The standard liberal line about racism in housing is that, as soon as a black family shows up on the street, the white people start to head for the exits. Raacism!
But Enoch Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech now enjoying its 50th anniversary, shows how the game really works. He tells the story of a WWII war widow that turned her house into a boarding house as widows have done since time immemorial.
Let us convert this into the US experience. Every wave of immigrants establishes itself in an urban neighborhood that has seen its best days, and is starting to decline. Or maybe the neighborhood is ageing, and all the ambitious young people have already moved out to fancier neighborhoods leaving their ageing parents in the old family home. The immigrant new wave, being as yet unadapted to city life and city skills, uses physical aggression to establish itself, and of course usually has a gang component, as in Irish, Jewish, Italian, black, Mexican, and now Salvadorean gangs. So anyone with half a clue gets the hell out while they still have equity in their homes. The last to leave are widows, because.
Of course, this is the way that wars and migration have always operated, since the dawn of time. I am reading today about the expansion of the Bantu tribes out of West Africa.
Today, the black LA suburb of Compton is fast transforming into a Latino community, and the Latino gangs are helping to intimidate the black women householders into getting out of town.
Of course, it's easy for a rich bitch like me to take a lordly view of all this. I left Britland fifty years ago for the greener pastures of the US and Seattle. And what with one thing and another, Seattle has transformed itself from a Boeing and Weyerhauser town to booming Amazon City, via Microsoft. So, if you are already a resident, your boat gets lifted by the rising tide. That makes life easy.
But what about the folks on the wrong side of the curve? Hey, maybe for a season the ruling class makes a fuss about them. Like it did for the working class. Like it did for blacks. For women.
But politics is a moveable feast. Yesterday the working class was worthy and deserving; today it is racist and bigoted and deserves to die. For a hundred years Democrats held the line for the white racist South. Now it agitates for the northern black racists. Tomorrow?
Rule One about life, the universe, race, class, gender, and everything is that the politicians and the culture warriors don't care about you. They only care about your vote. And they only care about your vote if it will help them to win this November.
I like to say that all stories are survivor stories. That's because the stories of the dead die with them. I realize that the story of my own family is also a survivor story. My father's family got out of Russia in 1918. So what would have happened if they had stayed? My mother's family was in Japan up until 1940 and got out to Australia. My own parents married and had their children in India, and then migrated to Britain in 1948 after Indian independence. All this seems unexceptional and anodyne, but only because my family always had the sense, or received sensible advice, or the pure luck to get out while the going was good.
So here am I, in Seattle in 2018, as the murder rate in London, England starts to surge about the murder rate in New York City.
All in all, I think I am the luckiest guy in the world. But other people are not so lucky. And the truth is that the unlucky people just slide below the waves and are never heard from again.
But Enoch Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech now enjoying its 50th anniversary, shows how the game really works. He tells the story of a WWII war widow that turned her house into a boarding house as widows have done since time immemorial.
She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.But the widow was not willing to rent rooms out to black immigrants. So her house stayed empty, and she started to experience aggression and hostility from her new neighbors. We do not know her eventual fate. We do know there are now rape gangs in Rotherham and Telford in England, and the authorities are hesitant to act, because racism.
Let us convert this into the US experience. Every wave of immigrants establishes itself in an urban neighborhood that has seen its best days, and is starting to decline. Or maybe the neighborhood is ageing, and all the ambitious young people have already moved out to fancier neighborhoods leaving their ageing parents in the old family home. The immigrant new wave, being as yet unadapted to city life and city skills, uses physical aggression to establish itself, and of course usually has a gang component, as in Irish, Jewish, Italian, black, Mexican, and now Salvadorean gangs. So anyone with half a clue gets the hell out while they still have equity in their homes. The last to leave are widows, because.
Of course, this is the way that wars and migration have always operated, since the dawn of time. I am reading today about the expansion of the Bantu tribes out of West Africa.
When the Bantu first expanded out of west-central Africa several thousand years ago, they had a profound influence on the indigenous rainforest hunter-gatherer populations they encountered … Even today, the overwhelming pattern is that Bantu men mix with pygmy women …This aligns with my own reading, about hunter-gatherer tribes, in War Before Cilivization. A tribe existed as long as it had men to defend the border; after that the women got distributed into neighboring tribes. Then there were the Vikings sailing up the rivers of Britain 1,000 years ago. They took the food, killed the men, and sold the women and children into slavery in the regional slave market in Dublin, Ireland. Until 1066 and all that. But the Normans were Vikings!
Today, the black LA suburb of Compton is fast transforming into a Latino community, and the Latino gangs are helping to intimidate the black women householders into getting out of town.
Of course, it's easy for a rich bitch like me to take a lordly view of all this. I left Britland fifty years ago for the greener pastures of the US and Seattle. And what with one thing and another, Seattle has transformed itself from a Boeing and Weyerhauser town to booming Amazon City, via Microsoft. So, if you are already a resident, your boat gets lifted by the rising tide. That makes life easy.
But what about the folks on the wrong side of the curve? Hey, maybe for a season the ruling class makes a fuss about them. Like it did for the working class. Like it did for blacks. For women.
But politics is a moveable feast. Yesterday the working class was worthy and deserving; today it is racist and bigoted and deserves to die. For a hundred years Democrats held the line for the white racist South. Now it agitates for the northern black racists. Tomorrow?
Rule One about life, the universe, race, class, gender, and everything is that the politicians and the culture warriors don't care about you. They only care about your vote. And they only care about your vote if it will help them to win this November.
I like to say that all stories are survivor stories. That's because the stories of the dead die with them. I realize that the story of my own family is also a survivor story. My father's family got out of Russia in 1918. So what would have happened if they had stayed? My mother's family was in Japan up until 1940 and got out to Australia. My own parents married and had their children in India, and then migrated to Britain in 1948 after Indian independence. All this seems unexceptional and anodyne, but only because my family always had the sense, or received sensible advice, or the pure luck to get out while the going was good.
So here am I, in Seattle in 2018, as the murder rate in London, England starts to surge about the murder rate in New York City.
All in all, I think I am the luckiest guy in the world. But other people are not so lucky. And the truth is that the unlucky people just slide below the waves and are never heard from again.
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