Urban renewal and racial integration are to blame, and not the destruction of the entire regional economy? Or, not to put to fine a point on it, did black people kill the auto industry too?
I grew up on the south side of Chicago, by the way, and I don't know what you're talking about, unless your suggestion is that any metropolis that has bad neighborhoods is evidence of the failure of racial integration.
"In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control."
"The largely Catholic ethnics" (I'm a Catholic of Irish and Eastern European descent) were not "driven out" of their neighborhoods. They left them as a reaction to integration and the beginning of the end of redlining policies. The "control" they lost was "the ability not to live next to ethnic minorities other than their own".
Moreover, upon leaving the white Irish Catholic and Polish enclaves, mortgage lending moved with them, leaving the neighborhoods to be filled with residents who were systematically denied ownership of their own homes. The attending decline in property values and upkeep were entirely predictable.
Again: we have a situation clearly explainable through economics, and you seem intent on injecting race into it. Why?
Drive a few hours south from the (gradually but painfully resurging) south side of Chicago to southern Illinois and you'll find predominantly white towns that have been similarly devastated by the rural economy and the decline of small-scale midwestern manufacturing jobs, and methamphetamine.
Also: you're not a little concerned that the "book that changed your way of thinking" about urban decay was written by a guy that has a whole section on the ADL's website, who has written of a "Jewish takeover of American culture"?
I know nothing of the book that is being mentioned here, but various policies in the mid-20th century DID force the breakup of the traditional ethnic neighborhoods.
It's not an issue as simple as black and white. I live in an area that in the 1960's had thriving Irish, Italian and Polish catholic communities. Community being the key word -- these folks lived, worshipped and attended school together. They were tight groups of people, who still maintain ties today.
The reality of this is a loss of community in general -- read the book "Bowling Alone", which describes the decline of civic life in America, and isn't written by a kook. My children are almost certainly not going to know the names of more than half of the people who live in our city block with about 40 homes. In my childhood (back in the 70's and 80's), we knew everyone.
My kids play with 5 other families on my block, and we know many, many more of our neighbors than that. I'm literally a stone's throw from one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago. Here's a suggestion: instead of blaming your alienation from your block on the breakup of old racist† '60s ethnic enclaves, reach out to the people on your block. They'll appreciate it. Set up a block party. Collect email addresses from your neighbors and start a mailing list. Do a neighborhood watch. Talk to the other parents on the block and set up a movie night.
I'm glad that you're so progressive, but you happen to be the exception. You also are reading what you want to, and not what I said.
The nationwide trend is that social interaction between Americans has been in decline substantially in recent years. This is pretty much across the board. Again, read Bowling Alone, or skim a review of it. These are quantifiable facts.
You can apply whatever judgement that you want, but the fact is that ethnic communities were and in some cases still are true communities that people feel a part of. Your suggestions are also great ways to build a community based on commonalities other than language and culture.
The review I remember reading of Bowling Alone contrasted its example of declining urban bowling leagues with the surge in urban soccer leagues.
Commentators since de Toqueville have observed that Americans are remarkably strong at forming leagues and clubs around their interests. Some go away and are replaced by others. Isolating half of this process ("some go away") as some kind of indication of social rot is purely in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, they were driven out. There was a sharp increase in crime caused by the friction of disparate groups suddenly coming in close contact with each other (Devil's Night and so forth). Yugoslavia broke up due to such friction, and those ethnic groups have been in contact with each other for centuries. The Malays and Chinese of Malaysia have had plenty of scuffles, too, and they've been around each other for a long time, as well. Those are just two examples. Diversity + Proximity = War. A fortiori, integration in Detroit was going to be eventful.
Furthermore, a lot of people throughout the world like to live next to those who are like themselves. I mean, a lot. When I was younger, I was shocked by the attitudes of older members of my family towards out-groups. I'm a little older, now, and see that it's not going away. We need to build around this fact of human nature, because we can't plow it through.
If the remaining residents of Detroit were being "systematically denied ownership of their own homes" then some bank could make a killing giving them home loans. During the housing bubble, we saw what happened when banks did that. My brothers make a living picking up the pieces.
I'm not injecting race into anything because race was a part of this to begin with. Noam Chomsky, in his book Understanding Power, noted this: "Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic."
The blank slate hypothesis of human nature has a lot of evidence going against it. If natural selection is true, then different populations of any species must have different distributions of alleles. Otherwise, there's nothing for natural selection to select. Cochran & Harpending cover this: http://the10000yearexplosion.com/
As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.
> As for E. Michael Jones, he didn't start going into his theory of the Jews until after he wrote his other work.
Yeah, and I'm more than a little creeped-out calling anything this guy produces a "theory" or even "work".
Since you keep bringing up this guy's theories as such a transformative event for you and all, just for edification, here's what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about his "theory of the Jews":
"The magazine's cover stories over the last year or so are instructive: "Judaizing: Then and Now," "John Huss and the Jews," "The Converso Problem: Then and Now," "The Judaism of Hitler," "Shylock Comes to Notre Dame" and so on. Jones runs through all the usual anti-Semitic canards -- the ideas that "Jewish media elites" run the country, that Jews are "major players" in pornography, and that Jews are behind Masonry and the French Revolution -- but that's only the start. He also accuses Jews of poisoning society with thinkers such as Karl Marx (a devotee of Satan, says Jones) and Sigmund Freud (who set off an epidemic of sexual sin, he says). And he describes the World War II Nazi genocide of the Jews as "a reaction to Jewish Messianism (in the form of Bolshevism)." Last April, in an article raging about a new president of Notre Dame University, Jones charged that anyone who went to a mainstream university would emerge "with a Jewish world view … and maybe a Jewish spouse." Jones, who has written nine books and hundreds of articles, regularly cites extremist sources, especially the American Free Press run by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto. He also has taken up race, most obviously in his "Rooted Culture" conferences that include a trip to Germany. The 2005 trip theme would be familiar to any neo-Nazi -- "the continuing deracination in Germany." Jones has one other line of business that would be familiar to the racist right: the "neo-ethnic songs" he sells as part of a bid to create what he calls a true "Volk" music."
Sounds to me like his "theory of the Jews" stupidity didn't exactly evolve too far from his "theory of the blacks", eh?
> Diversity + Proximity = War
And now...let's see here now...such an elegant little equation for Hacker News here and all...concise...and war...sounds harsh...so, according to the 2000 census, the following U.S. cities were more diverse than Detroit: Long Beach, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Sacramento, San Jose, Chicago, Dallas, Anaheim, Newark, San Francisco, Miami, Riverside, San Diego, Fort Worth, Boston, Honolulu, Santa Ana, Milwaukee, Denver, Austin, Tampa, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Tucson, Corpus Christi, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Cleveland, Buffalo, Arlington, Norfolk, Charlotte, Washington, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha.
So they should all be war zones - that's what your equation tells us, eh? Yugoslavia. Bosnia. Ethnic cleansing in all those cities much more diverse than Detroit. Isn't that the phrase in the title of E. Michael Jones little racist book you keep leaving off for some reason: "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing"?
As I wrote in the previous post, Jones wrote that book before he started writing about Jews. Since you refuse to draw the implied inference, then I will do it for you: I disagree with E. Michael Jones about the Jews; I think that E. Michael Jones is wrong about the Jews. Think before you post. If I agreed with Jones about the Jews, then why would I bother pointing out what time he wrote which opinion?
Since that's settled (I hope), you should try to refute the claims of Jones with which I agree rather than those with which I disagree. But you don't even try. You go for point & sputter. Why don't you pull a Godwin while you're at it?
Furthermore, the fact that I agree with some of a persons opinions does not imply agreement with all of that persons opinions. Pick any of your heroes; almost certainly they will hold at least one opinion which you find repellant. I won't hold that against you. One would think that that would go without saying around here. More the fool I.
As for Diversity + Proximity = War, that is rough description. In order for different groups to be in conflict with each other, they must be within striking distance of each other.
New York City has had friction between not only races, but ethnic groups for a long time. Have you heard of the movie Gangs of New York? It was based on a non-fiction book written in 1928.
I'll keep this post as short as I can and invite you to fire up your favorite search engine and enter "racial tension X" without quotes, substituting one of the cities in your list for X. It does not make for pleasant reading.
I grew up on the south side of Chicago, by the way, and I don't know what you're talking about, unless your suggestion is that any metropolis that has bad neighborhoods is evidence of the failure of racial integration.