#White Flight

[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.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

The Republican party is going in two directions on race at the same time. Electorally speaking, the modern GOP has never been so diverse. Each of the past two elections, and most available 2024 polling, reveals the GOP making real inroads with Black and (especially) Latino voters. These gains shouldn’t be overstated — Democrats still dominate among non-whites as a whole — but they are real. But at the elite level, conservative intellectuals and operatives are developing a new doctrine of white identity politics. And it’s already shaping the Trump administration’s plans for a second term. A new book on “anti-white racism” — The Unprotected Class, by Claremont Institute fellow Jeremy Carl — illustrates this trend clearly.

Its April release went unheralded outside conservative circles, but it received laudatory attention inside them. Tucker Carlson praised it as “outstanding”; leading activist Chris Rufo described it as a “must-read.” Nate Hochman, a former speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, called it “the most important thing you read this year.” Carl got friendly interviews on Donald Trump Jr.’s web show and on Fox News during primetime. Carl’s book centers on the claim that “anti-white racism is the most predominant and politically powerful form of racism in America today.” What mainstream scholars of race call “white privilege” is, in his view, a series of “informal evanescent cultural legacies.” By contrast, anti-white discrimination “is increasingly legal and formal.” This discrimination is, for Carl, primarily the product of a pernicious ideology popular among elites (nonwhite and white alike). “Anti-white racism is the all-but-official ideology of our ruling regime,” he writes — and they have acted in such a way as to ensure that whites are increasingly shunted to the bottom of America’s social hierarchy.

Carl’s arguments for this view resemble a funhouse mirror version of American racial history: roughly the same series of events, but with the roles of victim and perpetrator reversed.

[...]

Carl’s version of white identity politics is hardly isolated on the intellectual right. He cites two other prominent book, by New York Times contributor Christopher Caldwell and think tanker Richard Hanania, to argue that the legal roots of anti-white racism were created by the legislative victories of the civil rights movement. Their accounts align on the idea that the basic structure of anti-discrimination protections — including the Civil Rights Act of 1965 — needs to be overhauled or repealed entirely. Of course, conservatives have complained about “reverse racism” for decades. What’s new is not just the aggressiveness of Carl’s claims and others like them, but their direct connection to radical policy proposals — and the fact that people in positions of power appear to be listening.

The MAGA movement is based on White victimhood and entitlement that plays up the “anti-White racism” while ignoring other forms of racism that have historically dominated American society (anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, etc.).

[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."

[the-penandpaper]

On Twitter, I hold reading spaces that serve as a political education resource. Books are read aloud by me 😊 and sometimes discussed with the people who join the spaces. Making radical material more accessible. Links to listen anytime and any place are available below 👇🏿:

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Free PDF📚: The Color of Law

If you're on Twitter and want to join a reading space where we explore material from radical thinkers, follow me here and turn on notifications to be alerted when the reading spaces start! Listen or grab a mic. This is a space where I want to expand on the work left to us by great minds and discuss their and our ideas of revolution & concepts of liberation.

Link to next space: Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P Newton

[thenixkat]

Thoughts about the cyclical nature of white flight and gentrification in the USA

[thoughtportal]

Sabotaging of Black People Era

[joscreativecorner]

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[thelonguepuree]

White flight, generally framed as a postwar phenomenon, has historically been understood to be a product of developments such as the GI Bill, the Highway Administration, and the FHA, as well as the second wave of the Great Migration after 1940. But contextualizing these midcentury phenomena in relation to early skyscraper narratives allows us to recognize the term white flight as a misnomer of sorts. Presuming whiteness to be a preexisting and stable category that simply moved from one location to another, the descriptor white flight gives the false impression that whiteness at midcentury was a concrete identity whose subjects simply relocated in reaction to the growing presence of racial others in cities. But representations of the skyscraper from its early era reveal the extent to which whiteness was already being actively reconstituted in this preceding moment.… The midcentury mass suburbs became a place to forge a broader coalition of whiteness—assimilating ethnic varieties into a broader racial umbrella through systems of redlining. The suburbs were not vessels receiving whiteness—rather, these spaces helped to remake this category by tethering whiteness more strongly to homeownership and making it a financial asset belonging to specific protected neighborhoods.

Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper (2017)

[apveng]

Now? America is resegregating. A 2021 analysis by the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, found that “out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81 percent (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990.”

That pattern contributes to more segregation in our schools, which research has shown has negative outcomes, particularly for Black children.

[ausetkmt]

BLAC Detroit |with Jamon Jordan - What Happened in the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit

Black Scroll Network founder and historian Jamon Jordan, takes us on a tour and shares stories from the 1967 rebellion.

[machturtl]

Suburbia was meant to isolate and alienate. The last thing that sprawl was meant for was "diversity".

[cjbolan]

Thanks segregationists. You’re the reason we’re losing quality public services.

[Image description: A nervous man representing racist segregationists, is undecided on whether to push the button for desegregated public spaces or no more public spaces. End description.]

[i8i8t]

Conrad Beissel, the founder, charismatic leader, and guiding spirit of the Ephrata Cloisters was born in Eberbach, Germany in 1691. At that time the Protestant Reformation that began during the previous century was still a powerful influence in Europe. In 1720 Beissel joined thousands of others who fled their homelands for religious reasons. He decided to come to William Penn's colony where religious dissenters were welcomed. After twelve years with other religious pilgrims he decided to seek solitude in the forest. That decision led to the founding of the Ephrata community in 1732.

Injured by the City much?