#white flight

[godisarepublican]

[312land]

Chicago in the mid-20th century was a city of contradictions—booming industry and economic decline, political powerhouses and social unrest, nuclear breakthroughs and suburban flight. From producing more steel than entire countries to hosting a political convention so riotous it required congressional investigations, Chicago didn’t just exist through history—it punched its way through it. Let’s take a deep dive into how machine politics, racial tensions, and sheer industrial might shaped the city’s trajectory.

Making Nukes, Steel, and Poor Urban Planning Decisions Since the 1940s

[alwaysbewoke]

[ausetkmt]

White Trash - Race and Class in America

This collection is devoted to exploring stereotypes about the social conditions of poor whites in the United States and comparing these stereotypes with the social reality.

WHITE TRASH The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America By Nancy Isenberg Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.

No line about class in the United States is more famous than the one written by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in 1906. Class consciousness in America, he contended, foundered “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” Sombart was among the first scholars to ask the question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” His answer, now solidified into conventional wisdom about American exceptionalism, was simple: “America is a freer and more egalitarian society than Europe.” In the United States, he argued, “there is not the stigma of being the class apart that almost all European workers have about them. . . . The bowing and scraping before the ‘upper classes,’ which produces such an unpleasant impression in Europe, is completely unknown.”

In “White Trash,” Nancy Isenberg joins a long list of historians over the last century who have sent Sombart’s theory crashing on the shoals of history. The prolific Charles and Mary Beard, progressive historians in the first third of the 20th century, reinterpreted American history as a struggle for economic power between the haves and have-nots. W.E.B. Du Bois interpreted Reconstruction as a great class rebellion, as freed slaves fought to control their own working conditions and wages.

Labor and political historians in the 1970s and 1980s recovered a forgotten history of blue-collar consciousness and grass-roots radicalism, from the Workingmen’s Party in Andrew Jackson’s America to the late-19th-century populists of upcountry Georgia to the Depression-era leftist unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Historians of public policy, like the influential Michael B. Katz, emphasized the persistence of notions of “the undeserving poor,” an ideology that blamed economic deprivation on the alleged pathological behavior of poor people themselves and eroded support for welfare programs.

[personal-blog243]

It is interesting to see a slight pivot in the ideal conservative “lifestyle” that they promote.

For a while American conservatism was associated with the middle class, suburban, small nuclear family lifestyle that arose post WW2. Now they seem to be pivoting even further from the modern urban centers and idealizing a large family, rural, “family farm” lifestyle.

Just a random thing I have noticed 🤷🏼‍♀️

Conservatives politicians have definitely allied with big tech, but the advancement in technology seems to be for the rich people only.

[wellconstructedsentences]

In the end, court-ordered desegregation of public spaces brought about not actual racial integration, but instead a new division in which the public world was increasingly abandoned to Blacks and a new private one was created for whites.

White Flight by Kevin Kruse

[inthecityofgoodabode]

January 2024: Spitting In The Eye Of The Conspiracy

My queen's lone surviving brother called in today from Harrisburg, PA. Amongst other things, he was worried because Memphis, or The City as I call it, had been declared the murder capital of the United States according to whatever bogus source had hit his ears & local representatives were calling for the governor to dispatch the national guard to Memphis. After a little research, I discovered all this angst was based off a statement made by our (as in my queen & me) state congressional representative, Brent Taylor, back in November 2023. To be clear, my queen & I were part of the one-third of voters who voted for his opponent. Taylor represents District 31 which is divided five ways between part of Memphis (including our neighborhood which was added to the district several years ago thanks to state Republican gerrymandering), Lakeland (a white flight community), Germantown (a white flight community), Collierville (a white flight community) & a portion of unincorporated Shelby County including Eads, TN where Taylor resides (also a white flight enclave). Memphis is good enough for them to earn their inflated salaries in but not good enough to live in. Prior to Taylor, we were represented by the rightfully indicted Brian Kelsey. Note that the unincorporated part of Shelby County where Taylor resides fought to be unincorporated from Memphis a few years ago so his "concern" about Memphians reads hollow. You might ask why all these suburban white flight communities exist. The simple answer is desegregation in the Seventies & they've been pushing out further since then. Technically speaking, Olive Branch & Southaven in Mississippi have become white flight communities from Memphis in relatively recent years. All this is part of a larger & ongoing narrative in Tennessee, to paint Memphis as a lawless, dangerous city because we are an African-American majority city that doesn't vote Republican. If you haven't figured out by now, the Republican party, at least in the former Confederate states, is the party of the Old South. I walked outside for an hour on Saturday & for about 2 hours on Sunday. If the prevailing narrative was true, I'd be dead twice over with no wallet & no shoes on my feet. Don't buy it. There is a community where you live right now, no matter where you are in the world, that is steeped in bad press. Look closer. Ask yourself, who profits... who has something to gain? The answer might be complicated & might make you question yourself but embrace the complications. Despite what we learned reading myths & religious verses, existence is complicated. There are some of us humans who are lost to corruption & it can be easy to give in to hardening our hearts but, as a believer whose had his fair share of heart crushing betrayals, I ask you to trust your gut but never lose hope. There is a day that I dream of where like-minded brothers & sisters embrace & say "you were not alone." I don't know that I will see that day but my heartfelt wish is the younger generation will.

I recognize that some folks who come to my blog are looking for an escape. You just want to look at garden photos. I get it. I have posts for that. This one isn't one of them. Above all else, this blog is about me. That people agree or disagree with me or are comfortable or uncomfortable with what I post is immaterial. This is me spitting my ideas & images at the universe. If others find value in it, then maybe me wandering in thought helped someone somewhere. At the end of our days, that's the best any of us can hope from our humble but difficult existence. Keep safe.

[reasonandempathy]

Americanismᵀᴹ, the version of extreme capitalism practiced in the US, can't be separated from its racist foundations, the "Original Sin" of the US.

That's the first thing you need to grasp if you're going to look at Suburbia or White Flight in general. Slavery was upheld for profit motives, explicitly, by what would later be called Capitalists. It was built into the model of the U.S. that blacks were dangerous, dumb, and lesser, making White Flight a foreseeable outcome of "but what if the [racial slurs] move to the city?" The two were linked at the start.

While mansions and elite neighborhoods were always a thing, White Flight didn't happen the same way when cities were just poor or immigrant. You can make a case that there being a larger middle class was part of it, which certainly is relevant, but saying that only betrays the point that it was explicitly tied into the economic structure. If whiteness isn't/wasn't an economic benefit, why was the flight of the Middle Class qualitatively White?

It picked up explicitly in the prelude to the Civil Rights Act, and increased after its passing. It was the foreseeable outcome of situations where capitalists successfully implemented explicitly and demonstrably racist structures that lost legal power but not all political or economic power, where both rich and middle-class folk had shared anxiety over a group of people they could visibly tell "wasn't one of them."