cawacko
Well-known member
Interesting column from Charles Blow (a progressive black writer for the NY Times). It's really long so I just posted the link. Basic premise is black people in Northern Cities should move back to the South where they will have large numbers and be able to have far more political power.
People of all stripes have been moving to the South for years because of jobs, affordable housing and lower cost of living. I question the idea that black power and advancement comes from having more black politicians but it's a big part of what's being argued here.
(I did include one portion of the column below where he responds to the question of isn't the South more racist than the North. His answer is that its not.)
We Need a Second Great Migration
Georgia illuminates the path to Black power. It lies in the South. Follow me there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/georgia-black-political-power.html?smid=tw-share
Others have objected: Isn’t the North just better for Black people than the South?
Many Black people are leery of the South, if not afraid of it. They still have in their minds a retrograde South: dirty and dusty, overgrown and underdeveloped, a third-world region in a first-world country. They see a region that is unenlightened and repressive, overrun by religious zealots and open racists. The caricatures have calcified: hillbillies and banjos, Confederate flags and the Ku Klux Klan.
To be sure, all of that is here. But racism is more evenly distributed across the country than we are willing to admit.
It is true that in surveys, people in the North express support for fewer racially biased ideas than those in the South, but such surveys reveal only which biases people confess to, not the ones they subconsciously possess. So I asked the researchers at Project Implicit to run an analysis of their massive data set to see if there were regional differences in pro-white or anti-Black prejudice. The result, which one of the researchers described as “slightly surprising,” was that there was almost no difference in the level of bias between white people in the South and those in the Northeast or Midwest. (The bias of white people in the West was slightly lower.)
White people outside the South are more likely to say the right words, but many possess the same bigotry. Racism is everywhere. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t you rather have some real political power to address that racism? And a yard!
For decades Northern liberals have maintained the illusion of their moral superiority to justify their lack of progress in terms of racial equality. The North’s arrogant insistence that it had no race problem, or at least a minimal one, allowed a racialized police militarism to take root. It allowed housing and education segregation to flourish in supposedly “diverse” cities. It allowed for the rise of Black ghettos and concentrated poverty as well as white flight and urban disinvestment.
The supposed egalitarianism of Northern cities is a flimsy disguise for a white supremacy that diverges from its Southern counterpart only in style, not substance.
And, while the North has been stuck in its self-righteous stasis, the savagery of the South has in some ways softened, or morphed. I am careful not to position this progress as fully redemptive or restorative. White supremacy clearly still exists here, corrupting everything from criminal justice to electoral access. The “New South” — with its thriving Black middle class and increasing political power — is still more aspiration than reality.
But the wishful idealizing of a New South is no more naïve than a willful blindness to the transgressions of the Now North. As the author Jesmyn Ward wrote in 2018 in Time about her decision to leave Stanford and move back to Mississippi, American racism is an “infinite room”: “It is the bedrock beneath the soil. Racial violence and subjugation happen on the streets of St. Louis, on the sidewalks of New York City and in the BART stations of Oakland.”
Black people have traversed this country in search of a place where the hand of oppression was lightest and the spirit of prosperity was greatest, but have had to learn a bitter lesson: Racism is everywhere.
People of all stripes have been moving to the South for years because of jobs, affordable housing and lower cost of living. I question the idea that black power and advancement comes from having more black politicians but it's a big part of what's being argued here.
(I did include one portion of the column below where he responds to the question of isn't the South more racist than the North. His answer is that its not.)
We Need a Second Great Migration
Georgia illuminates the path to Black power. It lies in the South. Follow me there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/georgia-black-political-power.html?smid=tw-share
Others have objected: Isn’t the North just better for Black people than the South?
Many Black people are leery of the South, if not afraid of it. They still have in their minds a retrograde South: dirty and dusty, overgrown and underdeveloped, a third-world region in a first-world country. They see a region that is unenlightened and repressive, overrun by religious zealots and open racists. The caricatures have calcified: hillbillies and banjos, Confederate flags and the Ku Klux Klan.
To be sure, all of that is here. But racism is more evenly distributed across the country than we are willing to admit.
It is true that in surveys, people in the North express support for fewer racially biased ideas than those in the South, but such surveys reveal only which biases people confess to, not the ones they subconsciously possess. So I asked the researchers at Project Implicit to run an analysis of their massive data set to see if there were regional differences in pro-white or anti-Black prejudice. The result, which one of the researchers described as “slightly surprising,” was that there was almost no difference in the level of bias between white people in the South and those in the Northeast or Midwest. (The bias of white people in the West was slightly lower.)
White people outside the South are more likely to say the right words, but many possess the same bigotry. Racism is everywhere. And if that’s the case, wouldn’t you rather have some real political power to address that racism? And a yard!
For decades Northern liberals have maintained the illusion of their moral superiority to justify their lack of progress in terms of racial equality. The North’s arrogant insistence that it had no race problem, or at least a minimal one, allowed a racialized police militarism to take root. It allowed housing and education segregation to flourish in supposedly “diverse” cities. It allowed for the rise of Black ghettos and concentrated poverty as well as white flight and urban disinvestment.
The supposed egalitarianism of Northern cities is a flimsy disguise for a white supremacy that diverges from its Southern counterpart only in style, not substance.
And, while the North has been stuck in its self-righteous stasis, the savagery of the South has in some ways softened, or morphed. I am careful not to position this progress as fully redemptive or restorative. White supremacy clearly still exists here, corrupting everything from criminal justice to electoral access. The “New South” — with its thriving Black middle class and increasing political power — is still more aspiration than reality.
But the wishful idealizing of a New South is no more naïve than a willful blindness to the transgressions of the Now North. As the author Jesmyn Ward wrote in 2018 in Time about her decision to leave Stanford and move back to Mississippi, American racism is an “infinite room”: “It is the bedrock beneath the soil. Racial violence and subjugation happen on the streets of St. Louis, on the sidewalks of New York City and in the BART stations of Oakland.”
Black people have traversed this country in search of a place where the hand of oppression was lightest and the spirit of prosperity was greatest, but have had to learn a bitter lesson: Racism is everywhere.
That's your 'contribution' to the thread?