arthurwellesley

I think it is a very well supported statement to say that the "american-black-ethnic-group" that moved north into Detroit had levels of crime that the prior residents of Detroit found quite disturbing. And a major proportion of this crime was directed at white people in a racially charged manner. That is not to say that violence is an indelible attribute of all black ethnic groups, at all times, and all places. But high rates of violence was a property of this particular ethnic group, at this time, at this place. The movement of this ethnic group into the city, and the interactions of this ethnic group with other ethnic groups in the city, is important for understanding what happened. The Detroit story is partly a story of an ethnic-sectarian conflict, just as in Kosovo, Israel, post-bellum Atlanta, or innumerable other times and places in history.

What are the practical reasons is it important to recognize and talk about the ethnic nature of the conflict? I can think of a couple:

a) The current conventional wisdom (that I learned in college) was that white flight was due to an irrational and bigoted revulsion of black people. Thus the solution to preventing future white is to re-educate white people to make them not racist. The actual story, I think, is that white flight was a result of ethnic violence. White people feared black people moving into their neighborhood, because they had the quite rational and well-supported belief that this would dramatically increase the probability of black-on-white ethnic violence. The solution, then, is to take the same techniques of law enforcement and re-education that were used with tremendous success to reduce white-on-black ethnic violence and white-on-black racism, and use those techniques to reduce black-on-white racism and black-on-white violence.

b) If you are governing a city or a country that's experiencing a large influx of ethnic migration, and that ethnic group has cultural patterns that are causing problems, you need to work on strengthening your institutions to handle that influx. And if the influx is too much and too sudden, and your rate of building institutions too slow, you might want to think about ways to limit the influx, so you can properly assimilate the migrants, before the migration overwhelms your institutions entirely and you lose the city.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm inclined to agree that it's social control from families, neighborhoods, and governments that determines crime. In the case of the decline of Detroit, the lack of social control was intricately tried to race in all sorts of way (ex. a history of societal neglect under Jim Crow that gave rise to an underclass culture, the black power movement that gave young black men a rationale for beating on whitey, racist policing that failed to police the black projects). Again, we're not discussing race to lay blame, we're trying to understand what happened. And in the context of this discussion, I had to emphasize and highlight the racial aspect, because the parent comment to my comment specifically denied that there was any racial aspect at all.

Imagine we are talking about slavery. I can certainly imagine a study that proves that slavery is not innately based on race, but rather has to do with relations of power (black on black slavery in Africa was really common, white on white slavery used to be common in Europe, a few slaveholders in the antebellum south were black, slavery has been common in virtually all civilizations, etc). Now imagine someone denies that "whiteness" had anything to do with slave owning in the American south, and that anyone who discusess it should be shunned. Someone else replies extensively and highlights that slave owning and oppression of slaves in the American south of the 1800's was "almost entirely white" and was intricately tied to race. Is that person racist against "white" people? No. Is that blaming all whites living now for what happened then? No. Should we not talk about the racial aspect of slavery, because some racist young black men might use it has a justification for violence? No. Understanding the racial aspect of slavery in that particular time is essential for understanding what happened in that time. Similarly, understanding the racial aspect of crime in the 1960's and 1970's is essential for understanding what happened to Detroit.

I studied the issue of urban decay because I spent a lot of time living near and walking through these neighborhoods. I read dozens of books and articles to try and figure out what happened. The interpretation above is the best I can do.

If you find stormfront repugnant (as I do), then don't put yourself in a position where the stormfronters are on the side of truth and you are on the side of falsehood. Otherwise you will be giving good people, who would otherwise be reasonable progressives, incentive to ally themselves with the stormfronter crowd. Recognizing the role of blacks in the destruction of Detroit's white neighbhorhoods should be viewed the same way as viewing the role of whites in the 1906 destruction of Atlanta's black neighborhoods. You can recognize and speak the truth about 1906 Atlanta without being racist against whites, and you can speak the truth about Detroit without being racist against blacks.

Do you shun that viewpoint because it is false and slanderous? Or do you believe that it is true, but that it must not be talked about, because the wrong people might exploit the history for undesirable ends?

It seems to me stunning that anyone can dispute the statement that "black people played a role in the decay of Detroit". It's every bit as true as saying, "White people played a role in the 1906 Atlanta riots" or "Mongols played a role in the sacking of Baghdad in 1258" or "Irish played a major role in the degeneracy of New York's five points in the 1850's". Obviously, this is not to say that all central-asians are responsible for sacking Baghdad or that all blacks are responsible for the destruction of Detroit. But it is true that both of the events had an ethnic component to them, and if you want to understand what happened, you need to understand how different groups of people played a part.

I've spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to piece together what happened to leave so many American areas in ruins. Detroit is the worst, but large swaths of cities like Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Haven, NY, Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, etc, show the same patterns of blight, abandonment, decay, crime, drug abuse, and gang violence.

The quickest summary I can produce is:

a) The U.S. has always had a crime problem. A good deal of this crime problem has stemmed from the fact that the police and justice system have always been much less effective at bringing criminals to justice than have the European systems. This was the case in the early 1900's and it's still the case today. Read this book if you want more details: http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&dq=raymond...

b) In the U.S. in the early 1900's, the south had the most ineffective policing system. Judges were horribly corrupt and murderers could often buy a non-guilty plea for as low as $50. And in the south, the black communities had the least justice. Police and the courts did not care when black people killed black people. Not suprisingly, crime was a huge problem among the black population. If you look at murder rates by city in the 1910's, its always the cities with large black populations that had the highest rates, and if you look at crime by race, you see the same effect.

c) During the 1910's through the 1960's, black people migrated north in large numbers. The migration was due to push factors (escaping Jim Crow, loss of jobs due to mechanization in the cotton fields) and pull factors (the two world wars creating lots of manufacturing jobs).

d) American law enforcement was always lax, but in the 1950's and 1960's it became even more so. A series of court rulings made it more difficult to arrest and convict. Liberal leaning mayors and progressive activists helped curb the age-old practice of police dealing "street justice". During that time period, the average expected punishment for a given act of burglary declined by 75%.

e) The civil rights movement quickly branched out into the "black power" movement. Parts of the black power movement blamed whites in general for all the ills of the world, and gave justifications for violence. Young men always have supressed desire to riot and rampage, to exert their own sense of power and dominance. Many black young men latched on to the ideas of the black power movement as a rationalization for violence against all whites (even those who had zero responsibility for slavery or discrimination).

f) As part of urban renewal push, city planners razed entire blocks and neighborhoods. The government erected housing projects, populated largely by blacks, in replacement. Most of the housing projects had little or no police or security precense. Complex bureaucratic rules made it impossible to evict misbehaving neighbors. Without any government law and order, gang rule took over and anarchy ensued.

g) So altogether, you have a population that historically has had quite high crime rates moving in to Detroit. The policing at the time is becoming much more lax. The housing projects knock down existing blocks and place these new, high crime residents right in the middle of more middle class residents. These high crime residents often bear a special grudge towards white people. As a result, these middle class residents are exposed to a level of violence and social degeneracy that is schocking. Muggings and assults become a frequent occurrence. Naturally, they flee.

h) The biggest tipping point was the 1967 riots, during which (almost entirely black) mobs torched buildings, looted stores, and killed residents. They killed people like Sheren George "a married mother of two. Shot while in the car driven by her husband (Ross), as they tried flee from a mob of black youths beating a white man." and Krikor Messerlian, "A 68 year-old Armenian immigrant, beaten to death by a group of black youths, one wielding a baseball bat." The police stood back most of the first day of the riots, but by the third day the military was called in and started using live rounds. They killed a bunch of rioters and some innocent people. After the riots, the rate of exodus from Detroit rose from 20,000 a year to 80,000 a year.

(comment got too long for HN to handle, breaking into a second comment)

i) The overall homicide rate in Detroit rose from around ~7 per 100k in 1918 to a peak of 60 per 100k in 1991. That's nearly a 10X increase. That rise in crime was predominantly black on black and black on white. Naturally, the middle class whites who could afford it, fled the city. The book "Devil's Night" by Chafets gives some first hand documentation of the people who left, but I haven't read it. I have read "Carnasie" by Jonathan Rieder, who chronicles the exact same process in Brooklyn. Rieder's actually a liberal, but he's quite frank in his descriptions. Here a few excerpts:

Page 68: I met few residents who were strangers to street crime. If they had not been victimized, usually only one link in the chain of intimacy separated them from the victims...Most had a favorite story of horror. A trucker remembered defecating in his pants a few years earlier when five black youths cornered him in an elevator and placed a knifeblade against his throat. "They got two hundred dollars and a gold watch. They told me, 'Listen you white motherfucker, you ain't calling the law.' I ran and got in my car and set off the alarm. A group of blacks got around the car. If anybody made a move, I'd have run them over. The police came and we caught one of them. The judge gave them fucking to-year probation." The experience left an indelible imprint. He still relived the humiliation of soiling himself.

Page 69: One police officer explained that he earned his living by getting mugged. On his roving beat he had been mugged hundreds of times in five years. "I only been mugged by a white buy one time. All right, one instance, I went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They got a huge mugging rate there. I was dressed like an old man, a scar on my face, a little blood dripping like I was just anaccident, a cast on my arm, wearing old clothes." He had been out on the street for barely five or ten minutes when a band of black youths approached him. "First words I heard were, 'Get the old white man.' Somebody got around me, I got kicked, I got punched, one guy says, 'Grab him, let's take his wallet,' I got stabbed in the hand. It was a savage thing. I also found that it was because I was white. 'Look at the old white guy', 'Let's get the old white guy,' 'Get the fucking white scumbag.' What the hell does 'white' mean?"

Page 71: Many Canarsian's, concluding that vast stretches of Brooklyn had become dangerous places, nervously shifted their patterns of movement through the city or retreated into protective asylums...Whites ceded many areas of the city, but crime followed them into Canarsie. Social policy and administrative decisions, such as housing for the poor in middle income neighborhoods, school zoning and busing schemes, and inadaquate screening of public housing, increased the permeability of the community."

Page 73: After a flurry of muggings by black youths around the subway station near the low-income project, the residents were especially unnerved...One evening dozens of people crowded into a synagogue basement to discuss the muggins. The rabbi sermonized, "...Five blacks broke the ribs and shoulder bone of the last person who was attacked. The entire perimeter of the proejct has become hazardous...."

The statistics and the anectdotal evidence are overwhelming. Urban decay happened primarily because of violence committed by a subgroup of lower class black youths against whites. Once the middle class whites and blacks had fled those neighborhoods, the remaining lower class blacks did not have the cultural or economic capital to start businesses and create jobs, so the areas remained depressed.

This pattern of violence and decay happened all across America, from Boston to L.A.. But Detroit got it the worst and has basically never recovered. Why did Detroit get it the worst? A bunch of reasons: 1) Detroit had a higher perecentage of black residents. Detroit was 29% black in 1960, Chicago 22%, Boston only 9%. 2) Detroit went a lot further with its lax policing and urban housing projects, for liberals of the time it was considered a model city 3) style of urban renewal - as I understand it, Chicago restricted most of its housing projects to certain areas which resulted in only those areas getting blighted 4) chance of leadership - sometimes its just bad luck that one city gets a particularly destructive mayor 5) decline of the automative sector. I think this factor matters, but it's been overrated. The decline of Detroit itself went into high gear from 1965 to 1975. The automobile industry didn't really start to decline until the late 70's and 80's. Overall, Detroit metro gained population from 1960 through 2000. The real economic hardship to the region didn't hit until the 2008 crisis. That said, Detroit doesn't really have a strategic location, it was something of a one industry city, and it did not have any great universities, so the decline on that industry has meant the city has basically completely died, rather than limp along like Phildalphia 6) tipping point effects - all the small differences above can combine to pass a tipping point in which the city becomes completely unlivable.