The Moral Poverty of urban blacks

[_bcspace]

This is the article, Being White In Philadelphia, that's causing all the stir.

Early on, during my walks around northern Fairmount, I’m surprised by a couple of things. One is the international flavor. On a warm Sunday in October, I buttonhole a woman I’ll call Anna, a tall, slim, dark-haired beauty from Moscow getting out of her BMW on an alley just south of Girard College. Anna goes to a local law school, works downtown at a law firm, and proceeds to let me have it when we start talking about race in her neighborhood.

“I’ve been here for two years, I’m almost done,” she says. “Blacks use skin color as an excuse. Discrimination is an excuse, instead of moving forward. … It’s a shame—you pay taxes, they’re not doing anything except sitting on porches smoking pot … Why do you support them when they won’t work, just make babies and smoking pot? I walk to work in Center City, black guys make compliments, ‘Hey beautiful. Hey sweetie.’ White people look but don’t make comments. … ”

That’s the other surprise: If you’re not an American, the absence of a historical filter results in a raw view focused strictly on the here and now. I meet a contractor from Maine named Adrian, who brought his Panamanian wife to live here, at 19th and Girard, where she saw fighting and drug deals and general bad behavior at the edge of Brewerytown. It all had her convinced there is a “moral poverty” among inner-city blacks.

American whites I talk to in Fairmount have a decidedly different take. Our racial history, as horrible and daunting as it is, has created a certain tolerance of how things operate in the neighborhood, an acceptance of an edgy status quo.

One Fairmounter blames herself for her grill being stolen from her backyard, because if you don’t fence it in, she tells me, you’re asking for it. A pumpkin gets lifted from her front stoop in the fall, she buys another. That one gets stolen, she gets one more. It’s called city living. Flowerpots, even trash cans—they don’t stick around. Porch chairs have to be chained together. Your car window is likely to get smashed every now and then.

The danger can be a little steeper. One afternoon, at Krupa’s Tavern at 27th and Brown, a guy named Bob tells me about working in the mailroom at Rolling Stone magazine years ago and shows me an anthology of Beat-era writers he’s reading. I can’t resist asking him about his wire-rim glasses, which are way down on his nose and twisted at an absurd angle—there’s no way he can see out of them.

“Oh,” he says, smiling, “I went home one night from the bar and two guys smashed my face into the cement steps of my house”—that’s what messed up his glasses. “A few days later I got my wallet back in the mail—they had thrown it in somebody’s mailbox.”

He acknowledges that his assailants were black. “Not that that matters,” he says.

Not all the crime in Fairmount, of course, is perpetrated by black guys from Brewerytown, the neighborhood north of Girard. But that’s the perception, and it’s generally correct: Another day, I chat with two cops sitting in their car outside Henneberry’s, a drugstore on 24th Street, and ask them who commits crimes here, large and small. Mostly, they say, black guys from North Philadelphia.

One early evening, just as light is fading, I chat for half an hour with a short, middle-aged woman named Claire who’s walking two terri-poos at 26th and Poplar. She’s a blunt-speaking widow who’s lived a couple blocks south for 30 years. I ask Claire if racial dynamics have changed over time. “It’s mostly white people,” she says, “so there’s no dynamic to change.” I motion Claire down 26th a few doors, out of earshot of a black guy standing at the corner, to ask:

“Do you find that you need to treat African-Americans any differently, to tread lightly, to worry about what you might say?”

“No,” she says. “There’s no need to be careful if you treat people as human beings.” A black woman comes out of the rowhouse behind us, and Claire adds, certainly loud enough for the woman to hear, and probably the guy on the corner, too, “As long as you don’t have a gun in your hand, I’m okay with you.”

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/white-philly/

[_palerobber]

bcspace, i heard today about a new RNC initiative you might be interested in volunteering for. i think you'd be very effective.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus, today on Face the Nation (via The Hill):

We’re going to be announcing a $10 million initiative just this year and it will include hundreds of people, paid across the country, from coast-to-coast, in Hispanic and African-American, Asian communities, talking about our party, talking about our brand, talking about what we believe in.

[_Kittens_and_Jesus]

I can't imagine how this could happen in post-racial America. Didn't we just wipe centuries of history away by voting in one of those people?

When will those people learn?

White guilt, welfare queens, crack addicts...

Did that cover it all for you?

[_moksha]

bcspace, i heard today about a new RNC initiative you might be interested in volunteering for. i think you'd be very effective.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus, today on Face the Nation (via The Hill):

We’re going to be announcing a $10 million initiative just this year and it will include hundreds of people, paid across the country, from coast-to-coast, in Hispanic and African-American, Asian communities, talking about our party, talking about our brand, talking about what we believe in.

What would the qualifications be for a prospective candidate to fill the Net with Republican talking points? Could Mormons with a posting names like SistaSoul, Kemara or Bro Pahoran be sufficient?

[_Harold Lee]

Haha, just saw this episode and reminded me of this, since it's Philadelphia and all...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5RYeMGXw58

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

BCSpace,

What was your point you were trying to make?

- Doc

[_subgenius]

"The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

[_Droopy]

The truth shall set you free -- but the question always remains, who want's to be free? Freedom comes with serious and wide ranging concomitant responsibilities or duties. The hard truths that must be faced regarding a certain socioeconomic subset of the American black population will, once they are finally faced, begin to finish what Dr. King and others began so long ago and what the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" of the Declaration and Constitution provides those willing to understand that "where much is given, much is required."

Facing them, however, will unravel an entire ideology, worldview, and political/economic power structure that has arisen and established itself upon a philosophy of permanent racial grievance, racial separatism, racial in-group herdism, and victimology, and that power structure will not go quietly nor civilly.