https://madison365.com/what-no-one-wants-to-talk-about-race-and-progressive-cities/
Interesting article and how so many "progressive" cities are really just smoke and mirrors bullshit. Nice to see San Fran and Portland get knocked down a peg. Fuck those places.
Interesting article and how so many "progressive" cities are really just smoke and mirrors bullshit. Nice to see San Fran and Portland get knocked down a peg. Fuck those places.
Madison, Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, San Francisco.
These are America's most progressive, forward-thinking, open-minded, and social-justice-focused cities. They also have the worst racial disparities in the nation and some of the worst racial segregation.
It just doesn't make sense on paper. It's not supposed to be this way. But the statistics don't lie. Rampant black and brown poverty within blocks of white affluence. Eye-popping racial disparity numbers in employment, education, health, housing, and more. Black and brown people of all socioeconomic backgrounds feeling uncomfortable and unwanted in progressive cities that are often segregated as bad as Jim Crow Deep South. In the end, there is very little "Coexisting" in the land of "Coexist" bumper stickers.
Tim Wise, one of the nation's most prominent anti-racist essayists, educators, activists, and pioneers, tells Madison365 about a conversation over coffee he had with an African American friend in the San Francisco Bay Area who explained in very stark detail why San Francisco was the most racist place he had ever lived in. "This man was in his 50s and had lived in Birmingham, Alabama. He'd lived in Dallas. He'd lived in St. Louis. He said that San Francisco to him was the most racist place he had ever lived," Wise recalls. "As we teased that out, of course, he was talking about what Ralph Ellison talked about in 'Invisible Man' … that feeling of being invisible and of people looking right through you and not really being seen. In some ways, to have that happen in a place like San Francisco has to be more weighty … to have a reputation of being X, but you're really Y.
"At least if you're in Birmingham, you know you ain't X and you know how to protect yourself and prepare yourself," Wise adds. "This guy was like, 'It's amazing living in San Francisco all the crap I experienced that these white liberals just didn't see at all.' He ended up moving back to the South, too, because it was so much easier to deal with the overt racism than the covert, colorblind racism that you deal with in liberal cities."
Wise, whom scholar and philosopher Cornel West calls "a vanilla brother in the tradition of (abolitionist) John Brown," says progressive cities need to take a deep look at themselves on issues of race. It's a populace that is so preocupied with pointing out and condemning racism in more conservative parts of the country, he says, that they completely ignore what is happening in their own progressive backyards. For example:
◆ Austin is top-10 in the most segregated cities in the United States … described as "a rich Texas town that holds on to its whiteness for dear life." Austin is the only fast-growing United States city losing African Americans.
◆ In comparison to their white counterparts, black adults in San Francisco are much more likely to be arrested, booked into county jail and convicted, according to a racial and ethnic disparities report
◆ Portland shows a persistent disparity between how often whites and blacks are stopped and searched.
◆ Minneapolis has seen the formation of the some of the nation's widest racial disparities,and the nation's worst segregation in a predominantly white area
◆ Closer to home in Madison, African Americans in Dane County are 5.5 times more likely to be unemployed than their white neighbors. African American families are 6 times more likely to be poor with children 13 times more likely to live in poverty than their white classmates. This disparity in child poverty was the largest among any jurisdiction in the United States. Nearly three-quarters of black children in 2011 were poor compared to 5.5% of white children. This is just the tip of the iceberg, to read more about Madison racial disparities click here.
