing neighborhood" in Cleveland used to pull up in front of her daughter's house at 6:15 am and honk her horn to get her grandson to come out, get in the car to go to school. After about three weeks of this, I woke up early, waited for the honking, walked to the car, and asked her to tell her grandson to be up and ready, or to get out of her car and ring the doorbell.

Her daughter came to my house later in the day, yelled at my wife and suggested that if we didnt like the noise we ahould "move to the suburbs." So we did!

We all recognized the fundamental incompatibility between the black "middle class" and white people. Black people like to "live large", God bless 'em, and they have every right to do so in their neighborhoods.

anon said...

im imagining if a white cop had said we're not pushing them out just helping them assimilate-priceless

Svigor said...

What Marc B mentions is pretty apparent on The First 48. You see quite a few relatively middle-class blacks caught up on that show. Pretty much all of the few whites are white trash.

Big Bill said...

"So, middle class blacks are following middle class whites to the exurbs. But if gasoline goes to $10 per gallon, how will that work out."

Given the fact that almost 50% of Detroit residents don't pay their property taxes, I dont think the Talented Tenth in Southfield should be tolerated. Make it a requirement that the Talented Tenth actually LIVE in Detroit and pay taxes there to prevent them from further sucking the wealth out of Detroit.

IHTG said...

Big Bill: Discriminating tenant committees are only legal in very small communities.

Anonymous said...

"One thing I'm struck by is the lack of social science research into how to get lower class minorities to stop being such bad neighbors."

I live in a multiracial neighborhood that's about 45% black (mostly poor, a few middle class), 20% poor white and 30% white liberal who want to live in a multiracial area. This is the main issue that the local neighborhood organization (mostly comprised of the white liberals) faces and that people here are working to solve, though of course they can't admit this. But in practice the main strategy seems to be similar to that in Southfield: be aggressive about calling the police, and enact tougher laws on homeowners/landowners.

I'm told that the neighborhood has improved significantly in the past 10 years (I only moved here recently), but I don't know how much of it is poor blacks behaving better and how much of it is the biggest troublemakers just leaving. So far property prices here are still low, but I expect that the long-term effects of current neighborhood revitalization efforts will be gentrification and poorer blacks moving out.

Pat Boyle said...

Snowden - I apologize for lending support to an off topic comment - may be a the first swallow of the Spring. He could very well be the annunciator of a new age.

He seems to have been a failure in all standard academia, but he did well in Microsoft certifications.

Bill Gates has spent a fortune on traditional education. Yet he himself had little use for it. He dropped out ASAP. One suspects he would have just gotten a bunch of Microsoft Certifications had such been available when he was young.

I have a bunch of Microsoft Certifications myself and I used to teach the classes that prepared people for them.

I remember a beginning networking class I taught once. There was a guy in the back who when asked told us he had failed the beginning data communications test six times. He was black and his business kept paying for his tests and tuition. They needed a black face I guess, but he wasn't ever going to pass. Unlike high school or a lot of college there is no 'social promotion'.

Snowden is probably pretty smart but also probably has some severe social problems. As standard schools lose credibility in their role as an appropriate institution for career preparation, I expect more young men to just get a technical certificate and avoid hanging around on a traditional campus for four years.

Albertosaurus

Cail Corishev said...

Very few, if any, "middle class" (or higher!) blacks are more than 2 degrees separated from appallingly antisocial if not criminal blacks, whether through relatives, friends, or hangers-on.

John Ross touched on this several years ago, in an article about how a black friend explained to him why 90% of blacks voted against a right-to-carry referendum:

"Then I am going to ask you two true-or-false questions. One: Do blacks in the city of St. Louis have large extended families?" I answered in the affirmative. "Two: Is it true that in St. Louis, over 40% of the black males between the ages of 17 and 25 have criminal records?" I told him that was also true, unfortunately.

"So here is the important question: What are the chances of a black person of voting age in St. Louis having at least one relative with a criminal record? Assume we define ‘relative’ broadly, to include the young men who father the children of our female relatives, whether married to them or not." He sat there waiting for my answer.

"Are we talking fathers, stepfathers, uncles, brothers, stepbrothers, male cousins, sons, stepsons, nephews, mothers’ boyfriends, aunts' boyfriends, sisters’ boyfriends, daughters’ boyfriends, stepdaughters’ boyfriends, female cousins’ boyfriends, nieces’ boyfriends, as well as anyone actually married to a female relative?" I asked. He nodded. "Then I’d say there's nearly 100% probability that at least one relative would have a criminal record." He smiled at me like a teacher who has just gotten the right answer from one of his slower students.

"So," I said, "I'm to believe that the black sentiment in St. Louis was ‘I wish young Tyrone would stop robbing people, but I don’t want one of the people he robs to shoot him dead.’ Is that it?" I asked.

"You’ve got it exactly," he told me.

countenance said...

East St. Louis, Illinois wasn't some little town in the middle of nowhere.

Anonymous said...

"Very few, if any, "middle class" (or higher!) blacks are more than 2 degrees separated from appallingly antisocial if not criminal blacks, whether through relatives, friends, or hangers-on. I would guess that the majority are only 1 degree separated."

Eh, it's not that uncommon among whites, either. You'd probably be surprised by how many middle to upper class Italians and Irishmen are (still) related to people with probable mob ties or just classic white-ethnic criminals.

Steve Sailer said...

One degree of separation is the premise of "The Prince of Bel-Air."

Anonymous said...

We need a link to the beer commercial in which your lawn starred.

Anonymous said...

Agree with what has been said about middle class blacks. Although some have genuine middle class values most just have a veneer of middle class superficialities like the right educational credentials and decent jobs. But scratch the surface and you'll see most of the dysfunction that they would like to blame exclusively on poor blacks. Especially regarding infidelity and out of wedlock childbearing.

Steve Sailer said...

I saw the beer commercial once on TV. It was onscreen about as long as it took to say, "Hey, there's my lawn." It took a crew of about 75 people half a day to film it.

Anonymous said...

"His officers, handling complaints, have found two or more families living in a single house, pooling their money for rent. They have 'no food in the refrigerator and no furniture,'"

The "no food" is likely B.S. Too easy to get food stamps.

"No furniture"? Yeah, I suppose.

Anonymous said...

In the very long run, lower class blacks will likely end up warehoused in small towns in the middle of nowhere.

Face it, you have to stop sending welfare checks. The only other option: you have to make daddy and mommy get fixed after the first baby or forever ban them from receiving another check from Uncle Sam or the state government.

I'm sick of paying for their contraception which goes unused. Fix 'em.

Anonymous said...

Middle class blacks tend not to be penny-pinchers, so I suspect a fair number got caught up in cash-out refinancings during the subprime bubble.

peterike said...

Will none shed a tear for the whites of Southfield?

Nanonymous said...

Sheryll D. Cashin,
B.E., Vanderbilt; M.A., Oxford; J.D., Harvard is quoted saying:

"if you don't want to love and help your lower-income black brethren, why would you expect white people to? If you can't do it, no one in society can do it. You can try to flee or you can be part of the solution"

Anyone wants to bet on where this light-skinned black Georgetown professors lives? I bet just about anything that she is not practicing what she preaches.


Anonymous said...

"Eh, it's not that uncommon among whites, either."

I know of only one relative who's spent time in prison. A brother of one of my grandmas was convicted of a white-color offense (some some sort of embezzlement, I think) long before I was born. Other than that - nothing. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, great-uncles, great-aunts, their spouses, cousins, second cousins, their spouses - nothing except for that one guy. I even know one of my fourth cousins. Nice guy.

I doubt that a record like that is very rare. And yes, I'm white.

Anonymous said...

Interesting article,

I pose this question to Mr. Sailer. Perhaps in So Cal area you have a different perspective on this and that the "middle class" blacks out there tend to be better socialized than say their East Coast/Southern brethren. From your observations, how would you classify the "talented tenth" or "middle class" blacks in the LA region? Examples might include those who are lottery winners to upper middle class high schools based on basketball/football skills and thus get to bring along their parents into the bargain to share in whatever benefits accrue them. A rising child tends to bring the relatives on board, so to speak. How would you classify the So Cal middle class blacks from those that are the subject of the Detroit suburb article?

Anonymous said...

I've known blacks who seemed very middle class in behavior, manners, tastes. All of these people had Caribbean roots. Don't get me wrong, most Caribbean blacks are not middle class. But the proportion who are is many times larger than among traditional US blacks.

I have a theory about this. The Caribbean is a very provincial part of the world. In our age cultural rot emanates from the nerve centers of civilization, slowly spreading outwards. There are places that the 1960s revolution has barely touched.

I do believe that behavior has a large genetic component. But there is a cultural component as well.
This cultural component isn't as screwed up in Caribbean blacks as in American ones.

Anonymous said...

http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/in-jeopardy-future-of-white-south-africans/

"The world’s most prominent expert on genocide, President Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch, already warned last year that the Afrikaner population could be on the verge of a government-linked extermination campaign."

David said...

>it's not that uncommon among whites, either<

We're definitely not high income (or even high-middle), but my family has zero criminals, even at its remotest extent. My father knew some crooked gamblers in his rather Dickensian youth, though, and much later a black he befriended at work completely astonished him by leveling with him about black crime rings and their doings.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I'm with nanonymous, and had the same suspicion. But even without that, look at Sheryll Cashin's choice of words "your people" black brethren" and "developed their own culture." It tells you everything you need to know. To try and get away means ostracism.

Steve Sailer said...

I haven't been to Baldwin Hills, the nice all-black neighborhood seven miles south of Beverly Hills, since the Crash, but there wasn't a blade of grass out of place in 2007. Even in poorer neighborhoods, like Florence and Normandie, where the Rodney King riot started in 1992, homes are kept up pretty well, although the commercial streets are dumps.

L.A. doesn't have a huge amount of public housing, so rising land prices squeeze out poor blacks, unlike San Francisco where Hunter's Point has been a housing project forever.

Blacks do pretty well in the entertainment industry, which generates a lot of money, and attracts ambitious, talented blacks from the rest of the country who get along pretty well with whites.

The San Fernando Valley is 4.0% black, but I can't think of any black slums left in the Valley, the way San Fernando had a dominant high school football team in the 1970s. I'm not aware of any neighborhood left in the Valley that's known for being black. There are probably a couple, but they aren't big enough to have a consistent impact on high school sports.

Googling "San Fernando Valley blacks" only brings up 11 pages, mostly from the 1990s, even though blacks must number around 60,000 or so in the Valley. As I've mentioned before, the SFV in 2013 is kind of a 1963 Stanley Kramer vision of American in a half century where blacks are integrated, middle class, and distinctive from whites mostly in being better at singing and playing basketball.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Sailer,

Thanks for the info. It sounds though like you're saying that because of the relatively low numbers of blacks in So Cal area, there's probably no long term cause for alarm out there. In other words, they're never going to gain a "foothold" over several exhurbs and also LA is so spread out. Plus, obviously they aren't the major minority to raise the warning signals over.

Because of their (relative) low numbers out there, they have no choice, so to speak, but to behave like well behaved suburbanites, right?

Thanks again.

Steve Sailer said...

In the long run, poor blacks from L.A. are going to be other people's problems.

Anonymous said...

Fleeing ghetto blacks is becoming more and more difficult as public housing projects are demolished and former tenants given Section 8 vouchers. This is especially true for rental communities. Only the highest of high end apartment communities in my part of the DC area are immune from them. And of course there's the "Mixed Income Community" laws that force new developments to include housing for poorer people also. The only way to escape the trash is to try to outrun them into the suburbs or, of course, be an elite who has the means to love poor blacks from the safety of their lily-white enclaves.

NOTA said...

Cashin's quote (I love the appropriate name, BTW) reflects a good example of why people are wise to be skeptical of calls for racial solidarity. How is that being used here? She's telling people who have decent neighborhoods, homes, streets, and lives to accept having their neighborhoods and homes and streets and lives trashed, on racial solidarity grounds--they should stick with their people, rather than try to find someplace where people don't toss garbage in their yard and make noise at all hours of the night.

One of the weirder features of US racial dialogue is that some variant of the same appeal works with many white liberals--like you're supposed to put up with trash behavior because the trash in question is black. I think this is a different kind of appeal to team spirit--liberal, anti-racist whites are told to remember that they're on the same team as underclass blacks.

Anonymous said...

I don't think Sailer would ever be richwined because:
a) He relies on funding from people who, if anything, would increasingly support him in such a "scandal". He can't lose his job over it.
b) He would never recant.
c) His counter-arguments would be devastating. Same reason Duke rarely gets airtime.
d) He would most likely enjoy being a national pariah. If anything, it would bring greater coverage to his viewpoints, greater readership to his blog, and more numerous donations.

Any attempt to richwine him would be a huge own goal.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Well, something to think about.

On a lighter note, neither CA favorite sons came away yesterday with the US Open. It's about too late for Phil and, tick, tick, tick, goes the father time-clock for Tiger.

Nicholaus's record 18 masters is looking safer and safer.

691 said...

Steve, I think you've been scooped by Ta-Nehisi. He's been arguing recently that, basically, this is exactly why middle class blacks deserve affirmative action. Since they have to take the fall for the rest of us and live with low class blacks, they should get a little something in return.

jody said...

" But how best to combat simple ghetto obnoxiousness, such as people strolling down the middle of the street blocking traffic"

is this happening everywhere? i swear, it's an epidemic. slow walking. lines of people across the road.

i now see this in towns where even 10 years ago there was none of it. gotta be extra careful when driving at night now that school is out. 5 or 6 people walking in a line down the road blocking both lanes seems to be the thing these days.

Anonymous said...

Middle Class Blacks are, as one commenter put it 'the camel's nose under the tent flap'. They're the gateway for when Pookie and Tyfeerius need to 'beat the heat' and 'hide out at cuz's'. They do the same prole bullshit with bumping their music when they come in, the same monster parties that seem to last for days, and the same random collection of people moving in and out. Hispanics are just as bad for this. at least you can talk to white proles without needing to think about how to deal with Ladarious and his cousins if it all goes south when you confront them about their bullshit.

But maybe that's what more whites need: lessons in how to confront shitty neighbors. this passive aggressive bullshit of hiding behind HOAs results in whitey getting a letter for a weed after a storm while Blacky lets them pile up for years.

More and more it seems like this craft farming trend is just an excuse for certain SWPLs to get out of the city and not look rayciss.

Buck Turgidson said...

Well, Southfield's real estate values may have taken a big hit, but that's nothing compared to the long term hit the public school reputation took. Both Southfield High and Southfield Lathrup High now are schools that few middle-class blacks would want to put their kids in, assuming they had a choice. Both schools are overwhelmingly black. Both are capable of producing an outstanding athlete or two, but their basketball and football teams don't do that well.

Blacks from Southfield have flooded northward into Birmingham and West Bloomfield schools, particularly Birmingham Groves. That's good for the teams, but bad for the MME scores.
Middle class whites are fleeing north to exurbs more than 60 or 70 miles from downtown Detroit. Extreme northern Oakland and Macomb counties are booming, but the ring suburbs are just hanging on.

As Detroit shrinks, just about every really good high school football player in the city now enrolls only at Cass Tech. They've won two straight state championships, and only the largest white Catholic high schools can even hang with them on the field.

Southfield's dying, and it's not coming back. What the long-term future is for all of Metro Detroit is not clear, but it doesn't look good.

Anonymous said...

A key concept to remember here: Regression towards the mean. This is where the real problem lies when a neighborhood starts turning black. The new black residents may very well be law-abiding, educated, middle-class professionals. Their kids are likely to be another story, as they regress towards the black population's mean for criminality and educational achievement. My next door neighbors growing up were black. The husband was an aerospace engineer and the wife was a corporate lawyer. A real life Cosby Show if you will. And their two kids were as dumb as rocks (although to the best of my knowledge, they've never seriously run afoul of the law).

Gringo said...

For an example of better off of one ethnic group helping the newer and less better off of that ethnic group, look to 19th century Jews in New York City.

By the late 1800s, there were a fair number of wealthy Jewish people in New York City- most of whom were of families that had come from Germany.

There was a flood of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late 1800s into New York City.
Wealthy Jews of German origin set up charities to help their less well off brethren from Eastern Europe.

And yes, those from Eastern Europe did have habits which did not please those from Germany. Asa a result, some of the charitable efforts were directed towards "Americanizing" the recent immigrants.

ATBOTL said...

This is a part of a coming trend of mega-ghettos, whole regions that have been denuded of whites.

Average Joe said...

We all recognized the fundamental incompatibility between the black "middle class" and white people. Black people like to "live large", God bless 'em, and they have every right to do so in their neighborhoods.

The problem is, of course, that sooner or later they are going to want your neighborhood to be their neighborhood.

Anonymous said...

Shooting the breeze on a front porch is one of the things that makes life worth living; let's not denigrate everything about black living. Plenty of white people used to kill their evenings on the front porch, they were a godsend to the elderly. I would much rather spend my wheelchair years on a porch than planted in front of a TV.

Anonymous said...

Slightly off topic but not entirely, Columbus Ohio's Juneteenth (if you don't know, don't ask) celebration was cancelled a day early when a ten year old boy was shot. A suspect was arrested Monday and he is ... wait for it ... Lovauntea J. Mickens, age 15.
One of the on-line comments on the story I present without editorial comment:

"'Lovauntea?' I could have looked at his birth certificate and told you this kid is going to end up shooting somebody before he's old enough to drive a... oops, I mean steal a car."

Zoink said...

"Very few, if any, "middle class" (or higher!) blacks are more than 2 degrees separated from appallingly antisocial if not criminal blacks"

Yes, and they are loud and disruptive when visiting Aunt Natasha's house in the suburbs.

"San Francisco where Hunter's Point has been a housing project forever."

Check out the NY Times ethnic census tract map for large California cities for 2000 and 2010. All of them have seen huge decreases in the number of black majority and plurality census tracts. San Diego now doesn't have a single black-majority census tract, which are as small as 2 blocks. SF's black neighborhood is now half the size it used to be.

SF does seem to be clinging to its public housing so like Manhattan you have the incongruous sight of unemployed loafers hanging on their stoops right in the middle of a block of shiny million dollar condos. Increasingly though public housing is filling up with elderly asians in both NYC and SF.

Anonymous said...

"... this passive aggressive bullshit of hiding behind HOAs..."

A facist HOA is your most effective defense against infiltration by the undesirable element. Facist HOA rules laying down tolerance parameters for grass height, lawn debris, house color, pet size and type, architectural elements, outbuildings, automobile parking, noise, renting, etc. can be irritating but they are like Kryptonite to the undesirable element. They find structure and organization in their lives stifling and intolerable so even if they win the Lotto they still won't be moving in.

Hunsdon said...

Fifty five comments in and no one's name checked Next Friday?

Hunsdon said...

Gringo said: And yes, those from Eastern Europe did have habits which did not please those from Germany. Asa a result, some of the charitable efforts were directed towards "Americanizing" the recent immigrants.

Hunsdon said: Hmm, so there are some things that even Jews can't do!

Anonymous said...

"This is a part of a coming trend of mega-ghettos, whole regions that have been denuded of whites."

I know you like the Baroque Cycle, Steve, but I've never known Neal Stephenson to comment on your blog.

Anonymous said...

I love this blog. The comments are as good as the posts. At least on this thread.

Anonymous said...

In the long run, poor blacks from L.A. are going to be other people's problems.

See the exportation of low income people from LA proper to Palmdale/Lancaster over the last 20 years.

Darfur Miller said...

But if gasoline goes to $10 per gallon, how will that work out?

A lot more white people will buy electric or CNG cars.

Chicago said...

Jesse Jackson's half-brother Noah Robinson is currently serving a life term for conspiracy to murder. His son is also headed for prison. Not many degrees of separation there.

ah said...

totally shocked that Steve's readers didn't notice that the town treasurer's name was Irv Loewenberg.

Das iss a black man? Nein!

Anonymous said...

Anon wrote:

"“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,” the Rubio aide told Lizza. “There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.""

From the New Yorker article.

Well, this is certainly true. The problem is that those workers, referenced in the construction industry, are usually the same kind of people who immigrated from Mexico in the first place.

Amnesty was never about workers or about efficiency.

It's ideological, from start to finish.

Anonymous said...

"The Jews have developed a wonderful tool for segregation in Israel. They have [Jewish] tenant committees who get to decide whether someone is "compatible" with the other tenants. The committee can veto the application and prevent someone from moving in. It is very effective in keeping non-Jews and Negro Jews out." - So thats what they call restrictive covenants over there.

Anonymous said...

"The "no food" is likely B.S. Too easy to get food stamps." - Those can pretty much be monetized into other items. One of the welfare ideas I've thought about was replacing the entire system with things that are not fungible: staple food,hygene items, basic clothing, and direct payments for the roof over your head, though no means testing as that inevitably gets gamed.

Ultimately if we're not going to take an active hand in controlling dysfunction then welfare is a losing proposition.

Dennis Dale said...

"There is classism within the black community"

Yes, but not really. The "ism" suffix connotes prejudice barring acceptance even where no significant differences in behavior, character or ability exist, in the same way "racism" and "sexism" do ("behaviorism" would be more accurate, if it wasn't already taken). Clearly this isn't the case here.

Orwellian language has become second nature to us--we routinely speak of post-judicial observation as prejudice.

Aaron Gross said...

If there is an Israeli Jew reading this website can you please give us more details to help us do in our country what you do in yours?

I don't know where you got your information from, but it's wrong. The grain of truth is that almost all apartment buildings are condominiums, and all condominiums have "house committees," which actually comprise all the tenants of the building.

But the house committees have no say over who moves in. You buy or rent your apartment from the current owner and then you move in. Only after you move in do you typically meet the house committee representative. Her job (it's usually a she) is to collect the monthly fees and pay the common maintenance bills. If you live in a private house or duplex, there is no housing committee at all.

There's nothing to keep Gentiles or Ethiopian Jews from moving in. It's typical for apartment buildings to have a mixture of Gentiles, Ethiopian Jews, and other Jews, depending on the neighborhood. What's not typical is for Arabs and Jews to live together, except in a few places like Haifa or Jaffa.

You implied that Israelis don't like Ethiopian Jews or wouldn't want to live near them. I might be wrong, but I don't think that's the case for most Israelis. At first, Israeli attitudes were very positive towards Ethiopian immigrants - and negative towards "Russian" immigrants. (A natural stereotype-threat experiment!) Now I think both are more normalized. Be careful not to project American black-white relations onto Israel.

Regarding what you can do: In Israel, the government was indifferent for years to mass immigration ("infiltration") from Sudan and Eritrea. It took violent protests, nearly riots, to get the government to do anything. Even now, parts of south Tel Aviv look like Africa.

So the Israeli approach is to take to the streets and demonstrate loudly and violently until the government takes action. In Israel, that's the only thing that finally worked.

Paul Mendez said...

"They pull up (in cars) in the middle of the street, and they'll hold a conversation. You can't get in your driveway. You blow the horn and they look back at you and keep on talking...

This is also standard behavior for affluent white people in SWPL neighborhoods. In addition, they'll have a Golden Retriever on a 25-yard leash blocking what's left of the street.

phil g said...

I don't know a single person in my extended family going back at least two generations both maternal and fraternal that has ever been convicted of anything greater than a speeding ticket.

Family is Danish/Swedish/English/Irish-Welsh stock settled in Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota. They were farmers and ranchers than teachers and nurses.

I doubt my experience is that rare from similar ethnic/cultural stock of people.

I'm not surprised that there's a black class hierarchy just like there's a white class hierarchy. No middle class whites want to live next to some Scotch/Irish white trash in a dilapidated house with a car or two on blocks and appliances scattered about. Neither will you find a middle class white person anywhere near a trailer park.

If I were black middle class, and I know a few who's raising their kids the right way and who live their lives similar to their white neighbors, I'd want to live around white middle class as well.

Anonymous said...

According to DC blockshopper, Sheryll Cashin lives in Shepherds Park, NW DC, which is practically in Silver Spring, I assume not too many ghetto blacks there.

We need to bring the Dirt Gap angle in here. Here in TX, the cheap land means that every neighborhood deteriorates over time, unless something specific stands in the way. Historic building preservation ordnances help a bit for the older parts, but not enough to make a difference schoolwise.

It helps if the developers had the foresight not to put in apartments, and/or were not mau-maued to do so. 'Apartment kids' are universally recognizec as the bane of a school. Fewer=better. Along with school desegregation, i believe the biggest govt push downhill was a ruling that apts can't discriminate against kids. Formerly swinging singles apartment complexes (like where Jim Lehrer met his wife) became warehouses for NAMs.

Interesting point about fascist HOAs. I appreciate them better now.

Here, the blacks have been driven out of the inner city by Hispanics. The middle class blacks want English spoken in their classrooms.

We're on the knife edge of the gentrified area (white elementary school zone, though not high school, and historic district) next to a vast Hispanic working class ghetto. Symptoms: litter, graffiti, booming bass from cars, weedy lawns, feral dogs. It's made me incredibly sympathetic to Giuliani-style fascist policing. I am constantly calling code enforcement, and surprisingly, it often works. Graffiti seems to be the easiest for them to deal with, but it's a 30 years war.

Camlost said...

Shooting the breeze on a front porch is one of the things that makes life worth living; let's not denigrate everything about black living.

LOL.

And when you come from work during the day (every day) and see the same able-bodied black neighbors across the street peering at you and learning your schedule? And when you come home from dinner 8 hours later and an even larger, boisterous group is there stagnating on the stoop?

The home break ins are not far away, and non one's going to talk.

David said...

We had to move when our starter neighborhood of all-new houses starting letting in the riff-raff on EZ mortgages in 2000-2003. Surprise, George W. Bush was wrong: there are people who definitely should NOT be fast-tracked into homes.

Cail Corishev said...

I can think of a couple people in my extended family who spent time in prison, but they went for things like check fraud or domestic abuse. They weren't out committing the kind of repeated crimes that might get them shot by a cop or armed citizen.

That's what's different for blacks, even in the middle class: odds are they're related to a few guys who are directly threatened by any increase in law and order.

Anonymous said...


For example, "They still think it's OK to play basketball at 3 o'clock in the morning; it's OK to play football in the streets when there's a car coming; it's OK to walk down the streets three abreast. That's unacceptable in this city."



In general, large important social issues like this are ignored while social scientists investigate tiny irrelevant crap like transgendered people.

Anyway, Americans, or white folks or middle class blacks, etc. do not harbor or express disdain for poverty. They just want to insulate themselves and their children from the dysfunction and violence that lead to poverty.

Mike said...

"You'd probably be surprised by how many middle to upper class Italians and Irishmen are (still) related to people with probable mob ties or just classic white-ethnic criminals."

These two groups happen to be the only groups in which you find ANYONE willing to push back against day-to-day black aggression. I'm from the latter group and am the only white person I know that wont let a black guy get away with an attempt to hustle me with violence. It is always a hustle too - blacks will never actually fight. The only ones to actually be cautious of are the skinny or short ones - they make up for their lack of physical size by being armed.

Despite what this commentator says I also have zero "white-ethnic criminals" in my extended family tree. I have had two interactions with the police after physical altercations (both Hispanic gangster types. Hispanics don't believe in one-on-one combat BTW). The police (in Socal at least) simply could not care less about people fighting each other. The "He threw the first punch" thing that everyone hides behind as a reason not to fight is not something police care about at all.

Frankly the white community is sorely lacking a stand-up-for-yourself element. People are usually stunned that I actually WANT to fight them. They are used to white people being simpering cowards.

How do you expect things to change if you wont stick up for yourself? By writing whiny comments on a blog?! I'm not advocating starting confrontations but if someone starts something for God's sake have some pride and let them know it's not OK.

Dahinda said...

"But, small towns have far fewer surplus resources to support ghetto blacks than do rich big cities like New York and Washington D.C. that are currently shoving them out. So, it's likely that small towns that tip black will be chewed up rapidly and then begin depopulating as the least dysfunctional poor blacks get out."

Chicago tore down most of its highrise housing projects in the last decade and a half. Most of the residents were given rent vouchers to move to other parts of Illinois. Many wound up in places like Peoria, which is now emptying out into huge new subdivisions which amount to a whole new Peoria being built north of the city.

Anonymous said...

An observation from the Inland Empire (the inland part of the Southern California megalopolis). Middle class blacks seem to coexist with middle class whites and middle class Mexicans pretty easily, much like the Valley. Every one I know has one (or three or ten) hell-raising brothers or sisters or cousins they complain about. Luckily for us, all of those hell-raising relatives has long since moved to St Louis, Texas, Detroit, or Atlanta. And this is in the cheapest part of Southern California.

All you guys in the Midwest and East Coast need to do to solve your problems with ghetto lawlessness is to import a couple of million Chinese to gentrify the decent parts, and import some tens of millions of Mexicans to fill the rest of the ghetto.

Aaron Gross said...

Correction to my last comment: Housing committees don't of course comprise all the people in the building. I don't know what I was trying to say there, but it didn't come out right.

Anonymous said...

Shooting the breeze on a front porch is one of the things that makes life worth living; let's not denigrate everything about black living.

Camlost has it right. First off, front porch stoops are a late 19th cent. urban thing. They were the staples of those tennant apartment rowhouses so near and dear to NY, Philly, and lots of east coast urban centers.
Back then, with no TV, no computer, no radio, no motion pictures (nickelodeons perhaps) there wasn't much to do after sundown, so those not ready for bed sat outside on porch and talked to neighbors.

Something changed after WW2, it's called modern era. Yeah. You can see it in TV show leave it to beaver in the opening scene, Wally and the Beav are walking home from school. Their neighborhood, if you look carefully, virtually has NO FRONT PORCHES AT ALL. The prefab houses did away with that, and they were right to do so.

With the advent of grills for summer, that's all now in the backyard. The family action, so to speak, takes place in the backyard among and within the family, not with the nosey prying neighbors. If you want to sit out on the BACK porch, go ahead.

Most houses these days, from McMansions to modest, still dont include a front porch, for the most part. And there's sound logic in that decision. 1. Most people dont want them anymore. 2. Camlost poster is right.





Anonymous said...

One thing I'm struck by is the lack of social science research into how to get lower class minorities to stop being such bad neighbors. Generally, research is organized either from the perspective of lower class minorities as victims of society

The second part of this quote gives you the answer to the first part. Blacks have utility as cultural (and physical) stormtroopers to the Leftist establishment. Why would they want to end that?

IHTG said...

Wait, what? Is this a repost of a story from 2011?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/28/foreclosures-helping-change-color-of-some-suburbs/?page=all

What the heck.

IHTG said...

Oh wait, the AP article is from 2011, too. What gives?

Anonymous said...

"One thing I'm struck by is the lack of social science research into how to get lower class minorities to stop being such bad neighbors."

I reckon it's pretty simple: religion and traditional two-parent families. In fact, that would probably make most people, regardless of class or race, better neighbors.

NOTA said...

Ta-Nahisi's making an argument that makes sense (and he's made variants before), but it's got more complicated and interesting implications than he's discussing.

The big idea: blacks and whites are very different, in lots of ways that are hard to measure. If you pair off blacks and whites by education, income, IQ, social class, occupation, etc., you still get significant differences. Whites have more wealth, more of the kind of connections that help them out, fewer that drag them down[1], a rather different culture in things as commonplace as more often having watched their parents bargain for cars or houses, and as obscure as having lawyers or scientists or doctors in the family so that doesn't seem like such an unattainable thing to do for a living. They live in different neighborhoods, are concentrated in different regions, are largely socialized to different norms via both local community and media, etc. There are *all kinds* of differences, which make it difficult to compare blacks' and whites' situations.

I think the implications of those differences are complicated and hard to untangle. One implication is that it's hard to tease out genetic differences between blacks and whites that lead to differences in outcomes (graduation, income, jail, etc.)--in order to make that kind of comparison, you need to try to account for any big influences on the outcomes that aren't accounted for by genetic differences. Another implication is that it's probably a lot harder to fix obvious brokenness in the black community (high illegitimacy, high crime, high dropout rate) than we'd like--those things aren't simple responses to too little money or too few jobs, they're tied up with culture and social network and neighborhoods.

[1] Presumably most of us have had experiences with family members or friends whose main effect is to drag down their family and friends. The least destructive kind of drag involves hitting you up for money, but mentally ill or drug-addicted or persistently criminal friends or relatives can cause a lot more problems. Just having bad examples for your kids hanging around is a big problem if you're trying to raise your kids to do their homework and stay out of trouble.

Bottledwater said...

Speakibg of divisions within the black community, Steve should use his nuanced understanding of race to write one of his insightful film reviews about "Darl Girls" airing on the OWN network this Sunday night at ten because it tackles the never discussed topic of colorism, where light blacks discriminate against dark black females, not just in America but in the most exotic places on Earth.

http://www.chicagonow.com/six-brown-chicks/2013/06/black-women-and-beauty-oprah-screens-dark-girls-documentary/

Anonymous said...

Camlost, I'm not trying to speak for the other commenter, but I think he (or she) meant sitting on the porch in the Southern tradition, socially acceptable, rocking-and-greeting-your-neighbors way, which is pleasant for all concerned. The situation you describe is obviously totally different, more like city stoop behavior, and I wouldn't like it across from me, either.

Anonymous said...

Well, Steve, when growing up in the SFV 50's 60's era, Blacks were confined to Pacoima & Mexicans to San Fernando with some in Canoga Park. The Chosen in Encino. The remainder of the Valley was White World.
Returned to my old haunts a few years back for a look see, driving on my childhood street we got some very hard looks from a passing car of Cholos. Adios SFV.

Anonymous said...

phil g -Neither will you find a middle class white person anywhere near a trailer park.

Of course.

FWIW I did look into trailer park numbers a while ago and like so many other anti-white stereotypes its false. Whites are less likely to be trailer dwellers per capita than blacks or hispanics. Its all in the census data somewhere.

Jefferson said...

[QUOTE] Steve Sailer said...

One degree of separation is the premise of "The Prince of Bel-Air."[/QUOTE]

Hey Steve, Will Smith's character in "The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air" was not a thug. He came from a lower class background, but he was not a thug. His character was a decent guy. He wasn't killing, raping, and or robbing anybody on the show.

E. Rekshun said...

A few years ago, a couple of street over from me, in a nice upper-middle class White neighborhood, a dentist got into an argument with the one black resident over something the black guy said or didn't say to the dentist's pre-teen son. The argument escalated to a fight between the two; and just before the black dude finished kicking azz, the White dentist pulled out a 38 and shot black dude dead.

That ended the fight, the black guy's life, and the dentist's career and freedom. He's now doing 30+ years in the state pen, his kids are growing up w/o him, and his wife divorced him.

Dr Van Nostrand said...


I don't think Sailer would ever be richwined because:
a) He relies on funding from people who, if anything, would increasingly support him in such a "scandal". He can't lose his job over it.
b) He would never recant.
c) His counter-arguments would be devastating. Same reason Duke rarely gets airtime.
d) He would most likely enjoy being a national pariah. If anything, it would bring greater coverage to his viewpoints, greater readership to his blog, and more numerous donations.

Any attempt to richwine him would be a huge own goal."

All good points except for that David Duke nonsense.Get a grip dude! Seriously
Anyone attempting to Richwhine Steve would look like a damn fool.Its the equivalent of closing the barn doors after the horses have bolted

Many liberals have refused to debate Heather MacDonald from the City Journal. To their credit,they have implicity accepted pre emptive defeat by conceding that she was formidable.

Dr Van Nostrand said...


"NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s path from security guard to security clearance

Seriously OT. There is are other posting dedicated to him.Basic netiquette...

Dr Van Nostrand said...

The argument escalated to a fight between the two; and just before the black dude finished kicking azz, the White dentist pulled out a 38 and shot black dude dead.

That ended the fight, the black guy's life, and the dentist's career and freedom. He's now doing 30+ years in the state pen, his kids are growing up w/o him, and his wife divorced him."

A white on black crime wouldve been front page news. Any links?

Even an unPC crime like this has justifiable homicide written all over it if the black guy was indeed as violent as you claim.
And 30+ years ,in which era is this?

Marlo said...

^Best thing about Steve-O's: the hilarious fabrications.

NOTA said:"She's telling people who have decent neighborhoods, homes, streets, and lives to accept having their neighborhoods and homes and streets and lives trashed, on racial solidarity grounds--they should stick with their people, rather than try to find someplace where people don't toss garbage in their yard and make noise at all hours of the night. "

This is false. She's suggesting that, by moving away, the middle class blacks would bypass an opportunity to reform the ghetto ones. For example, the middle class could agree to buy food for the poor under the condition that they change their behavior.Blacks, of course, would never think of doing this; they don't really believe in racial solidarity.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 6/18/13, 5:37 AM:

Do you live in Dallas's Hollywood/Santa Monica? Thinking of moving there in the fall...care to discuss?

Anonymous said...

Well, historically speaking roughly three things have caused large communities of black people to act highly civilized: slavery, colonialism and Islam.

Have fun with that one.

Dr Van Nostrand said...

.Blacks, of course, would never think of doing this; they don't really believe in racial solidarity."

Well yes but it does not seem like they see it that way. To middle class blacks it is more class than race and to a considerable extant they ARE quite concerned as to how they are viewed by white folk and look upon the ghetto blacks as making them look bad in front of whites.Loser ghetto blacks have no recourse but to yell Uncle Tom or House Negro at them

Much as September 11th was a part of an intra Arab war as well gaining street cred for hitting the toughest guy in the prison yard(anti Saudi radicals hit the most powerful patron of Saudi Arabia), perhaps black on white violence could be a part of the struggle by ghetto blacks into showing the middle class blacks who is boss.

Dr Van Nostrand said...


Well, historically speaking roughly three things have caused large communities of black people to act highly civilized: slavery, colonialism and Islam.

Have fun with that one."

Ethiopia,Egypt(to some extent),Punt,Sheba(Eritrea),Zimbabwe.

Rest of it was pretty much unexplored tribal jungle stuff. They didnt bother no one as no one bothered them

And what civilized Europeans was incredibly brutal treatment by swarthiest of them (Romans) and later an Asiatic export-a Jewish cult of a dying god.

Have fun with that

Marlo said...

Dr Van Nostrand said:
"Well yes but it does not seem like they see it that way. To middle class blacks it is more class than race and to a considerable extant they ARE quite concerned as to how they are viewed by white folk and look upon the ghetto blacks as making them look bad in front of whites.Loser ghetto blacks have no recourse but to yell Uncle Tom or House Negro at them"

You're right that middle class blacks are concerned with how white people view them. So concerned in fact that they'd rather move to white neighborhoods than improve the conditions in their own. They don't know that white folks view them negatively regardless of their behavior. Look at all the comments implying that blacks can't really be middle class, as if they enjoy living with strife.

Clearly, to whites, it's more about race than class.

Anonymous said...

So what's your point, Doc? What exactly then, is your point?

Because to imply that its NOT about race with how most blacks view the world is frankly....erroneous at best, mendacious at worst.

Middle class blacks as this particular post suggests are only 2 if not 1 degree in separation from all that nasty anti-social behaviors so commonly found among ghetto class blacks.

The middle class white suspicion is that while an individual middle class black family may indeed be upstanding and a good neighbor, what about their relatives, friends from outside the middle class neighborhood, etc? What about them? What happens when they are invited into the middle class neighborhood? Then what?

It appears that the only real recourse to the middle class black families that decide to move into and among majority white middle class neighborhoods is to simply: Cut ties with all and everything related to lower class ghetto blacks. Cut ties with those kinds of folks. And of course, don't "act" ghetto in the neighborhood.

LIke Prester John, the imaginary figment of middle ages western europe, middle class white people (including SWPL's) are just fine and dandy with having Bill Cosby's Huxtables for neighbors as long as they sound, act, and behave 99% white all the time. Like Collin Powell and Condi Rice, so to speak. To the whites, those particular blacks are a okay. Those ones can get in. And of course the question is, how does the rest of the community view those particular examples of African Americans? Something traded (nixing the ghetto aspects of one's culture) for something else in return (e.g. civilized living accommodations for one's one nuclear family).
Decisions, decisions.

Who is kidding whom, at the end of the day. For most ethnics their own particular tribe or race is all that matters.

'Tis a puzzlement, a puzzlement.

JR said...

Aren't many of the same negative behaviors noticeable in low income members of all races?

E. Rekshun said...

"Very few, if any, "middle class" (or higher!) blacks are more than 2 degrees separated from appallingly antisocial if not criminal blacks, whether through relatives, friends, or hangers-on. I would guess that the majority are only 1 degree separated."

Just think how many of those black female clerks sitting down the hall from you in your government office go home each night to their convicted felon boyfriends and adult sons. Or spend one weekend a month visiting Trayvon "up state."

One such clerk that worked at a former employer lived with her baby-daddy and toddler son - the baby-maker was recently released from federal prison after serving time for armed bank robbery.

Anonymous said...

Three homes in my block were renovated then rented to ghetto blacks. They have parties that start on Thursday night and end on Sunday night. There's fighting and cursing, dumping trash right out of their cars onto the street, littering, police being called, ambulance showing up for people hurt in fights. We have worked hard all our lives, gone to college at night, graduated, put up with much prejudice at work, gone to work many times in inclement weather and this is what we get. My white counterparts don't have to deal with this behavior. We work hard all day then come home to grime and crime. I think this is being done on purpose so that the majority of Blacks can never really succeed. You hear the ghetto blacks laughing at us because we work, vote and pay taxes. My ghetto neice lives in $300,000 house and only pays $50.00 a month. Wow! that's incentive not to work.