Houses Divided:A hard look at segregation in Illinois

[Texashiker]

Wow.

This entire post is devoid of reality. It also tap dances right (wing) around white flight.

You sir have no business whatsoever discussing race or racism. You're entirely too clueless.

I live near a town where one of the worst hate crimes in recent decades happened, Jasper Texas and the James Byrd jr dragging death. What about you? Ever had your community invaded by the black panthers and white nationalist at the same time? When the black panthers were marching to the court house of Jasper where were you? You were probably in jr high, or grade school.

I saw the forced integration of Vidor Texas in the 1990s. When protests were happening at the court house of Orange county due to the forced integration of Vidor, I went to the court house to observe. When groups of blacks and whites were screaming at each other face to face, Texas Rangers were calmly standing in the middle of the group.

While in high school I attended a mostly white high school, and a mostly black high school. I have seen both sides of the coin first hand.

I have seen middle class communities destroyed by poverty, drugs and gangs. When the jobs moved away, drugs and gangs moved in. Places such a downtown Port Arthur, Texas which up until the 1980s had a thriving middle class. Now those neighborhoods are low income HUD housing. Same with parts of Orange Texas. Up until the early 1980s parts of Orange were thriving because of the shipyards. When those jobs went overseas, the communities crashed and burned.

Please keep your notions that I do not know race relations to yourself.

 

[bshole]

Are we really trying to assign blame on something that people happen to do naturally?
Ethnic enclaves exist ALL over the planet. There may be some exceptions, but comfort with diversity is not our natural behavior.

Assigning the label "problem" on economically mobile people freely associating with people that share their worldview, politics and culture is important. Once the label is applied, powerful monied actors in conjunction with powerful political actors are free to apply solutions. The solution most often used is the insertion of high density low income housing into middle class neighborhoods via HUD.

I am unaware of any instance where this type of action by HUD has resulted in a lessening of segregation, it usually just resulted in people moving. It seems to be a failure in its stated objective and yet it continues to get pushed. Why? It is my belief that almost all political actions taken by our federal government are aimed at benefiting the top 1% of society, the elite. Looking at the problem with this lens, I have noticed two things that reliably occur whenever HUD takes this action:

1. An enormously wealthy developer (generally living in another state and ALWAYS living in one of the most segregated communities in the country) makes millions of dollars.

2. A community that once voted Red slowly turns Blue and very few if any of the original community members remain.

You will notice that these results do nothing to end segregation but they do involve massive profit and politcal gain for interested elites; money and power, it always comes down to money and power. I believe these results reveal the true motives for HUD creating section 8 housing in flourishing communities.

Freedom of association is explicitly protected in the 1st amendment to the Constitution. The Chinese people do not have this protection and their government is dispersing the Muslim population (against their will) across the county to wipe out their culture. It is readily apparent that the only way our government can prevent economically mobile white people from living in communities together is to end their right of free association. There really is no other way. The question is whether voluntary segregation would result in less human suffering than involuntary integration. I currently side with the former ( I tend to believe that the framers of our system were on to something morally good with the Bill of Rights).

There are some of the white middle class who are comfortable living with people that are different than themselves. There are several diverse communities that demonstrate this in Milwaukee. From this, it can be reasonably deduced that there are similar communities all over the country. If people want to live in diverse middle class communities, I believe that they generally are available. If they want minority middle class communities, they are available too (check out Georgia for example). For those with the economic means, there is almost certainly a community that checks all of the boxes needed to make them happy.